 Welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Michael Calabrese. I direct the Wireless Future Project, which is part of our Open Technology Institute here at New America. And the event, just to make sure you're here on the right day for the right event, because we've been having tons of tech events lately, is super Wi-Fi incentive auctions and the emerging unlicensed economy. And of course, I think as everyone knows, maybe many people are here, is that we're approaching decision time this spring at the FCC on the rules for the upcoming incentive auctions of more TV spectrum, which will be expected to be mid next year, mid 2015. But of course, it involves really reshuffling the broadcasters and other users in the band, including wireless microphones, unlicensed secondary broadcasters and others who won't even have a chance to sell their spectrum into the auction as the broadcasters will in the reverse auction. So we're gonna have, we're gonna start with kind of going right down the line with some opening remarks from our panel. They'll talk about five or so minutes and then open it up for kind of some interactive discussion, including your comments and questions. And when that time comes, please, well, please don't speak at great length for one thing, but also to let us know first who you are and who you represent because that will be really useful to know. I also should note that, because you may be looking down and say, where is Dustin Springman from Ag Tech? He actually had to drop out this morning, unfortunately. But Bob Nichols, who showed up explaining his lack of a tie, among other things, and the reason he's going last, but Bob actually agreed to hop on the panel because one thing, it pained me a bit to have excluded just because I didn't want too many panelists was all the great work that's been happening in the nonprofit sector with TV White Space, particularly with a project that Bob and I co-founded that air.u, which is to leverage TV White Space for particularly rural colleges and communities. And Blair Levin, who I think is here, was a mastermind behind this as well, kind of as an inverse of gig U. So schools and libraries have really benefited and we'll hear a bit about how that's actually expanding into K-12 and otherwise. So as I said, the focus of today's event is on licensed access to vacant TV ban spectrum. And the TV White Space has already spurred deployments to connect unserved rural households, colleges, libraries, but I think less well known is what you'll hear about today, and that is how companies are innovating to leverage the very special propagation characteristics of this low-band spectrum, this super Wi-Fi, to boost the productivity of many other industries. And it's really something that's below the surface as Wi-Fi perhaps was 10 years ago. But industries including agriculture, energy, particularly smart grid, the automated meter, infrastructure, oil and gas, ubiquitous Wi-Fi connectivity, rural broadband and device-to-device communication, all of that is really going to be generating huge, further gains for the economy if we have this low-band unlicensed to go along with the higher-band unlicensed. So overall, the unlicensed economy is surging. I would really call to your attention if you haven't browsed through it yet. There's a new economic study, really the most comprehensive yet, that was just released a couple weeks ago by a new company coalition, Wi-Fi Forward. It's by Professor Raul Katz at the Columbia Business School. And basically what he did is he went through many of the different use cases for unlicensed and estimated that unlicensed overalls contributing more than $220 billion to the US economy already today. About half, excuse me, about half of this is from RFID for inventory control and location tracking just in two large sectors, the retail sector and in healthcare. And it's probably not very well-known, but this was also featured in a very good study that Yokai Banklor at the Harvard Law School published about a year and a half ago that in retail, healthcare, and smart grid, the US is leading the world in the deployment of things like smart meters, for example, and wireless medical equipment in large part because the vast majority of it is going over unlicensed. They don't need to ask permission, there's no middleman, there's no extra cost. So that's an important thing that I think gets boosted further with TV white space as you'll hear. Another big impact that Professor Katz found, of course, which I think has now pierced the veil of denial in some quarters is the role of Wi-Fi offload. So already mobile device traffic, more mobile device traffic is being carried over Wi-Fi today in the US and in Europe than over carrier networks and infrastructure, which is an astounding thing. In other words, recent studies, both user studies by Mobidia, projections by Cisco, are that nearly 60% of US smartphone traffic, more than 80% of tablet traffic is over Wi-Fi. So a short distance at low power over shared spectrum directly into a wired connection that's already been provisioned and paid for, whether you're home, work or whatever. So it's this important distinction between mobile use, truly mobile use on the go and nomadic. So nomadic in a sense is the new mobile, about 85% of all the high bandwidth uses of mobile data, particularly video, is at home, work or a public place, someplace where you're very close to a wire where you don't need to use expensive, exclusive spectrum and carrier infrastructure. So really Wi-Fi has proven to be the single biggest factor in resolving the spectrum crisis, which was declared five years ago and although we haven't put out a megahertz since then, it, you know, we're still not, we still haven't kind of plunged off the cliff and that's because a lot because of Wi-Fi offload. So the FCC is addressing all this in three different proceedings and it's important to keep your eye on all three because they address different parts of the ecosystem. Of course, the incentive auction proceeding will determine whether the, there'll be continue to be sufficient access to unlicensed in the TV band spectrum, you know, with the special propagation characteristics. Then there is the 3.5 gigahertz band where the FCC has proposed a citizen's broadband service based on the recommendations of PCAST back in summer of 2012. And that's proceeding, it may get done this year. And in fact that the next, the third one is the expansion of the five gigahertz band unlicensed in five gigahertz for things like the 802.11 AC standard, very wide channels, potentially gigabit Wi-Fi. And the first part of that is expected to be adopted at the commission's meeting next meeting, March 31st which is another hundred megahertz of unlicensed outdoors at full part 15 power. That's the uni one band. So what all this reflects is the importance of unlicensed spectrum access at a variety of propagation characteristics. It's proving to be a powerful complement to licensed but as you'll hear today, this requires low band unlicensed and not only high band spectrum that can be used for things like Wi-Fi offload. Today unlicensed is one of the incumbents in the TV band since of course the original order was adopted and unanimously by the FCC in November 2008. And then again when all the reconsiderations were cleared up in September 2010. And then, but it took until just last year before the first TV bands databases that control access of devices to make sure there's no interference that the first TV bands databases were certified to operate nationwide and for devices to be certified. And so now they're finally rolling off the assembly line particularly for a fixed wireless. After substantial investment, the building blocks are in place for a globally scalable marketplace of device and services. I was just at an unlicensed, an ITU unlicensed summit last week in Trieste and it was really interesting to see folks from over the world where they're talking about all the trials and deployments that are happening across four continents today. Standards have been developed as you'll hear about the 802.11 AF standard for personal portable devices in white space. The 802.22 standard has been done for wide area networks and wait lists for M2M applications. The key though, and the bottom line is to ensure sufficient, a sufficient amount of unlicensed in every media market in the country including the biggest ones, including New York and LA. And that's really the sort of the silver lining in the incentive auctions for unlicensed is that today because the FCC's rules are so conservative, there's at most one or two channels in several of the biggest NFL markets. And if the FCC adopts a balanced policy, we can have at least four six megahertz channels, let's say the equivalent of 24 megahertz in every single market nationwide. And that'll really be the fuel for a whole nother round of tremendous innovation and a lot of gap filling in the ecosystem. And so with that, actually I'm gonna turn to first here to Larry Koos. And you all have, I should have mentioned one of the handouts out