 Welcome to Civic Hall and Fast and Free New York's vision for public Wi-Fi everywhere. I am Michael Calabrese with New America's Open Technology Institute. I direct the Wireless Future Project there. And we've been advocating for Muni Wi-Fi for longer than I want to admit. And this is just so exciting to see New York rapidly becoming the world's greatest Wi-Fi city. And you'll hear why. This evening you'll hear about Mayor de Blasio's initiatives to give every resident and business access to affordable and high-speed internet access everywhere in the city. This ambitious investment in public Wi-Fi depends on unlicensed portions of the public airwaves, which is an issue that we'll grapple with. You'll also hear later about a rival licensed carrier technology called LTE over unlicensed that threatens to create potentially a tragedy of the Wi-Fi comments. So on the one hand we'll be, I think, you know, celebrating where the city is headed, but also making sure that we are paying attention to potential threats that might undermine it. So first I want to give just a bit of background because I know that not everyone here is well-versed in spectrum and telecom policy. I'm sure everyone's used Wi-Fi lots, but it might be helpful to do a bit. Oh, there I am. You want to tweet at me? Feel free. So spectrum, just we understand what we're talking about, is simply the range of frequencies that you use to transmit and receive information. And the public airwaves are really a unique resource. So very much very different than whether it's timber or oil or anything else, because the public airwaves are infinitely renewable, the bandwidth, the carrying capacity. It's back again in full every second. The uses for it are constantly evolving with technology, and it is a commons. You know, most of you aren't old enough, but back in the TV, the big over-the-air TV days, we talked about the public airwaves and why the broadcasters had public interest obligations, because these were, it is a commons that's owned and controlled exclusively by governments worldwide. Regulators divide the spectrum frequencies into bands and allocate them for various purposes, whether it be, you know, mobile phones and data, satellite, military, et cetera. Aha, okay. Ah, there we go. I didn't push the right button. So this is just to give you a sense, a tangible sense that it literally is a spectrum of frequencies, and these are some of the everyday uses and where they fall along that spectrum from low band to middle band to high band. Television down in the low band, which penetrates obstacles very well, you see cell phones, cell phones, and you know, essentially when you're buying service on your smartphone and you're on the cellular network, you're down around below 2 gigahertz, and that gives great, that gives coverage over broad areas. Wi-Fi is a little bit higher at 2.4 and increasingly at 5 gigahertz, where you can get much wider channels that carry far more data. So the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, um, oops, regulates access to the airwaves, and that's a two-stage process where they allocate bands to a general purpose like TV or satellite, but then they assign them to specific uses. And it really was until very recently that almost all of these assignments were based on exclusive licensing, you know, and after 1994 by auction. So companies like Verizon and AT&T still pay billions of dollars at an auction to get exclusive use of frequencies for quality of service networks. But increasingly what's come to the fore is unlicensed spectrum, where nobody, everybody has equal access to it, but there's certain operating conditions, so you can use it without a license, but your equipment is certified. You know, the devices must be certified by the FCC, they have to be low power, so it's a very local area coverage. That's why unlicensed and Wi-Fi is so spectrum efficient, because it's reusing spectrum, and why you see maybe 10 Wi-Fi networks when you're browsing, because they're spread all over and they're actually sharing and reusing that spectrum in ways that cellular networks don't. You cannot cause harmful interference to licensed users in other bands, and you must accept interference. In other words, you must share. It's very much like the public highways. So there are certain rules that erode and Wi-Fi in particular has developed a way through standards to avoid what you might call a tragedy of the comments, because you would think, oh, well, if everybody has to share these fairly small frequency bands, wouldn't they all be colliding and there'd be all this interference and it just wouldn't work? But actually it does, because the technology has been designed with certain protocols, and foremost among them, or most easy to understand, is listen before talk. Wi-Fi actually, unlike a licensed carrier technology, which just knows it has exclusive use of that. You might call it a racetrack. They can just go. Wi-Fi always listens and hears how many other users there are, and then divides up the amount of spectrum accordingly so that it's a fair sharing among all the users. So even in a crowded airport, you will never be blocked. You will simply be slowed down, because that means the available bandwidth is just being divided up among all the people who are trying to share it, like when you're slowed down by congestion on the highway, and it's a trade-off in that sense. So finally I want to mention that since exclusively licensed spectrum is scarce and expensive, individuals and businesses have been relying increasingly on Wi-Fi to make smartphones and tablets and other mobile connectivity fast and affordable. So it's very interesting that just six years ago or so, the former, the last, well, it was Obama's first chairman of the FCC, Julius Genekowski, warned of a spectrum crisis that with the emergency iPhone we were going to run out of airwaves, because everyone was just thinking about the licensed cellular. And in reality, that spectrum crisis never happened, because more and more of this data traffic on the smartphones and on the tablets moved to Wi-Fi. The device is not automatically default to Wi-Fi, because what Wi-Fi does is it sends your broadband data traffic a short distance over unlicensed spectrum to a wire, a wireline broadband connection, whether it be Fios, Comcast, whoever. It never touches the licensed carrier spectrum. It never touches the cell towers or anything. And so Wi-Fi has become the workhorse of the internet. Wi-Fi now carries roughly 80% of all mobile device data traffic, which is kind of amazing to think, like we're all paying Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, some carrier about $100 a month to carry 20% of what we do on our smartphones. The other 80% is going over Wi-Fi, and that gap keeps increasing. So with data caps, where you pay more if you exceed your data cap, or for more low-income folks who are on prepaid plans, where they only afford so much data per month, and then they run out on day 20, that's where Wi-Fi really comes in and that's where New York's network or network of networks really comes in. But while our homes, cafes, and workplaces have exploited Wi-Fi, no city has yet seriously tried to harness Wi-Fi's full potential to democratize connectivity until now. And that's what this event is about. New York City is really showing what is possible when Wi-Fi is leveraged for broadband equity and social justice. Mayor de Blasio sees broadband for all as a core part of his commitment to address inequality. So next we'll hear from the top-ranking city official that the mayor has made responsible for leading this effort. Maya Wiley is counsel to the mayor. She founded the Center for Digital Inclusion here, and so she has a distinguished track record at the intersection of broadband as a tool for promoting racial and economic justice. Maya. Thank you, Michael. I just got, I don't actually have nearly the expertise that Michael just suggested I do, because actually the Center for Social Inclusion. But I think what's key to that is that we understood that broadband and access to broadband and all of the things that we need broadband to do is actually critical if we're going to have a socially inclusive society. So very much like water and electricity today is fundamental to everyone's daily life. So now is broadband and unfortunately is still highly racialized and driven by a bunch of economic inequities that mean that literally 20% of New Yorkers do not have home broadband. And if you look at those who earn $30,000 or less, that number jumps up to 36%. Before I, I just went there because you took me there, Michael, but let me just say just to begin with just a big thank you to the New America Foundation which has been such a critical resource, not just in terms of the intellectual side of broadband connectivity, but also to a whole host of other issues. It's just been an incredibly important think tank. And I personally have drawn on