there is the, how to bio, so I'm not gonna spend time getting into it, but Larry is the co-founder and vice president of engineering for KTS Wireless. And oh, and by the way, the speakers, you can either come up here, which is probably preferable or stay there either way. Thank you, Michael. I'm here primarily because I get to talk about markets that most of you don't think about. Most of the time when people think of white space, they either think of the personal portable devices, which would be intended to take the place of or compliment Wi-Fi networks today, thinking of using them in home and small office and that sort of thing. Or they think of broadband internet access in rural areas. And I'm here to educate you on a couple of other markets that you may not have thought of. Our company, KTS Wireless, created the first certified white space device and it is a high-powered fixed device. But our focus from the beginning has been on two markets that I'm gonna talk about this morning. You've heard a lot of buzz, I'm sure about this idea of the internet of things. And it's gotten a lot of press and people talk about it all the time. But I wanna let you know that there has been wireless networks connecting things since the early 60s. Controlling and monitoring these things for a very long time, long before the internet was anybody's idea. What kind of things am I talking about? 500,000 gas wells in the US. 400,000 oil wells. Over 16 million water wells. Over 2 million sewer lift stations. 70,000 electrical substations that have one and a half million control points in the grid. As you can begin to see, these form the heart and soul of our nation's infrastructure. And all of the control and monitoring that goes on in those networks are way more critical than whether or not you can download the latest Netflix video. Having lived in Florida for the last 34 years, I've been through my share of hurricanes and I've been through extended periods without electricity and cell phone. I would gladly give those up as long as my sewer doesn't back up. It's these systems that make sure that that doesn't happen. Today, the majority of those wireless networks use what are called part 90 radios named after the FCC rule part that defines those radios. They typically use very narrow band channels in three different bands in the US. The channels used to be 25 kilohertz. They're now 12 and a half kilohertz or six and a quarter kilohertz. So it's dial up kinds of speeds. And from a single 25 kilohertz, 12 and a half kilohertz channel, the utility will monitor and control several hundred devices in a metropolitan area. And so they're interested in very large coverage. They typically go out ranges of 10, 15, 20 miles from a central operating site to monitor and control these devices. They're very much interested in online of site. Again, for the same reason, they have to go through trees and buildings. You and I, if we're having trouble with our cell phone signal, we'll gladly walk out in the hall or walk near a window to get a better signal. You cannot move a sewer lift station. It's got to work wherever it is. So their level of reliability has to be much greater. Like I've already mentioned, it's okay in a hurricane if your cell phone quits working. It's not okay if the sewer starts backing up. So the level of reliability that's required exceeds what cellular systems today can provide. And they provide their own work crews to monitor and control these networks that respond immediately after disasters to recover the networks quickly so that they don't go offline. So these tend to be privately owned networks, privately owned in the sense that municipalities, utilities, people of that nature own them. So if they have that system and exist today, what's wrong with it? What's the problem? Well, the problem is that the world has changed even for those guys. First off, while the majority of the installed base today uses serial ports and serial port protocols, they're all moving to TCPIP type protocols, ethernet types of interfaces. Because of that change, it now allows them for the first time to integrate their control and monitoring systems with their back office systems. And so the amount of traffic and data they wanna extract for them for control and monitoring system is growing. The demand for that data is growing. You see this in things like whether or not the amount of oil that's being produced in a given oil field, what the impact that might have on the hedging that they're doing on the Chicago Board of Trade. And so they're trying to integrate these systems together. Finally, thanks to the Stuxnet virus and other things, security is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. Approximately half of these networks that exist today, these industrial telemetry networks, are virtually open, they are basically unprotected. And there is a huge push to change that. They're beginning to encrypt every network, every link, beginning to authenticate every device in the network. And then finally, video surveillance is getting to be a bigger thing ever since 9-11, physical security is becoming more and more important. So you add all of those things up, and what you find out is you just can't accomplish the mission with dial-up speeds. You need something significantly larger. Do I need 50 megabits? No. Most of these guys would be thrilled with 200 kilobits. So if you can give them something significantly higher than the dial-up they get today and still meet their mission, they would be thrilled. And that's where white space is the key. White space is 1,000 times faster than the dial-up speeds they use today. So there's plenty of bandwidth there for them to use. But they get comparable ranges from a white space network deployments that we do today, doing three to 10 miles range from a hub side is a very common thing. And so you may have to put up a little bit more infrastructure, but you can cover the same geographic area with white space that you do today with these narrowband radios. Great spectrum availability in a lot of these places, you don't find oil wells in the middle of Washington, D.C. They tend to be out in rural America and away from everything else. There are exceptions. Electrical utilities, of course, operate everywhere. And so they get good spectrum availability outside the NFL cities. But again, back to Michael's point earlier, we'd love to see some consistent spectrum throughout the NFL cities for people like electrical utilities who would love to use it throughout their entire network and just not outside the main cities. And finally, the recurring costs are low. It may not be a big deal to you to pay $40 a month for a connection, but when you're trying to run a network with 10,000 nodes in it and you're having to pay a recurring fee every month to run that network, it becomes a major burden on a lot of these smaller municipalities and smaller utilities. So they love the recurring cost being so low when you go to an unlicensed band like Whitespace. So they're moving to Whitespace. Our customer base today, in oil and gas, we've got deployments in Alaska, Texas, Illinois. In water and wastewater, we have deployments in Florida, New York, North Carolina. We work with rural electrical cooperatives in California and Washington state. Departments of transportation in Mississippi. We're probably working in over 20 states today. Out of all of our Whitespace radio shipments to date, probably 80% of them are in either industrial telemetry or agriculture. It's a big deal. So what's the problem and why am I here? The level of acceptance is still very low. And the whole reason is the uncertainty behind the availability of spectrum going forward. When these guys invest in networks, they expect their investment to last at least 10 years, preferably 20. And when you're looking at a set of rules that change within a two-year period, it makes them very nervous. And that's our single biggest issue with trying to move radios and product into these spaces is the lack of clarity on what will happen with spectrum in the country. A second one like it I've already mentioned, and that is the available of spectrum, Whitespace spectrum in the NFL cities. Today for the most part it's nonexistent. I wanna take a few minutes with Michael's permission to talk about agriculture. The fellow that didn't show up this morning is one of our customers, he was with Ag Technologies. Another oft overlooked application space is agriculture. It's out in the rural areas, just like a lot of this industrial telemetry. And if you have not looked at agriculture lately, it's worth your while to spend an hour or two to go do some breeding. Because agriculture is one of the highest tech industries that exist today. They have to be smart in everything they do because their margins are horrible. A typical row crop farmer will, his input costs are $700 to $1000 an acre. That's the total cost of what it takes him to put in a crop. In a good year, he will only make $80 to $100 an acre in profit. So his margins are really low and they're always looking for ways to improve that. One of the first big moves they made into high technology in the area of wireless is a technology that they call RTK. It's a form of high resolution GPS. Using RTK systems, farmers can control where their tractors are and where their implements are to with less than two inch of accuracy. Today when they go to plow up a field, the driver plows the tractor to the edge of the field and then let's go to the steering wheel and the RTK system drives the tractor and plows the field for him. As a result, the accuracy that they achieve has improved their yields in a field dramatically, 20, 30, 40%. When you're only making $20 to $100 an acre off of $1000 input cost, a 20% improvement in yield is enormous. This ripples through the entire operation of an agricultural system. Water becomes precious. It costs a farmer about $8 an acre to water a field one time and that's if the water is free. When it costs $8 to water a field and you can only make $80 or $100 an acre, if you can do something to affect that equation, that's enormous. So what you're beginning to see is farmers putting in soil moisture sensors, changing the type of irrigation nozzles that are on their center pivot irrigation systems. The list goes on and on. Out of those water wells I mentioned earlier, over 400,000 of them are on farms. And they're taking more water out of the aquifer, more water than they know they're taking. They're not even doing a good job of measuring how much they're taking, but they know the aquifer resources are going away. And so there's a huge environmental pressure on farmers to monitor things like water and chemical use and things of that nature. White space is key in that agricultural space. Why? Because farms are spread over many, many square miles. Farmers need the least expensive way they can to create wireless telemetry networks to monitor all these things that they have in the field to create connections to their tractors in the field, to do asset tracking in locations so that as vehicles are moving through the field at harvest time, they're minimizing the amount of fuel they use to harvest the crop. And on and on the list goes, I could probably list 30 different applications for wireless and farms that are going unused today because cellular systems do not provide reliable enough coverage and the existing high-band unlicensed solutions can't get the range and non-linus site capability that they want. So I hope this opened your thoughts a little bit about the larger markets beyond the ones you may have thought of, and thank you for your time. Thanks, Larry. Next up is Gabriel Desjardins, who is Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom Corporation. Broadcom has gotten increasingly active on these issues recently. Good afternoon. I'm Gabriel Desjardins, and as you just heard, I'm Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom based in San Francisco. I'm responsible for our high-end mobile connectivity chips. So so far that's been primarily focused on 802.11ac and Bluetooth. We also have FM, 60 gigahertz, and TV white space in that portfolio. So just a little background about Broadcom. Broadcom is one of the largest fabulous semiconductor companies in the world. So we have 16,000 employees, primarily North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. And we have a broad portfolio of telecommunication products, including a significant presence in every sector. So we're all throughout the ecosystem, home devices, handheld devices, infrastructure. If you have any iPhone 3GS onwards or Galaxy S1 through now S5, those have one or more Broadcom chips in them. And that's the kind of market that we wanna take TV white spaces to. We estimate at this point that 99.98% of all internet traffic goes through at least one Broadcom chip. But compared to other companies who also spend very little on marketing, so despite that quantity of traffic, Broadcom's not really a household name. The focus is really on investing. So more than two thirds of the company are engineers and the Wall Street Journal, for example, has ranked our IP portfolio as one of the strongest in the industry. So I'm here in particular representing the Mobile and Wireless Group. It's also known as MWG, and that's our largest business unit. So we had about $4 billion in revenues in 2013, just to give you a sense of the kind of market opportunity we need to see in order to move on TV white spaces. So this business unit in particular is responsible for the bulk of our cellular and Wi-Fi products. And we have significant presence as a result in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. So one of the key things for us in that context is spectral efficiency and scheduling. So in particular, I think we feel the impact of limited spectrum availability. And again, both licensed and unlicensed uses are very important to us. And specifically to the MWG group, since we are developing both connectivity and cellular baseband, we have a multi-billion dollar investment in both areas, and we work on platform convergence for licensed and unlicensed uses. At this point, we can actually supply every chip in a smartphone, including cellular and Wi-Fi. So at this point, we're also operating around the world, and I think we're running into spectrum challenges in a lot of different markets. And given that foreign governments take their cues from the US, I think there's an opportunity here to be a leader in TV white space spectrum issues. Broadcom itself, I think, is a leader in the IEEE 802.11af standard development. And we see that the 600 megahertz TV band is needed for full deployment of 11af. And I think it's important that all the spectrum in this band ends up being fully utilized because we see the propagation characteristics as being useful for a number of different use cases. I think in particular, that's Wi-Fi range extensions. So we're talking like one mile Wi-Fi in addition to 2.4 and five gigahertz coverage. And we really want to have access to 11af when we're out of range of 11N or even 11B. We also see, I think, a lot of potential use cases in machine-to-machine communications, or the internet of things, more than, I think, the home internet of things than the internet of things we just heard about, and again, in farm communications. So anywhere, really where our parts can play. I think another important thing to note is that we see that licensed and unlicensed users can coexist in this band. We've driven coexistence in handsets for much, I think, more challenging coexistence situations, LTE band 40 and band seven next to Wi-Fi in the bulk of the handsets in the world that support these bands and support Wi-Fi, have a Broadcom chip in them that has managed the coexistence. So we've gone and done studies of 11af and looked at guard bands and duplex bands, and we have determined that 11af can operate in a technically reasonably sized guard band. We don't really anticipate any interference to broadcast TV, and what minimal interference there is to LTE we think we can manage by other means. So I think the unlicensed use can really come from remaining TV white spaces from channel 37, from changing the way in which wireless mic channels are allocated, and then from the guard bands and duplex gaps. So, I mean, overall, I think we wanna push for at least four channels nationwide to support 11af device development, and I think a key piece here is that if there isn't certainty around spectrum availability, it's a challenge to invest in products that'll actually use this band. At the moment, we have massive investment in 11af, but a key thing is to actually find a product that we can take to market with it. If you put 11af into a chip and you have to sell that chip to a market that's not paying for it, you'll end up losing revenues, many orders of magnitude larger than the actual investment to develop the 11af technology in the first place. So again, we're continuing to invest in it, but we really, our timeline to production is roughly two years after spectrum availability is confirmed. So overall, we really wanna encourage a balanced approach here between licensed and unlicensed, and we think that this is going to give us the greatest opportunity for efficient spectrum allocation between cellular and wifi, and that's overall what's needed to maximize broadband deployment. Thanks. Thanks, Gabe. Next we have Elizabeth Bowles, who is president and chairman of the board of Aristotle Inc, which is a wisp in which she'll explain what that is, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and also the recent, that's how I know it was with primarily, she's the recent past president of the wireless internet service providers association, WISPA. Good afternoon. Yeah, as Michael said, I'm Elizabeth Bowles, I'm president and chairman of the board of Aristotle Inc, and we're actually headquartered in Little Rock. I could wish we were in Hot Springs because it's a much nicer town in some ways, but we're actually in Little Rock, Arkansas, and what we offer in addition to fixed wireless broadband is we're also an interactive media agency, so