the work of New America for years and of OTI in particular. So thank you, Michael. And also for being a tireless advocate. So we really appreciate that. And also to Greta, who you'll hear from later, but you know there's a team. So Greta Byrom also critical. And Greta, I'll talk a little bit about it later, but actually really contributed to some of the work that's here in New York that we're actually trying to build upon. So I'll talk about that in a little bit. But that work is actually, if you think about what Michael just said and you think about how many of you think you spend 10% of your day on your mobile device? Pretty much everyone. And how many of you think you spend most of your day? Okay. I got two mobile devices. So, and how many of you... And I actually wanted to cry, Michael, when you talked about spending $100, but you're only paying for 20% of that access, because I've got kids and they each have mobile devices. So I spent a lot more than $100 a month. And so when you go back to that notion of Wi-Fi and those statistics that Michael shared, think about the fact that 36% of New Yorkers who are earning less than $30,000 a year don't have it at home. Do not have it at home, right? That means that unless, and given how critical broadband access is to any number of things that we have to do in society, apply for a job, find out whether our kids have done their homework, get in touch with the Social Security Administration because we need to actually track whether we're getting our payments or what's going wrong. I mean, increasingly, if you do not have the ability to transact your life online, increasingly you do not have the ability to transact. And that is a fundamental reality of where technology is taking us. And that in and of itself is not the problem. The problem if we all don't have universal access to it. So let me just back up because there was a, because this, I think, put such a fine visual point on it. I was looking, I just happened to pick up the New York Times. I think this was in February. And there's a picture, the picture that was on the cover was of what are clearly middle school students standing on what looks like a residential block. There's a nice little neat house behind them and a fence and grass and a yard. And they're looking down at their cell phones. And, you know, as a parent, I immediately said, yeah, I can't get my kids off that cell phone either, right? You just think of it as such a common thing that we all see. And not just kids, all of us, you know, people just constantly looking down at their cell phones. Well, once you start to read the article, you realize that Tony and Isabella Ruiz, Mrs. and San Antonio, are not just sitting there Instagramming or Snapchatting with their friends. They're actually standing outside their school catching the bleed from the wireless network so they can download their homework because they can't do it at home. That's actually true of so many kids in New York City right now. So for us as a city, when we have a mayor who campaigned on a platform of reducing income inequality, right, income inequality, meant you can't actually tackle that problem if you're not building the fundamental infrastructure that give people the tools to help them actually attack it, right? So that means if our kids can't download their homework, how are they going to be successful in school? And if parents, you know, we're constantly berating parents, particularly low income parents of color, about not being actively engaged enough in their student school. But increasingly that engagement requires internet access. And for so many families, they actually cannot pay and we're not even in a full world of data caps, right? They're luckily like cable vision, for instance, which is in the New York City footprint, does not have caps currently. But what if it does? Not only that, too many low income people can't afford the monthly charges anyway, even without caps. So unless we're actually moving to a place where we recognize what Michael talked about, which is that this must be public space and that cities and states and the federal government have got to ensure that it remains public space and that everyone has access to it. So the way we're doing it in New York, and you might say, well, if you're the mayor's lawyer, how did you inherit broadband? That's a really good question. And it actually all starts in Red Hook, Brooklyn, because I happen to write an article in the nation about Mayor de Blasio, if he really wants to tackle income inequality, should do what Red Hook initiative did with residents in Red Hook houses, which is essentially build a public free Wi-Fi network on the street network with that really serve fundamentally as a community building, social capital building enterprise. And that was a model and one of the things that Greta did was actually help include in that the digital stewards program, which meant that kids from Red Hook houses were actually learning how to put up the wireless, right? So there you had already a multiplier effect of access to the technology that was community owned that actually engaged kids in getting job training and being able to maintain that fundamental infrastructure for themselves. And it was free, which means residents can catch access and get online when they need to, at least when they're out in the public areas where there's access. And more importantly, it's scalable, because that's the other thing about Wi-Fi, right? It's scalable. It's not only inexpensive. So when Sandy hits, they actually still, their wireless stayed up. So residents that were displaced by Hurricane Sandy could actually be in touch with each other in order to communicate about what government was doing to help them and where to find help and support and resources and how to start bringing back their community. So I just wrote an article saying, Red Hook Initiative did the greatest thing since sliced bread with wireless and Mayor de Blasio, if you want to actually do something about inequality, you should take that model and figure out how to proliferate it. And so then when I went in and he called me in and said, I want you to be my counsel. I said, why? And he said, because you get inequality and I want someone a lawyer who's going to be mission-driven on inequality. And I said, okay. Well, then what would I do? And he said, I wrote that article, Dante's Dad. You're going to do broadband. All right, let's see how you do it. And I went, holy shit. And say I knew how to do it. I just said you should do it. So, and one of the great things I did was hire Josh Breitbart, who actually was one of the people who engaged in that mesh network. And Josh is here as our, yeah. Those that know how to, who don't know how to do, hire. That's what I did. So the bottom line is then we started looking at every lever we could as a city to develop public free access to wireless. And I'm really proud to say that we actually are taking that Red Hook Initiative model that not only are we taking it, we're taking that wireless network all the way into the buildings. So the 6,500 Red Hook house residents will have free broadband access in their units. And that we will connect with Red Hook Initiative and their mesh network to scale that and the digital stewards will be involved in that project. But we're not stopping there. We're doing that at several more developments. We've literally announced that we'll reach 21,000 New York City public housing residents with free wireless access. And we're doing it in a way that includes the community and all the things that the community wants to do with that. But equal, thank you, yes. So that's our down payment on that public access to Wi-Fi. The other one, which is really important, is the public-private partnership is LINC NYC, which is the coolest thing on the planet, quite literally. The largest free, super-fast wireless network in the world, one gig of speed in at least, well, I'm going to say that because they're going to try to get it everywhere, but certainly probably at least 80% of the footprint and it's going to be city-wide. We're already over 100. Colin O'Donnell is here from Intersection. How many are we up to now? Over 150. But over the course of this franchise, it's not only going to produce at least 7,500 of these free wireless kiosks. It is actually one of the ways in which we're ensuring residents in low-income communities are getting this vital infrastructure and getting it for free. And I'll also say, you can plug your ears on this, Colin, because it's the best deal the city has ever gotten on a franchise agreement. Because actually, we're getting a guaranteed minimum income revenue from this franchise. It's part of what we're using to get that free wireless to public housing residents. So it's not just that the thing is good unto itself and will save money for low-income people, but it's also that it's actually resourcing us to do many, many more things. And we're