we do website design and search engine optimization in addition to being a broadband service provider. We primarily use fixed wireless. We provide service in the city of Little Rock and to the rural areas which surround Little Rock, which if you're at all familiar with Arkansas, you only have to go about five miles outside of Little Rock and you're in rural America. In addition to being the past president of WISPA, I'm currently the legislative chair for WISPA. WISPA is the trade association that represents the fixed wireless industry. We have about 700 WISPs nationwide who are members of that organization. As we all know, lack of broadband access in rural America is very critical. I mean, the farms are all in rural America. We have so much trouble in rural America getting service to these places because of the lack of density of population because of acres and acres of land where there's nobody, because of topographical challenges in states like Arkansas where you're looking at granite or trees, which is very hard to deploy fiber solutions or make it a cost effective solution for reaching these populations. The FCC found that regardless of how many people in nationwide have access to broadband, 76% of the people who don't have access to broadband live in rural America. So this is a very real broadband gap that TV white space spectrum can help us resolve. Aristotle and other similarly situated broadband providers provide service in rural America throughout the country, predominantly rural, though as I said, some of us are in urban areas. And the vast majority of these are funded without federal universal service support. We don't take federal dollars. And many of our members are extremely proud of that fact and have said even if the dollars were able to be taken by WISPA, they wouldn't accept them. So these have been self-funded deployments predominantly to rural America. In fact, fixed wireless therefore is really the only solution that they can use because if it isn't fixed wireless, it's going to be cost prohibitive to deploy. Fixed wireless costs a fraction of what it costs to deploy wireline solutions, particularly fiber. For example, Aristotle, I only need 40 to 120 customers to justify a deployment. That's just flat, not true of fiber. The cost of deploying fixed wireless may be a tenth of the cost of fiber as it stands. And since it is, as I said, self-funded, this becomes critical. And in fact, in many cases fixed wireless isn't only the most cost-effective way to get broadband into rural America, it's the only way. Because as I said, these areas involve, if there may not be poles from which you can attach fiber, attaching fiber to poles isn't a great idea anyway, because it can snap in ice storms. So that's why the WISPs rely heavily on unlicensed and license-like spectrum to provide this. As I said, fixed wireless is as reliable as fiber. It's capable of the same speeds. It's much, much quicker to deploy. It takes, we can deploy a tower in less than a week. And it's more resilient. Fixed wireless can be put back up in a matter of hours if you have the equipment sitting on the ground. That's not true of fiber cuts. So as far as rural America is concerned, unlicensed spectrum in fixed wireless is critical to ensuring that these people get the broadband that they need in order to be able to stay part of the economic revolution in this country. In addressing the needs of wireless broadband, fixed wireless unlicensed solutions have to be part of a blended solution. You do need licensed spectrum, and we're not arguing that you don't. You have to have licensed spectrum. But you also have to have unlicensed spectrum, usable unlicensed spectrum. And the promise of TV white space as an unlicensed band is just huge. When you look at the state of Arkansas and the type of topography that I need to deploy where you've got rolling hills and trees, the propagation qualities of TV white space spectrum are huge. They make an enormous difference to my ability to reach this particular customer versus another. And my personal company, we deploy over every single available spectrum that we can get ahold of licensed and unlicensed. And we look at this spectrum as an amazing hope to reach these customers who honestly don't have another option other than us. And because the TV white space spectrum is below one gigahertz, the propagation characteristics allow us to deploy fewer towers to reach the same number of people. So even though the equipment may or may not be as cheap as other unlicensed spectrum, by deploying less of it, we can save more money. It's extremely cost effective. And it is very well suited for penetration into deeper rural areas. This promise may never be realized. And the reason I say that is if we auction every single piece of TV white space spectrum, then there will be none available for us to use for unlicensed uses. In addition, after the incentive auction, what's left over has to be usable. You need at least four six megahertz channels, preferably contiguous that can be accessed in every market in the United States. It's absolutely imperative if you're going to get any kind of reasonable speeds. And that is what rural America needs are reasonable speeds. So the repacking of the 600 megahertz band has to optimize the spectrum. We have to create at least 30 megahertz of contiguous spectrum to minimize the effect of adjacent channel protection. We have to limit the exclusive channels for wireless microphones. We have to allow the use of channel 37 where incumbents can be protected. And we need to incorporate use it or share it principles. Use it or share it. If a mobile provider purchases TV white space spectrum for the incentive auction and they deploy in a portion of it, the remainder of that spectrum geographically or channels unused should be available for use for unlicensed. So to the extent that it's possible to make specific channels available on a nationwide basis, even in urban areas where possible, the spectrum could have even greater utility. Equipment manufacturers you've heard from, they'd be able to build equipment specifically for nationwide use and that can reduce costs. And cellular congestion is a legitimate problem. It really is in Manhattan. It's not really a big problem in Malvern, Arkansas. It's not even a problem in Little Rock. And Little Rock's not an NFL city and I could wish it would be one but we will never see an NFL team in that town. But I'd love to have our own team to root for the Cowboys. But anyways, the closest NFL team. Well, I'm sorry, I'm from there. Anyway, no, the FCC needs to have a different set of rules for rural areas and urban areas. You cannot take a set of rules that are designed for high density market and apply it nationwide. It just won't work and it will not result in effective use of the band. Every American, whether you live in an urban area, a suburban area or rural area, should have the same access to broadband as somebody living in Manhattan or Dallas. And the best way to make that happen is to ensure that we have a balanced spectrum solution that protects the availability of usable unlicensed spectrum and that includes the TV white space bands. And I look forward to an exciting conversation later. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. That's a good point on the user to share it which the FCC actually has proposed for the 3.5 gigahertz band. And so hopefully they're considering it strongly for this one as well. Next we have Brett Kilbourne who is Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of the Utilities Telecom Council here in Washington, DC. Okay, thank you, Michael. Thank you to the New America Foundation for this opportunity for UTC to get its message out and also to lend our voice in support of what you're trying to accomplish in terms of access to spectrum, unlicensed spectrum in this case. A little bit about UTC for folks that aren't familiar with us. Utilities Telecom Council was formed back in 1948. Most of our members have their own private internal communication systems composed of wireless backhaul, microwave systems, but also predominantly land mobile systems. And so I'm gonna echo a lot of the same comments that Larry made in his presentation and validate some of them. So our existing communication systems are predominantly narrow band. And the issue that we come up against in this year of SMARC-RID is, how do we accommodate our increasing communication needs in terms of bandwidth when most of our wide area systems are all narrow band? So quite frankly, in the near term, unlicensed looks like it's gonna be our best solution, but in order to for unlicensed at work, as Larry said, it needs to be highly reliable and it needs to have that propagation characteristic to be able to provide wide area coverage. So we see Wi-Fi fitting in from an outdoor perspective and we like it because it provides us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we're trying to do and we'll talk about some examples of that. So one of the things we're using Wi-Fi surprisingly for is long haul backhaul. So we use some of that in the 5.8 band. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but also the biggest application for unlicensed is in the metering space. So we have millions of meters that are operating in the 902 to 928 unlicensed bands and quite frankly, in terms of a lesson learned, we've run into a problem about a year ago with a decision that came out of the FCC which authorized a high powered licensed use of the 902 to 928 band by a company called Progeny for 911 location accuracy. So all of a sudden our invested base in millions of meters is suddenly put at Jeopardy by virtue of the fact that you've got this coexisting use of the same frequency band as some of the meters that we have out there. We went to the FCC, we explained our concerns and it's not just metering, it also affects these SCADA systems that we have. Larry was talking about sort of industrial internet type of applications where you're monitoring and controlling the grid. It's a real safety issue if you're talking about interference to those systems. So despite all of that, the commission still went ahead and authorized Progeny to go out and deploy on a commercial basis. And yes, we're still concerned about that. The good news as far as that goes is that things have been going fairly slowly. We expect though that once Progeny gets fully deployed that you're likely to see a lot of interference in the 902 to 928 band. So what do the utility companies do with all those meters if that happens? They need to be able to guarantee that those meters are actually gonna deliver reliable information, because it's not just about reading the meter, it's actually being able to turn it on and off remotely and know when your power is up. So these systems need to work and they need to work reliable and in some cases they have to be able to be pinged in a 15 minute interval. So if you can't do that, then you've got big problems. So the idea of trying to use some of the incentive auction spectrum down below 600 is something that I think that would be very attractive for us because it would provide that wide area coverage that we're gonna need and it also would provide the flexibility and the wide band communications capacity that we're gonna need. So that's one case in point in terms of a lesson learned. Another one in terms of a proceeding at the FCC that Michael mentioned is the 3.5 gigahertz proceeding and commission started out in the right direction I think of this one where they were talking about creating a priority access tier for quote-unquote mission critical users which would have included utilities and we were all in support of that not only because it would provide us the kind of reliable spectrum that we need but it could have also been combined with the 3.65 band which a lot of utility companies are already using for some of their meter deployments. So there was a lot of potential in terms of that opportunity. Having said all that, we're a little concerned now that the commission seems to be backtracking and going down a path of auctions and that unlicensed seems to be sort of taking a backseat to what was originally envisioned. So while we're still seeing an opportunity there again we're challenged in terms of whether this is necessarily gonna represent the opportunity we were in first envisioning. And then the last point I wanna make in terms of it preceding the FCC of relevance here is the 5.8 gigahertz band proceeding which Michael also mentioned and which is gonna provide some additional spectrum but from our standpoint, one of the things that one of the minor points in that larger proceeding was a proposal by the commission to limit antenna gain. And so what I discovered in the context of this proceeding was that we have utility companies that have hundreds of these 5.8 gigahertz systems that they use for a point to point point to multi point type of operation for long haul communications. And this is SCADA as well as less or mission critical type of applications. But nonetheless, it's really important that again they be highly reliable and that you have a invested base in the field that you don't have to suddenly restrict your antenna gain because obviously that's gonna reduce the links in terms of the distance you can cover. So our guys were really worried about that and I guess we've got this item at the end of the month we'll find out how it actually comes out. But yeah, I mean you've got a significant invested base of mission critical communications that the 5.8 gigahertz band that once again represents something that we're concerned about in terms of potential interference. We think that that's actually gonna turn out okay. So from that standpoint we're hopeful in terms of the opportunity there going forward. So with all that being said in terms of our spectrum challenges I do wanna come circle back to the incentive auctions and basically say that yes, we would support the position that having at least four channels in these NFL cities is a good idea. I wanna make one little minor point. We do have some tele-sets sets that are quote-unquote wireless microphones but for those folks I think we can probably coordinate around them, wouldn't be a big problem. But yeah, having that additional spectrum for all the other applications that you'd usually companies use would be a good thing. And so with that I'll go ahead and make way for the next speaker. Thank you. Thanks, Brett. Our last speaker is Robert Nichols who is the founder and CEO of a startup company, the Declaration Networks Group. He also, as I mentioned earlier, co-founded the AIR.U project to use white space for connectivity in rural colleges and rural college communities. Thank you, Michael. Good afternoon. Michael mentioned on the CEO of Declaration Networks startup alternative access company deploying private and commercial networks specifically leveraging white spaces technologies. And our early activity is focused around the AIR.U program that Michael mentioned. As many of you are probably aware there's about 90 million Americans out there that lack broadband today. And the AIR.U program is focused on the higher ed communities in those rural areas as a way to establish an anchor institution to bring in a broadband upgrade for not only the institution itself but the surrounding community. This was an effort that was born out of some conversations with Blair Levin at the GigU who collected the 37 or so research universities across the country to try and bring Gigabit connection into their communities. And when I approached him and Michael approached him with white spaces as a potential add-on to that message, he said, jeez, I think that's a separate initiative all together. I'm constantly being hit by rural areas that want to join the GigU but we can't bring a gig to everybody because as Elizabeth points out, Fiber just doesn't have a business case in many of the areas across the country. And where a Gigabit may be great, there's folks that want 10, 20, 30, 100 megabits and in certain areas, certainly wireless can solve that particular solution. So about a year and a half ago, we started up the AIR.U initiative. There's based on three kind of goals at that point. Establish an aggregation of demand for these services so that folks like Broadcom and other equipment manufacturers can see a market for white spaces services. Two, to exercise the ecosystem. As you all may be very aware, there's a centralized database function. There's new equipment that needs to be deployed. There's frequencies that need to be opened up and we needed to exercise that ecosystem. And then more importantly than those two is what are the business models associated with this new spectrum? And those were three of the foundational elements of the AIR.U program. And this past summer, we were able to deploy our first network at West Virginia University. It is a Gig.U member. It's an AIR.U member. It's part of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is a territory which is one of the AIR.U sponsors. And we deployed there. The initial application is a public Wi-Fi application on their public rapid transit system. And we've progressed onto additional applications. We're supporting a remote site about a mile and a half off a campus that had a DSL connection that now enjoys a nine and a half megabit connection thanks to white spaces. And we are expanding into the municipality, supporting applications like the utility applications that was talked about here earlier, public safety applications, public transit applications, as well as just commercial residential, commercial business applications. So the application for white spaces is varied. We have fixed applications. We have portable applications that we're looking to support. And an interesting development in this activity is the identification of how to expand rapidly out across the state. In West Virginia University, we're tapped into a middle mile network. It's called WVNet. It connects all the public institutions across the state. It connects the K through 12 institutions as well. So they represent a good partner for a white space