really excited about the partnership that it creates when we think about the network of networks with wireless, right? Because we want to take all these different pieces of public wireless and figure out how it connects into a broader whole. And last but far from least is our Economic Development Corporation, Dimitro is here from EDC. We're also using the Red Hook model to figure out how we have six new resilient wireless networks in sandy, impacted communities again around the city. So this is less than three years into the, in fact, less than two and a half years into the de Blasio Administration. We feel really good about where we've gotten. We've got a lot more work to do. But at the end of the day, we will measure our success, not by counting how much wireless we have, but by counting how much more social inclusion we have for all of our residents. Thank you. Thank you so much, Maya. And thank you, Michael. And thanks to all of our panelists and thanks to you guys for being here. So we've just gotten you guys really excited about the potential offered by Wi-Fi and also all the great things that have already been done with Wi-Fi. And now we're going to burst everybody's bubble a little bit with the panel. So what we're going to talk about today is a new technology that has the potential to really have an impact on all of these uses of Wi-Fi that we've been discussing. So Wi-Fi, as Michael said, it operates in these little unlicensed bands of spectrum. And what our panel today is going to talk about is this technology called LTE over unlicensed, which, you know, can really impact the sort of not only the coverage area but actually the speed of your wireless connection. And it really could have a detrimental impact on the city's investments and on equity, as Maya was talking about, as well as economic development. But before we get you guys depressed, we're going to hear from Colin O'Donnell, who, as Maya was saying, is the CIO for Intersection. He's a co-founder of CityBridge, which developed LINC NYC, and he is obsessed with pragmatic innovation. So we're also going to hear... So I'm just going to introduce these guys in the order they're going to go, and then I'm going to pass you guys the clicker. So Colin, you can take the clicker. And after Colin, we'll hear from Chris Schimanski, and he's here representing Broadcom Incorporated. He's the director of product marketing and government relations for Broadcom. And prior to that, he spent five years with his family in Shanghai, working at a semiconductor factory. And before that, he was a congressional aide. Dmitro Pokilko is down on the end, and he's a vice president of emerging and implied technology, especially broadband and economic development, for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which Maya talked about a little bit about some of their work, and he'll go into that a little more. And last but not least, Andrew Aflerbach next to me, who is the director of engineering for CTC Communications, which is an IT consulting firm that has worked with hundreds of government and nonprofit clients, and Andrew specializes in state-of-the-art networking applications. So first, to get us excited again, Colin, please introduce us to Lincoln YC. Cool. So I think Maya stole most of my thunder, but we're excited to be rolling out Lincoln YC. We're about just over three months into the project, really, from when we started rolling out. And for those of you who don't know what a link is, it's replacing all the phone booths in New York City. There's about 6,000 phone booths out there, and we'll replace at least 7,500, where we'll put out 7,500 of these units, and maybe up to 10,000. So the primary function is to provide really fast Wi-Fi. And so in the top of each of these, we've got an RF chamber that's kind of an open place where we can continuously upgrade the Wi-Fi equipment that's there. The revenues are generated. There's no advertising on the Wi-Fi network. The Wi-Fi network is completely private from your device out to the Internet. We don't do anything with it. We wanted to create the best possible Internet experience. Period. We do generate revenue from the advertising on the sides of the link, so there's 255-inch screens there. Each one has a fiber optic cable coming into it. It is providing one gig, but we've built these all with 10-gig switches because we know we're not going to stop where we are with Wi-Fi consumption and with data consumption, so upgradeable over time just by swapping out optics. They each have a tablet, and so you can access city services, make a free phone call, have a YouTube dance party on the block by yourself or with friends. We're finding out all kinds of interesting things that people are doing with links. They also have an emergency button, access to 311, a lot of great features. So the network is really big. I don't know if you can see these green dots. I think you can go to OpenData, the OpenData portal for New York City and take a look at the pay phone locations. These are just about 6,000 dots on a map. We're going to replace each one of these with a link. We're going to beef up the number in the Bronx and Staten Island because they're underserved by pay phones, but they will have good representation of links. So I think it's really hard to appreciate what Maya said also about 20%. I think we're doing well because I think just several months ago 25% of New Yorkers didn't have access to high-speed broadband. So there's one in four people for those of you who are math-impaired, which is pretty ridiculous, and we hope to change that immediately. So as soon as we put out the first link, we felt like we had made a difference. We've seen incredible growth in the use of the network over time. We saw a million sessions just about a week or two ago, but as the weather warms up and people start to log on, we saw the next million sessions in just like three days later. So it's growing really fast. There are 150 units out there, so we go from the East Village all the way up through Harlem or Breaking Ground in the Bronx. It's a super exciting project with a lot of potential, and places like Civic Hall have been a foundation for this. New America Foundation, OTI, have been supporters and collaborators and contributors to the concept since the beginning. So there's been a lot of hands in the evolution of this, like it's a new way to approach the problem that is Wi-Fi. So I guess lastly, no surprise, but people really dig it. We're seeing incredible approval ratings. We think it's kind of free Wi-Fi gets higher approval ratings than free monies. You have 90% of people saying they're looking forward to it that they feel like it's going to be valuable in their community. So I think it's just a really nice way to reflect on this is just seeing how people are using it and seeing the enthusiasm which the city is embracing this. So we're excited about it. Okay, great. Next we're going to hear from Chris, who will tell us what could go wrong. Now for the doom and gloom, I think. So first of all, a bit about Broadcom. Broadcom is a global leader in wired and wireless semiconductors. We make the type of semiconductors that go in your home, in your hand, and in the network. We ship well over 7 million chips per day. And we make our living off of coexistence among the various technologies, whether it's wireline or wireless. I work in the Wi-Fi division. So if you take a look at this slide here, it's a chart from ABI talking about the adoption of Wi-Fi and it's staggering if you take a look at that curve. And a lot of those chips are Broadcom chips. The successful chip for us is over 500 million units. So scale is very, very important. Wi-Fi marches on. So we're talking about the blistering speed of Wi-Fi in New York. And what we're talking about is advanced AC, 802.11 AC. It can theoretically bring you up to 7 gigabits per second. Wi-Fi is evolving to meet greater densification needs. Like in Manhattan, we have so many people that are uploading and downloading internet. You need a way to serve all of those users. And then with 802.11 AX, it's designed specifically for indoor and outdoor deployments and for very, very dense networks, more carrier grade. And so it's wonderful that New York is designed to upgrade the equipment because as you can see on this roadmap, there's going to be some advanced equipment coming out in the near term. So what is unlicensed LTE and how will it be deployed? So first of all, it's being deployed to meet dense network needs. It's going to be in the places where you already have Wi-Fi. It's not going to be on deserted streets. LTE is a cellular-based technology. So as Michael described it, it was designed for a racetrack. And what they've done is they've decided to modify this licensed LTE so that it could use the same spectrum that Wi-Fi uses. And that's great. But you need to make sure that you coexist well with Wi-Fi. Obviously, we have over 7 billion devices worldwide that are operating. We need to make sure that we're treating those devices fairly. In the interest of full disclosure, Broadcom actually works on the cellular side. We work on the Wi-Fi side on the licensed and unlicensed side. So we're not just speaking to this from a Wi-Fi perspective. So what you see here is this nice link New York terminal. And those rings that you see there are basically the strength of your signal. And it sort of makes sense, right? The further away you get from the AP, the weaker the signal. But when you talk about the outer ring that's minus 90 dBm, that's techno-speak, that's good enough for high-speed, high-definition Wi-Fi. You could be watching a high-definition movie there. What's basically happening is that unlicensed LTE technologies, such as LAA or LTEU, aren't designed to protect those weaker signals. And so when that LTEU node comes on, it's going to drown out about 90% of your coverage area. So if you were looking for that seamless connectivity, if you were looking to be able to roam point to point, you could lose that. And it would only protect those stronger signals. And once again in the home, oops, in your home, this is a typical apartment. Somewhere around 1,500 square feet, you have one Wi-Fi AP. It's New York. Okay, sorry, sorry. But you have a Wi-Fi AP and it's being served by broadband access on the backside of the alley. And then on the front, you have your E-node B. But that's sufficient for whole home coverage. And it's basically a heat map. As your Wi-Fi signal goes through the wall, you're going to have some loss. And it's going to get weaker and weaker, but it's still sufficient for whole home coverage. But if LTEU and LAA aren't made to be friendlier to Wi-Fi, you're going to have parts of your home go dark. I'm not a network engineer, even though I work for a tech company. I'm not going to know what to do if my children's Xbox or they're not able to watch Daniel Tiger on PBS. I just know that it's going to be pure chaos, right? So this is something that Broadcom's working very, very hard to address. Great, thank you. So before we, so actually Dmitra's going to speak next. And what we're going to do is kind of zoom out from the impact that LTEU would have on the link program in particular, and think a little bit about economic development overall in New York City. A couple of things I just want to bring out from what Chris just said. So just so folks understand what we're talking about is mobile provider traffic going over the public bands of Wi-Fi. And the impact that LTEU would have is to dampen the effectiveness of the Wi-Fi bands. I hope that makes sense to folks. But Dmitra, please introduce us to some of New York City's other broader economic development aspirations. Sure, of course. Thanks Greta. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks everyone for coming. As Greta mentioned, I represent EDC, which is the city's primary economic development engine. And we are tasked with bringing growth, creating jobs, and improving quality of life across the city, and realizing the city as the global model for inclusive innovation in economic development driven by the diversity of its people and its businesses. Starting with the Bloomberg administration and further enhanced under the leadership of Mayor de Blasio, we have worked to create ecosystems that are conducive to allowing ideas to evolve into startups and in turn to help those startups evolve to become truly successful in thriving businesses across our communities. And given this mandate, it's no wonder that we view broadband through the economic development prism. While it's easy for a policy person like myself to totally geek out on technical aspects of fiber optics and fixed wireless and elements of bringing connectivity to dense urban environments, we have to remember that time and again, time and time again, we're here from our business stakeholders that along with access to top talent, access to robust and affordable broadband is oftentimes the factor that makes or breaks a company. And this is why we have worked with our sister agencies and stakeholders from the business community and community-based organizations to address some of the common issues related to broadband. Last mile, digital desert, digital divide. And some of the elements of that work I want to highlight. One of them is related to digital deserts through a program called Connect IBC where we partnered with a number of industry, with industrial business zones, operators to bring fiber-level connectivity to four IBCs across the city, Southbus Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, North Brooklyn and Long Island City. When the networks are fully launched in 2017, hundreds of businesses will have access to connectivity where they didn't have it before and had to rely on DSL. And I think we can all agree tonight that it's pretty darn difficult to build a 21st century economy cluster on DSL. In addition to just bringing connectivity, we also help with transparency and availability of information through a public-private partnership that brought together real estate and ISP and tech communities together. We launched Wired Score where you would be able to see existing broadband infrastructure with commercial buildings. Since the launch, we have over 250 buildings representing just over a third of commercial office space in New York City, sharing their information and empowering entrepreneurs to make best decisions on where to locate their business and preventing or, I guess, eliminating the headache of having to wear both hats of a real estate broker and a CTO when you were deciding on what broadband this building has. Speaking of Wi-Fi, though, there are two initiatives that are related to that. Wi-Fi is probably the best technology that would describe connectivity that makes New York a special place in a way that it's more democratic and that is on a larger scale than anything else. One program is Rise NYC, which is a global competition that allows businesses that are impacted by Sandy across the city to be more prepared to climate change. They are developing resilient mesh networks across the city and Greta has been a great champion of that cause and after a successful pilot in Red Cook, additional neighborhoods will be announced shortly and we're quite excited to see progress on that front. And lastly, I wanted to mention the program called NYC Wireless Corridors whereby we partnered with four bids across the city, Flat Iron Bed, Downtown Brooklyn Alliance, sorry, Downtown Alliance in Lower Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Brooklyn Academy of Music where we're launching wireless corridors across busy retail areas in the city. When the networks are fully launched and we're quite excited to see them covering dozens of city blocks and helping hundreds of businesses improve their food traffic and allowing millions of visitors and locals alike to connect to each other, to tap into resources and benefits that are made available to them. This is all not to brag, but this is a long-winded way that broadband and by extension Wi-Fi have become an integral part of city's economic development policy and naturally we're quite concerned about the potential disruption to this. When I first learned about the technology, the LTEU, I couldn't help but make analogies to many shows that you see on NetGio and elsewhere about invasive species where something gets introduced to existing ecosystem and then no one knows what happens. So obviously I don't want our networks to settle from having blanket ubiquitous coverage to have to settle for spotty connectivity and I don't want the city's ability to leverage its assets to be diminished in the future as we are keep developing additional projects. So very excited to be here. Want to learn more how we can by our mandate welcome the progress while protecting our current job work and making sure that we remain robust and resilient. Thank you. And I'm just going to invite lastly Andrew Afflebeck to talk and he's going to cover not only what we've spoken about so far with regard to Wi-Fi access but also some of the other kinds of applications that could be impacted by LTEU. Thank you. So much has been said already. I'll try to fill in anything that might be left over. I've been involved in broadband with New York City back to the 90s when our firm worked with actually the Dinkins Administration on some of the implementation of the interactive video to the school systems and involved with a lot of different cities across North America on a realm of wired and wireless communications. This really caught my eye as something that I think is a potential both technology risk and also a real-money risk to city government. We prepared a report for Wi-Fi Forward and Glen Echo Group who brought us in specifically to look at the LTE on licensed technology and look closely at what the issues might be for government and for educational sphere