network to get access to high bandwidth internet and rapidly deploy out into the areas that don't have broadband today. This past week, I sat down with the state CIO of the West Virginia Board of Education to talk about how we could leverage white spaces to deliver services to the K through 12 students that he has purview over that go home at the end of the day, can access the internet, can't do the things that other kids can do to accomplish their homework and the research to continue their education. So they're quite interested in white spaces as a delivery mechanism to solve other issues there. Of course, West Virginia is not our only focus. We have active conversations now going in a dozen states. And the FCC just over the past month has conducted kind of an outreach of source for expressions of interest for communities who wanna get upgrades, declaration networks and ARU participated in about a half a dozen of those expressions of interest. And they varied from just an individual community to coordinating with colleges and coordinating with middle mile networks. One specific application that I wanna talk to this audience about is the Iowa ICN network. It's again another middle mile network in Iowa that connects public institutions, nonprofit healthcare institutions. And unlike West Virginia, they have not yet connected up all the K through 12 schools. They have not connected up all their administrative buildings. And they've identified 400 locations that they'd like to put a managed white space network solution in place to provide an upgrade to those facilities. So we see a very varied array of applications that white spaces can support. Some are as simple as a public utility narrow band application. And some are very important broadband applications delivering residential and commercial broadband to areas that are underserved. Some of the threats associated with us moving forward more aggressively certainly are these auctions and potentially losing some of the white space in the areas that we're serving. So I support all the comments that preceded me in terms of preserving white spaces not only in the rural areas but to open some up in the urban areas so that broad common other manufacturers can certainly see the market potential to upgrading their product development plans to move these services into the marketplace. From my perspective, white spaces creates a tremendous amount of opportunity not only for me personally but it creates an opportunity for the United States to close the broadband gap to those 90 million Americans out there today that don't have access to the internet and can't enjoy the same things that we enjoy here in the urban areas when we have access to broadband. With that said, I think I'll turn it over to Michael for questions. Thanks Bob. Yeah, Bob's been a great proselytizer for how you leverage these technologies to help these communities because it is a process but then as folks get it, we've been working with historically black colleges in South Carolina thanks to Commissioner Clyburn for example and they're very interested in deploying down there and there's just a lot of places that could really use it as if nothing else is a gap filler because of the penetration and the distance you get. So I'm gonna open it up in a few minutes for all your questions although I wanna stimulate a little discussion among the panel ask a couple things that maybe bring it out or clarify better. So one thing we heard about I think it's come up is that we really need to have some sufficient amount, some minimally sufficient amount of unlicensed access in this what is today to TV band for on the order of say 24 megahertz, say four today to six megahertz channel so four six megahertz channels and I'm just wondering a little more specifically when you think about whether you're thinking about the 802.11 AF standard that Gabe talked about which is going to be for your mobile devices, personal portable, mostly at the lower power on the band or even talking about fixed wireless such as Wisps are doing or what Bob's doing trying to communicate, trying to provide like on West Virginia's campus and I'll give you this example is even though we lit up, they have a tram system all around campus that carries 15,000 students and faculty a day it's a wonderful thing. The campus is really way spread out lots of hills and trees and so from the roof of the engineering building you light up the station platforms now they're going to put it on the cars but the way it works now is the students they're all using smartphones, tablets, laptops they can't talk directly to a TV white space access point, a base station that's on the roof of the engineering building because it's talking white space and they're talking 2.4 or five gigahertz they're talking today's wifi chip and so that's why I think Broadcom for example wants to the 802.11 AF standard would integrate this new flavor of wifi in with the others so you can get it all and you could broadcast that connectivity over an area and go directly to the mobile device that's just one example but my question is what would kind of be the impact if the commission comes back and says well you know hey you guys are still going to have a lot of white space in maybe in Arkansas outside of Little Rock but sorry I mean there's none in New York City, Los Angeles or San Francisco, Bay Area in other words if we have a more just a regional or fragmented market for and licensed in this band which would be something very different and obviously what's fueled wifi at 2.4 so and I think there might even be some interaction between the handhelds and even the you know the fixed wireless so I know if a few of you want to address that from your perspective. In the markets that we serve industrial telemetry and agriculture a fragmented availability of spectrum would be the death knell for our participation in that market. You take a company we've been working with John Deere for three years John Deere ships 10,000 tractors a year around the world they're not just asking us will it work in Arkansas they're asking us will it work in Brazil will it work in Ukraine will it work in all the large agricultural areas of the world and so we're not only concerned about availability of spectrum in the US but around the whole world. Unfortunately they can't even assume that it will be available in the US much less in Brazil at this point and so that uncertainty is killing the progress of that whole marketplace. People like electrical utilities will not invest in a technology that they can't use throughout their entire market space. So it doesn't do them a lot of good to work in Mayberry if it doesn't work in Raleigh, right? So they've got to have that spectrum of availability uniformly throughout their entire service region or they're not going to be interested. Yeah and I imagine there's probably some waste water waste water facilities and smart and smart meters and things even in big metro areas, right? Gabe? Yeah I mean well ironically I'm walking distance to a farm from where our Broadcom office is in Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale used to be entirely fruit farms and they've gradually been disappearing but they're still there. So I think even the tractor market in Sunnyvale is of consequence. But for us I mean we are definitely most of our sales are in urban areas, most of our use is in urban areas and I think we'd like to see availability in every area in the country. And so maybe right now you could say, hey, Los Angeles, New York, there's no open spectrum for TV white space given current channel allocations but going forward if the FCC doesn't guarantee usable channels we'll start seeing more and more markets disappear. And I think that we need to guarantee that every single market is accessible for TV white space otherwise there are going to be questions about from our end about investment into 11 AF. Anyone else? Well from my perspective since I do have a rural focus I think there's quite a bit of spectrum available but as these guys are pointing out there's a ripple effect, right? If there is not an urban footprint for this spectrum folks like Broadcom won't enter the market. We won't enjoy the economies of scale. I won't be able to aggressively deploy in the rural areas because the economies of scale aren't there for the equipment and the ecosystem and everything else. So I think it has a ripple effect if it's not available in a uniform way not only in the U.S. but around the world, absolutely. Yeah, I mean even to something as, I don't know if it's certainly a trivial but it may be obviously like even of having a dongle like some couple of the colleges talked about she wouldn't be great if we could give freshmen even if this wasn't quite in the chips that are in the iPhone yet for example that at least if we had a dongle that we could give everybody so that they could communicate directly to the white space transmitter rather than relying on being within a hotspot that's created from a white space transmitter. So I guess another thing I'd like to ask about is on