and we found a number of really, I think, pretty important risks and I wanted to just kind of walk through some of those with you. Increasingly, as we were discussing earlier, Smart City makes use of a realm of different technologies, especially Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is really important for Smart City because compared to other wireless technologies where you're going to have to pay a fee for every single device and metered use and so forth in the cellular space, Wi-Fi lets you put up one of these boxes like what we have, the Kinect boxes and so forth or Wi-Fi on the poles and so forth and you can feed any number of devices. As you can see here, you've got connections to potential body cam inspectors with tablets in the field, parking meters, the LED lights that are adjusted with these and monitored traffic cameras and other sorts of camera surveillance that you might have, hazmat sensors and the garbage receptacles and that's just the beginning because we want to think about with Smart City in 15 years we'll think about where we were 15 years ago. So when you go Wi-Fi with LTEU, what happens is you, among other things, you reduce the range of the Wi-Fi. You reduce the speed of the Wi-Fi and there are a lot of other effects. They're just not really known like the invasive species that we're talking about here. Among other things, that means that you have to put up more Wi-Fi devices which is going to drive up your prices. The other thing that it's going to do is it's going to potentially drive us away using Wi-Fi towards some of these other technologies. Well, right, does your Wi-Fi not work? Maybe you should go to LTEU, that'll fix it, right? So that's the kind of concern that we have in the Smart City environment. It really changes the outlook for being able to do a lot of useful things. Another thing to think about is in vehicle which goes back to public safety and there's a lot of... One thing that we found in this research is that public safety, both in mobile command vehicles, ambulances and so forth, they're really using Wi-Fi quite a bit for in-vehicle communications. So you have a Wi-Fi device and you've got various sorts of monitors and handheld things and laptops and so forth. All those communicate back to a Wi-Fi hotspot and then they're aggregated back through some other sort of network. If you consider the case where you might have an LTEU device if we can go to the next slide here. What happens then is that that device is not going to be particularly sensitive to the kind of communications that would be with an ambulance or a vehicle because it's sort of diminished being essentially indoors in that case and you could have a situation where you had a system which was very secure and reliable and very critical because it's a public safety or health critical type thing where that suddenly becomes less effective where you have difficulty communicating from one end of the vehicle to the other. You start to have problems with jitter and latency and so forth and these things can be really something that you definitely don't want to have to experience and something where you have to have some testing to go on. My last case here is the in-building case and this is sort of building on what Chris was showing us with the rather large apartment I guess I would say. But consider the case of a school, 80% of classrooms have Wi-Fi, 90% of the communications within a classroom are using the Wi-Fi in all those cases and what happens is that a lot of money has been spent not just bringing fiber or whatever to the schools to communicate there but Wi-Fi is critical to building out to the classrooms and then all the devices, of course, nobody wires in the devices that the students are using or the blackboards or anything else anymore. It's all relying on Wi-Fi you obviously are not... This is a huge problem with the cost having the Wi-Fi devices in there. What happens then when you go on to LTEU is you have a situation where again your ranges and your speeds diminish you have less effective ability to communicate with the Wi-Fi and then you drive your costs up because what happens is that you have to put more Wi-Fi devices out within the school to kind of get back to where you were and then you end up in what we call arms race situation where everybody's turning up their radio and so forth and you have to sort of basically fight back and so this is not something that I think schools that are already strapped for money and issues with IT and technology really want to face. In conclusion, what's the antidote we were told to at least lead with some sort of positive note after all this? I would say it's really important that testing that's going on right now that the FCC is beginning to do with allowing Verizon and others to sort of try this out in some markets that this be done in earnest and make sure that when the testing takes place that it not be done purely on the terms of the manufacturers of LTEU and the carriers but that it include neutral test equipment that the LTEU equipment that's used is used at the same power levels and settings that it's actually going to be used by the carriers that it's tested with a wide range of Wi-Fi equipment because it's all different from provider to provider and that we use all the different use cases and settings that I brought out and others that we can all think about because I think what we're really looking at here is we don't want an arms race situation we don't want the Wi-Fi that we've become very dependent on to diminish in effectiveness and we don't want a situation where cost is just going to go up and up and where a city like New York has to abandon the kinds of things going on Wi-Fi and maybe itself has to buy LTEU just to sort of keep its head above water Great, thanks you guys. Thanks everybody on the panel and I'm just going to ask a few questions to get us started with a little bit of conversation and then I'll invite you guys in the audience to tap into this wealth of expertise sitting to my right. So, you know, first of all I just want to ask, you know Andrew you just spoke about the FCC and about regulation as sort of the major mechanism that can be used to control the effective LTEU so just because, you know, usually folks talk about regulation as kind of being the enemy of innovation and economic development for anybody on the panel shouldn't the government just be technology neutral and shouldn't technology just be allowed to evolve and won't the market sort it out? I'll take this in some cases, yes in some cases, no and I feel the way that we approach broadband sometimes by necessity because we, you know it came as an extension of our economic development and it was not necessarily immediately, you know at the forefront of our activity we just realized that it's, you know an important part of enabling the thriving communities and when we're not sure the approach of a public-private partnership worked out pretty well for us when you have stakeholders at the table who are contributing financial resources and their sweat equity you are hedging a little bit in the sense that not only it is it is easier to launch and cheaper to launch but at the same time the risk is being shared and if you're launching this as a pilot you have an ability to reassess and then see if you need adjustments to scale up or to reshape the program to ensure ongoing impact and to ensure financial feasibility going forward. So I guess from EDC's standpoint we have taken the path of try before you buy and then, you know, as we learn more and more about these technologies we can make more significant investments. Alan? Yeah, I guess first off I'd just like to say that this is amazing and terrific if we can get LTE and Wi-Fi to coexist we can start using Wi-Fi and carrier spectrum which would be really cool. That's never going to happen. But seriously I think the regulation you know, the spectrum has been divided up in such a way and it's so siloed that it's just an incredibly inefficient use of spectrum and if you look at like the 2012 PCAST report on spectrum sharing, I know everybody here has because it's a thrilling read but it actually really is interesting to think about a new way of using this natural resource that we all have. So if we've sliced up our spectrum as we saw earlier into these little micro slivers of how you can use it and they just have these edges that you bump up against and very limited functionality and use cases that you can get out of it, when you start to take one use case and put it in another allocated bucket you start to get interference. So I think if you want to do this right you have to look at the spectrum this completely chaotic carved up spectrum or maybe it's not chaotic because it doesn't change for years and years and years and you can have some bit of spectrum that's just not utilized but if you look at this holistically it's not about taking one constrained area and having it invade the next cell over, it's about looking at this and saying let's not look at an analog way where it's divided up over decades where someone can have some spectrum and use it or not use it but let's look at it and how we can split it up and use it dynamically, use it for the military most of this is all used by the military use it for the military when it's needed but use it by the public when it's not needed. So I think there's a huge opportunity to let the market figure it out if the market is able to figure it out but you can't do it when you're just allocated this tiny little piece. Yeah. So it's speaking from the standpoint of industry. So taking a look at this from a company perspective we're not a huge fan of heavy regulation. We like the opportunity for innovation and the unlicensed bands but oversight is incredibly important if you think about unlicensed spectrum the goal here the analogy I would give is the difference between being in a noisy bar room environment where you can't really hear the person across the room and in a library environment. These are public airwaves that we all use and we're all trying to coexist over these airwaves and if you have some new technologies I like the invasive species analogy that are a little bit hostile what happens is you get a noisy environment and in this instance you could have your neighbors you know use of their his or her communication interfering with your communication and then what are you going to do you know most of us aren't network engineers so this is being discussed as a well this is a technology versus technology discussion or industry versus industry but at the end of the day all of us have invested in Wi-Fi and sure you know we can develop new Wi-Fi chips that are stronger faster more aggressive but that's going to then drive more towards that noisy bar room environment that none of us want so I think oversight is very very important and I would say there are certain developments now that look hopefully that were on the right track the testing that I mentioned and I think that as we move further toward more the potential of LTE being deployed it's really important that we look at the results that come out and what happens as far as any potential damage that appears to happen with this before it gets widely deployed I myself keep in mind that Wi-Fi came itself out of a very unregulated environment we had this unlicensed spectrum we had a very minimal number of rules that were associated with it and that's what Wi-Fi came out of so on one level we want to keep that going but on another level we have to recognize that the LTE could be essentially the take back of all that was there and at that point I think that regulation would be important to basically intervene I think it's one of those things about the history of spectrum that some of us find really thrilling history that the unlicensed bands were really these little tiny bands of junk spectrum and an amazing amount of innovation happened because those little bands were allocated so at this point what we're talking about is the irony of that becoming the place where 80% of mobile traffic is now routed so I guess I did ask the panel to not leave everybody feeling like this was a great big bummer so a couple of people talked about some things that we can do so Andrew was speaking specifically about pushing for certain kinds of testing but I think spectrum allocation telecommunications policy that's a place where a lot of people feel like they can't really be engaged so I'm just wondering what do you guys see that the average person could do about this issue write a letter to your senator it seems like it's very difficult to access this that's a very difficult a very difficult one how to get involved as an individual just to say something hopeful about it a lot of our focus is on what not to do and how to stop things from happening but I think that you can focus on what the next generation of wireless is going to look like I think things like 3.5 which is a spectrum that's going to become available and the proposal is that it is a tiered access system so that the government has access to it carriers can license it and people can use it so as we're rolling out there's all kinds of challenges with the existing wifi spec and if you think about what it was made for 20 years ago the uses today are completely different and so I'd love to see the evolution of wireless but I'd love to see it favor the commons and the open the public it is our natural resource and it's something that we should take advantage of so I think looking forward and saying there's all kinds of spectrum out there there's all kinds of ways to use it that are responsible to make it synchronize and maybe more like LTE where you get longer ranges and better characteristics about the connectivity but I think you have to protect what you have but you can also say we can also make this a lot better I mean the first thing to Maya talk earlier having city officials and government officials that are smart on this issue they magnify your voice and they understand the importance of broadband connectivity and what New York's doing is just fantastic it's one of the most forward if not the most forward leaning city in the world when it comes to broadband access and so from our perspective when you write a letter to your senator to your representative and let them know that this is important that you use it all the time and they need to look out for you when they're engaged in oversight I think that's very very powerful and I would say also just to stand along with what Maya is doing and what the mayor is doing and let your council members know that if you do approve of what's happening right now with length that you advocate for its expansion and its visibility nationally I mean you talk to people who are involved with it even peripherally and it's sort of like royalty in this kind of small community here so the more that if you like what you see you do have an outsize say in it just by advocating for it and then of course writing letters to the FCC and so forth which oddly enough with basically the with internet freedom turned out to be more effective than anybody would imagine so I guess I could make one other comment there's an organization called Wifi Forward and Wifi Forward has a website and you could go online and they also have a campaign called Save Our Wifi and they do an excellent job magnifying your voice so if you just Google Save Our Wifi or Wifi Forward you can see some of the excellent work that they're doing and they have some templates form letters, ways for you to get actively involved great so those are some great ideas and I do want to open up the discussion to the audience now and I'm going to invite Michael Calabrese to come back up as well as Josh Breitbart who can speak to some of the stuff that's pretty effective and they can they can definitely speak to sort of the question of what you can do because both of them have pretty powerful platforms so why don't we start right here hold on one second I don't want to be too reductionist but is it in general true that the more successful Wifi is in this city the more money for example the cell phone companies and others selling broadband access are going to be and is the motivation of LTE in fact to sabotage as much as possible Wifi is that not their motivation who would like to take that as far as the motivation of the carriers as we saw if 80% of the traffic is going over Wifi and the carriers are still charging you 100 bucks a month and they don't have to deploy a new infrastructure I don't think carriers are really opposed to all the Wifi and their system can't really the demands that we're putting on Wifi right now are wireless networks are too great for LTE to carry alone so I think they do coexist pretty well and I think from our perspective at LINC NYC we have not had any direct threats or interference from carriers we've had a lot of interest to see what this looks like and to be frank the network that we're putting out is going to offload a lot of the strain off of their networks part of that question is how do you how do you capture the economic benefit and the revenue from that and direct it towards the public benefit I think LINC NYC is a great example of that and the other initiatives the city is doing is in terms of targeting where those those deployments go and trying to get the full benefit of the use of that spectrum is really key so instead of just letting it be a subsidy to wireless carriers that they can use this public asset while also charging for commercial purposes it also becomes something that drives the economic opportunity and revenue for the city guys let's take another hey Greta how are you I barely see you quick question a lot of your comments this evening were about I'm sorry one second and Michael you have something burning trying to pile in on that and Colin made a really good point that up to a