machine to machine because that does seem also to be, whereas when we talk about earlier somebody was saying this and I'm sorry for all the alphabet soup but another standard the 802.11ac right which is what they'll use at five. It's an expansion of wifi into five gigahertz band but there because there's so much unlicensed spectrum potentially that's what the FCC has proposed you can have big wide channels although bad propagation right so it's short distance it's mostly gonna be you know for the most part I don't see a line of sight but in the TV white space you'll have less capacity right so narrower channels but the great propagation so a lot of talk about the potential for machine to machine and that's sort of an easy thing to say like oh yeah like but what is I mean what would be a few examples that people could wrap their heads around in terms of Gabe I think you mentioned like the wireless home short example I mean what are things that maybe can benefit the types of applications that could benefit from the added range or penetration you get. Sure I'll take that I mean we already have products in this space they're primarily 2.4 gig products and so you know at this point we have products that are going into all kinds of connected home devices refrigerators washing machines fridges thermostats things like that and so there's a potential again for those devices to communicate with one another across sort of you know potentially wider ranges than what we can do with 2.4 gig right now and again those are devices with very low data requirements and so this you know again seems like you know we picked 2.4 gig because that's the lowest band we had to operate in and we would happily move down to an even lower band to enable more of those devices. Okay and I guess one last thing for me I'll throw out there because I'm not sure this was very clear to people but you know when Congress debated and then passed the legislation in 2012 that authorized the incentive auctions one of the huge debates we had and some of you may remember this was well it was unlicensed actually in fact when it started off there was even some staff on the house side saying well let's auction you know the TV white space let's auction the unlicensed and although they moved away from that in the end there was a kind of a compromise that was struck and it was the and basically it said that the auction money couldn't you know on one hand it couldn't really be spent on paying off broadcasters specifically to free up on license spectrum and that's not even necessary because in fact you know most of the TV band today is white space in other words you know there's only an average of about eight full power channels per market out of 48 but the thing that it did say though for unlicensed the main thing was that the guard bands that would be needed for the new licensed services in other words for LTE industry wanted paired channels right so you'd have in the 600 megahertz band presumably something like 25 by 25 or 30 by 30 uplink and downlink and when you do it that way which is the American way really of doing cellular you have a duplex gap in other words these channels uplink and downlink can't be right next to each other so there's a duplex gap and then it would need also to be at least one guard band at the bottom end to separate LTE from the remaining broadcasters and possibly from radio astronomy and medical telemetry which is on channel 37 so these two potentially big guard bands Congress said that the FCC could designate them explicitly said it could decide to designate them for unlicensed as long as the width was technically reasonable and we started off talking about duplex gap for example on the order of 18 megahertz or more and now they're talking about band plans that might shrink that considerably so I guess one of the questions is it might be initially forgave since his company's filed a lot of research on this recently is what is the sort of the can we still get a six megahertz unlicensed channel in the duplex gap and in the lower guard band and what would that take like what's sort of the minimum necessary and would you consider it to be reasonable to do it that way? Yeah I mean I think it's still technically feasible I mean if you look at I mentioned before our activities with Wi-Fi and band 40 we came up with solutions for zero guard band between those so you know channels you know Wi-Fi channel operating exactly adjacent to an LTE channel in this case I think we really need a gap you know in the on the order of 10 to 12 megahertz in order to be operational but we don't see any you know anything that would render it technically unfeasible at that bandwidth But the goal should not be to end up with only a single usable channel you've got to have multiple channels I mean you can use 2.4 gig as an example where there's effectively only three channels in the two four gigs space on the floor of my office building and floor there's probably 11 Wi-Fi access points that I can see from my office all trying to get to three channels a solution that leaves you with only a single six megahertz channel or even two you might as well not have any channels Yeah, no that's right and in fact the channel, the unlicensed channel you could fit into the duplex gap a second one you could put into the lower guard band those are pieces of a larger puzzle that also need to include sharing which at least one of you mentioned sharing channel 37 which is just used sparsely today subject to protecting radio astronomy and medical telemetry sharing any remaining microphone channels because they can reserve in the TV bands database and then obviously you know outside of the very biggest cities there should be still white space if the commission repacks with a purpose I guess I like to say repacks the purpose of optimizing unlicensed so I think let's open it up and tell us who you are and any questions or comments I know a couple of you out there like I make call on Joel at some point cause he's out there actually doing some of this in the field, yeah Linda yeah and here's a microphone I'm Linda Moore I work for Congressional Research Service all of my opinions are my own they often get me in trouble very quickly this is a question it's a very serious question I've been working on a report for Congress that basically poses this question why do we need LTE why can't we just get rid of LTE and move on to more internet protocol oriented networks because LTE is holding us back it's a cellular network and we've got particularly the Europeans that see working on LTE standards from machine to machine LTE standards for automated vehicles LTE standards for robots these are not necessarily the best standards you want just a little bit of spectrum from 600 megahertz you really should have it all and you should start thinking about policies that push you beyond just asking for that little bit and a little bit of trivial things that you're not trivial the things you're doing now are very valuable but there are thousands of more valuable uses out there so why can't we get rid of LTE that's my question okay I see I understand all right that's that's definitely a provocative question I mean who it's probably above my pay grade but any of you have an opinion on that or you know we're related to that well I mean from our business perspective you know we have you know we have billions of dollars in revenue in LTE and billions of dollars of revenue in Wi-Fi so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna cut transition transition well no I mean I think that you know ultimately we need a wider area network then we're gonna get with with Wi-Fi right so we need something that gives us you know the seven to 10 kilometer cell range and and potentially slightly lower data rates than what we would get from Wi-Fi so I don't I don't see any reason that we would shift our development to shorter range Wi-Fi systems to me the question is not getting rid of LTE the question is can you create a regulatory environment that will encourage innovation in a lot of other technologies in addition to LTE right but LTE is LTE is an obstacle at the moment because policy-wise everybody is thinking LTE, cellular network, investment in big towers you know an economic growth model is basically comes from that entire evolution of the cellular network we need a different economic growth model a different policy model that evolves from basically unlicensed technologies although they don't always have to be unlicensed I would put it a slightly different way in that the reason we have TV white space today is because we over-allocated spectrum to TV right after World War II and we lived with it that way for decades and finally had the technology to overcome that misappropriation of spectrum given the current trends for auctions and allocation for only cellular use I could envision 30 years from now the creation of cellular white space because there's so much spectrum allocated for cellular use that is going unused nationwide just as TV is today. Linda you may be too much ahead of your time although I