certain point the Wi-Fi helps carriers so it was really interesting you may remember I know this is a long long time ago but in 2007 the iPhone was introduced the first two years AT&T had an exclusive and their networks were overwhelmed people often had drop calls and everything so first thing AT&T they ran out and bought a Wi-Fi company Wayport aggregated Wi-Fi hotspots and in fact consumer federation of America and this was several years ago that the carriers were saving about $20 billion in terms of spectrum and infrastructure they did not need to buy because of Wi-Fi so for a while this was all good for them but it's hit we fear it's hit a tipping point because of not just what New York City is doing is brand new but even a little less new on the horizon a little longer than that has been the Wi-Fi first carriers so for example Comcast is in the process of turning all of its 20 million subscribers both residential and business into hotspots that could you know blanket coverage of Wi-Fi over cities like Philadelphia and Google has entered the mobile market to some degree with a service that pushes you on to Wi-Fi and uses mobile and sprints as a backup so I think the carriers are very afraid of the mobile carriers very afraid of the cable industry in particular putting Wi-Fi on top of their wireline infrastructure and competing head to head with them and so our consumer coalition when we filed comments at the FCC last summer on LTEU what we warned about was that LTEU seemed to be designed to introduce just enough latency of the way so that you couldn't you have real-time applications on Wi-Fi such as FaceTime or interactive video chat and things like that so that's that and the shrinking of the coverage areas that you've seen that will could occur and for competitive reasons not just even New York's Wi-Fi but because of other private sector competitors unless we you know have good coexistence great thank you sorry about the delay no worries my name is Jason I had a quick question a lot of your comments seem to focus on regulatory or legal challenges with the FCC we're here at the 20th anniversary of the last rewrite of the telecommunications act is it perhaps time for a refresh of that and would that possibly address a lot of the concerns of voice this evening yes I'm not supposed to not in this Congress there's such paralysis in Washington DC unfortunately even like unlicensed spectrum have become somewhat partisan sort of gridlock I wouldn't expect a good rewrite of the telecom act great about right here please go ahead hi so just to try to understand basically what you're saying is that if LTEU would come in and share the spectrum every single Wi-Fi hotspot anywhere will have to what is broadcast this LTEU spectrum without you being able to stop that spectrum from or stop that signal from coming out so would that mean that all of the Wi-Fi hotspots essentially become cell phone towers sorry so not exactly and I want to ask Michael to just give it a quick once over since he's used to speaking of elected officials that don't really understand he's got a lot of practice this and others to chime in no it's just that one thing I mentioned way in the beginning is that there's been this dichotomy up until now about licensed technologies operate on licensed spectrum and unlicensed Wi-Fi Bluetooth AB monitor at home operate on unlicensed spectrum the mic a little more and the two are completely separate the thing is that if you start using these licensed technologies on the unlicensed band Wi-Fi was designed with fair sharing built in so Wi-Fi listens before it talks and if it hears three or four or five other Wi-FIs it you know it divides up the time slots fairly so that everybody can do it and when licensed technology comes in it can operate as if it's the only one there but it basically takes precedence and so it can squeeze out the Wi-Fi so they're transmitting separately but what the worry is is of crowding out of a licensed technology crowding out the Wi-Fi the unlicensed technology if I could thanks Michael and Greta so we are talking about completely separate technologies but they're occupying the same lane in the road so if you just sort of think about this and the analogy would be a highway and you have multiple lanes in the road and Wi-Fi is operating in a lane and you move LTE this unlicensed version in the same lane it's going to have an impact on that Wi-Fi traffic and Wi-Fi was designed so that it would be friendly to other Wi-Fi devices even really low level signals Wi-Fi is very very friendly and right now these unlicensed versions of LTE are not designed to be friendly to these lower level signals they can hear the strong signals the really loud signals but they would not hear those lower level signals as well so if this were a Wi-Fi AP you can connect to signals all around that Wi-Fi AP if you introduce your LTE base station the signals coming from this LTE base station would interfere with the signals coming in from this Wi-Fi base station which means interference into your device and so that's what we're describing that's basically the mobile providers routing traffic over the unlicensed, the shared common so you would be paying essentially to use your own airwaves that you own just to be clear I think the last spectrum auction was over 45 billion US dollars when the carriers what was the total figure I think it was 45 billion and change 44 billion and change a lot of money and so there's this massive incentive to reduce costs and I think they're wanting to do that by sharing the unlicensed spectrum and to beat it to death there's an AP in your house a wireless access point and that has your Wi-Fi on it and it's broadcasting in this range and if someone puts an LTE unit outside your house the argument is that it would interfere with the Wi-Fi in your home not the same device although it could be but I mean it's basically your neighbors doing something think of it almost as noise pollution your neighbors having a party it's very very loud and it wakes your children up it's the same sort of thing what someone else is doing could impact your home okay so question right down here and one right behind you thank you so much I was wondering my first question is if you could all discuss the evidence that widespread introduction of LTE would lead to this sort of doomsday scenario that you're describing because it's my understanding that evidence is somewhat inconclusive at best my second question is if I want to pay for faster service why shouldn't I be able to to use the highway analogy you've got the public road there's the toll road as well if you want to go faster and you have the money to pay for it you should be able to pay for it okay and we're just going to take one more question behind you and then one more and then we're going to ask everybody to kind of wrap up and we'll move to a reception hi this is on a slightly different topic but I'm interested with the LINC NYC project because it's such a it's going to be covering so much of the city and it's a really interesting opportunity to to have a really progressive privacy policy I'm just wondering how the LINC NYC privacy policy will be sure to protect the public and how the public will understand what they're protected from and what they're not protected from in the as it rolls out okay one more in the stack and then we're going to go down the line so over here in the stripes please hi I also have a question about LINC NYC so when you thought about the broadband connectivity in New York and where you were placing the APs did you do any sort of comparison or case studies with other cities across the world and how does the New York infrastructure compare to other cities across the world is there anything that you wish you could do that you're not able to or something that's being done that's a lot greater than other cities in the world okay so I want to have everybody speak to these questions except Colin and then Colin will wrap up with you so Josh do you want to answer any of these questions sure well I also want to acknowledge some of my colleagues are here Priya Srinivasan from Dewitt is here Adrian Schmoker and Lindy Page McCoy are here from the mayor's office of technology innovation Peter Hill from EDC and I don't know if there are others that I'm not seeing recognizing and then also we're talking a lot about Red Hook Initiative before Tony Schloss who runs that program at Red Hook Initiative is in the back and Tony along with Bruce Lincoln from Silicon Harlem on the mayor's broadband task force sorry Bruce Lincoln in the back from Silicon Harlem I said Peter yes no somebody somebody else can acknowledge their colleagues so to the question of things that are different about New York City I will say I think New York City is a particularly challenging environment to deploy broadband infrastructure of any kind it's certainly requires thinking at tremendous scale and again to acknowledge that's one of the things I love about working for the city is that you have 300,000 people who collaborate with you on that and finding great partners to do that with from the private sector as well but once you start digging up any part of the city it is pretty amazing what you can find you know some I think some of the phone booths that you thought you were going to be able to deploy to the clay conduit to them was crushed which means probably 120 to 130 years old but then again we're refreshing that we're laying all that on top and so you've got some of the biggest challenges and some of the most energetic and thoughtful people tackling those challenges and again great partners also from community organizations so I think we've got probably bigger challenges but I wouldn't trade them for anybody else's I'll stop there let other folks address the commercial question and thanks to the question about what's the evidence or what's the tangible evidence of where we are right now that was part of what our study was about the WIFI forward CTC so if you go to those websites we have a good amount of links to what had been documented before and this week actually at 3GPP there is more information that came out about the particular circumstances of the testing that's been done so in the early stages I think it's a very good point about unlicensed technologies that why this and why that why not have multiple there and being able to make a choice and to me just from a philosophical perspective I think LTEU has a lot of interesting promise as a technology and I'm open to a lot of things other than just WIFI one thing that's really important about LTEU is you can't just be any company and just operate LTEU by LTEU technology in the store instead of buying WIFI and operate that you can only operate LTEU if you are hardwired also into a license cellular network because by definition it's a technology that has to coordinate with the cellular bands because really what it does it operates in conjunction with the cellular network and if you want to watch video or if you want to do something that uses a lot of bandwidth then suddenly if there's LTEU there it'll activate that and you'll get more bandwidth that way so again I like to just direct everyone to those reports as far as the data and then Chris did you want to speak a little bit more to that? Broadcom has done significant testing and simulations on this so we make small simulations and testing both we have LAA product that we've announced back in I want to say November at the Dallas Small Cell Forum and we engaged in over-the-air testing and we've also engaged in sorry it wasn't over-the-air it was a simple cable testing but it was real-world testing and then we also engaged in simulations and it's physics and you have weaker signals and you can't detect that your neighbor is operating you're going to talk over your neighbor it'd be the same thing with Wi-Fi if Wi-Fi didn't have coexistence mechanisms in place to protect those weaker signals they're in 3GPP the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE have sent liaison letters and these are the standards body that's responsible for developing Wi-Fi and the certification body that's responsible for certifying Wi-Fi that's Wi-Fi certified and they had deep and substantive concerns about these technologies and they've sent them in a liaison letter in the spirit of collaboration from a Broadcom perspective we're not saying that they can't coexist we're saying that there needs to be some work so we're looking at this solely from a technological perspective we think with a little bit more work they can possibly coexist I just want to add about that from the city's perspective the department of education the department of education manages its own network of 75,000 access points throughout 1,309 school buildings to make sure that all million plus students can connect to the internet in every classroom so anything that is going to make their job more difficult or decrease the connectivity in those schools is going to give the city great concern they've invested quite a bit of money effort, technological expertise in installing that network and managing that to make sure that we can use the internet to teach in the classrooms and that coverage has to be managed at strong signal strengths and weaker signal strengths and adapt to a very dynamic and increasingly high demand environment throughout the school and not just in the classroom so it's not to say that New York City is very committed to innovation and driving new wireless technologies and we're excited to see 3.5 gigahertz and other things come online but technologies that can potentially interfere with those signals that are not designed to coexist the way that Wi-Fi is now is going to pose an enormous challenge for not just the DOE network Lincoln YC network the nitro projects that Maya described so any of these things are going to be tremendous challenges so when you talk about can we just allow other people to step in with other uses absolutely if you use the same coexistence protocols that have made Wi-Fi such a valuable technology for use in schools and homes and public spaces so Dmitro and Michael do you guys have anything burning to add before we give Colin the last word? One thing I think one person that I forgot to mention is Ketlau who is my ex-colleague and has been the person behind every single initiative that I mentioned now works for Colin so just one person that was not mentioned just to this question it's not LTE per se that's the issue it's how it operates and how it coexists and as Chris said we're hoping that it will work out and as Colin mentioned earlier there's another band of 3.5 gigahertz here we go finding the microphone Citizens Broadband radio service that we fought hard over years to have the FCC adopt and that's starting off probably as LTE over small cells it could get incorporated into the links for example in New York City and that would be wonderful but it's designed to operate in that band in a certain way that won't interfere with Wi-Fi I invite everybody we have a panel that can join us for more questions out there and yes I'm going to give Colin a chance to play us out here so make us feel inspired you know one more time can't allow everybody so two questions on link NYC first privacy policy we worked with the mayor's office to develop what we think is the most citizen focused privacy policy out there we went to some very aggressive privacy policies Portland had one that was an inspiration to us and we thought how we could take it further so we first off we'll never sell or share your personally identifiable information with any third party for their own purposes means we won't share your email address we won't sell it to anyone I think we take web traffic as the whole system we've designed for our users so if you want to make the best possible internet experience what do you do you make it really fast you put it everywhere you possibly can you try to make it seamless you don't put ads on it and you don't look at the data traffic that's going across the line so I think that's a really it was a wake up as an internet user to go through my home internet connection that's a ridiculous idea so we don't do that and your connection from your device out to the internet is private we've got an encrypted option for as devices adopt hotspot 2.0 they'll be encryption out to the network so we take privacy very seriously and try and set a new standard for that question is what could you do or what infrastructure is available to you in New York City what do you want or what's common in other cities there's so many different aspects of it like there's a land use aspect of it that the pay phones existed on the streets that we could put those there the advertising on the sides of links is actually really important because people haven't figured out how to make a free wifi network make money and I think we've figured that out so I think having that space available is really important but I think there's this really interesting thing if you want to think about something helpful I think people like Red Hook initiative are out there just taking action without taking it upon themselves to solve problems it's not link NYC won't be the first thing to blanket New York City and Wi-Fi New York City is covered in Wi-Fi if you pull out your phone you'll probably see 18 access points right now the question is how do you hook up all this bandwidth and make it available to everyone I think that's a really interesting challenge and so I think if we could have any kind of infrastructure out there any kind of coordination between all these different networks private networks personal networks, park networks, school networks and how do you bring them all together and really create a cohesive wireless mesh across the city and I think there's a real opportunity to do this Great, well thanks everybody and join us please for reception