think what you're asking so a private get asked a lot more seriously is if it's true for example the European Commission had a recent report in August quite good report where they're projecting in Europe Wi-Fi offload levels exceeding 80% within a few years for say by 2018 and so if you get where mobile device traffic where something like 80% of it or more is not even going over carrier networks you may get a lot more serious consideration of dynamic spectrum alternatives particularly as they mature and once you've done that and once increasingly the wireless and wireline networks blur Peter? Thank you Michael for actually organizing this I really appreciate it I'm Peter Flynn from Texas Instruments business manager there member of the White Space Alliance which is an industry consortium very much promoting the same thing and dynamic spectrum alliance and I contributed quite a bit to the DSA paper you handed out today, thank you very much and on this point I think Gabriel and I are very much on the same point even though usually we're competitors but in this case we both contribute devices to across cellular and Wi-Fi and backhaul infrastructure devices I think there's room for all of it and there's good technical reasons for all of it if you really want to get into it but I think the broader question that I have is trying to understand as I go through the papers that have been presented to the FCC and Michael's very excellent paper you've handed out here the economic evidence for unlicensed use is overwhelming I don't think there's any debate about that even from industry leaders as Cisco and Google and Microsoft and the gentlemen all up here and yet there persists to be a preference of cellular auction strategy as an economic model moving forward and rather than demonize a cellular industry which have their own motivations in mind or the FCC or Congress I would like to know your feedback about where exactly do you see the emphasis on cellular in these auctions predominant over unlicensed use even though the economic evidence really tends in just the opposite direction where exactly is the pressure coming from to have auctions is it Congress, is it the FCC and where exactly does this organization need to assert the proper influences to change that emphasis or economic benefit does anyone want to take a stab I mean it's all just a guess anyway but no, I think well personally I think that Congress has a lot to do with this because I think that the economic benefit of unlicensed spectrum is sort of secondhand in the sense that you're talking about economic growth or the creation of companies and the development of an ecosystem as you put it you're not looking at actual real dollars coming into the US Treasury and when you can say okay if I auction the spectrum I'm going to get 16 billion dollars I'm going to get 150 billion dollars I'm going to get two dollars that's a number that you can stick a pen in and the unlicensed spectrum numbers they're amalgamated from so many different places that I think that it's a little bit harder for people to get their mind around I do think the cellular lobby is huge my personal industry perspective is I could care less about the cellular LTE standard they're in my way all the time preventing the fixed wireless industry from getting spectrum that I would like to have but I don't know that there's not a place for that going forward I think there is a place for those LTE cellular networks but the need that's driving all of this in my opinion are certain large cellular networks in certain large metropolitan areas that actually do have a real need even with the cellular offload and I do think that need is real I think it's legitimate but it's not nationwide and unfortunately it seems to be driving the boat because those are the population centers too you know that's where you have 12 million voters and so I think it all sort of ties in together to create this push for injections into the federal treasury at the expense of the unlicensed economy I think you also had just on the politics of these incentive auctions and from my point of view an unfortunate convergence between the parties in the sense that when it was bipartisan it certainly wasn't and unlicensed was certainly a big fight where it never had been before in fact the existence I should note that the existence of TV white space owes itself a lot to Republican senators like Ted Stevens and John Sununu in fact Commissioner Michael Riley wrote the bill that forced Kevin Martin to take TV white space off the shelf and get it done for John Sununu when he worked for him but in this last go round you had Republicans in the house who saw it as a fiscal issue they wanted to raise money in general and unfortunately some Democrats I think who wanted to fund a public safety network first net first net and so there's been this revenue imperative which even runs right in it even flies in the face of the Communications Act itself which forbids the commission explicitly for making a public interest finding based on anticipated revenue because that's Mr. Markey says all the time Senator Markey that explicitly was they wanted to avoid situations like this when they wrote the act and they put that provision in 309J so we hope that now that it appears as if the H block there's two auctions before these incentive auctions the H block and the AWS three auctions and that money will also go to first net and so there's a lot of optimism that first net will get taken care of in these auctions ahead of the TV incentive auctions the problem though is those auctions aren't occurring ahead of the rule writing for the incentive auctions and so we're still under pressure to possibly have bad rules because of the money Joel you wanna Hi I'm Joe Plotkin with ASA Networks we're a startup WISP running TV white space trial up in upstate New York a little talent called Gallatin and it works and we're delivering a broadband to a bunch of people that don't have any other options my question is sort of a long line this gentleman from Texas Instruments but with a little twist is there are so many there seems so many legacy the wireless microphone manufacturers for one who have blocked off so much of the spectrum how can we mobilize the entrepreneurs in the tech communities around this country in New York and San Francisco in the Bay Area to really wake up and see that this is really a threat to the innovation platform and openness more generally in the same way that the net neutrality fight and all those things sort of constrain innovation if they're stuck in cellular world there are companies of course who play specifically only in on license like Ubiquity and I think if you had a certainty of regulation and they knew that they could count on it you would see companies like Cambium Ubiquity entering the market whereas right now there's so much uncertainty in TV white space they don't feel that they can enter and have a market but once the market's established I think you will see those entrance and I'll let these guys address how you balance that off of the amount of money that's made off of LTE but there are companies that specifically focus in on licensed one thing is that people working in the internet are playing kind of hardware hacking yeah I mean I think again it's a it's a certainty question I mean as soon as as soon as there is certainty I mean I already there's already a team inside Broadcom has developed an 11 AF radio and that was slated to go into into products you know in every successive year and it keeps dropping off the list because it's not clear you know what what bands we're gonna have to support and so once there's clarity there that just drops into a radio and it starts getting sampled and it's in the market it's in production and that's you know that's that's the path so that that is really the the primary thing that we're looking at and as long as there is regulatory uncertainty somebody who is a decision maker is going to not be willing to fund an 11 AF project or it'll get cut off it'll always be the lowest priority and when somebody says hey that chip's too big and you say well we'll take out 11 AF and that's that's what just keeps happening I think we have time for one last one yeah right back there Nick Miller I'm with the law firm at down best best and career I do a lot of work for local governments in this space one of the things I think the panel has hinted at but no one has said explicitly but I'd like your comments on it a lot of the problems with white space politically is a scarcity versus the scarcity versus openness debate it seems to me there's a lot of incumbents in this space who not white spaces but in in the wireless space who benefit greatly from extremely limited spectrum and controlling that spectrum going to the LTE issue that if you can use technology to limit who can have access to the spectrum you do have and then you can limit the spectrum then you can price the spectrum with pretty significant monopoly pricing practices and if you can slow down the regulatory process that is trying to open up alternatives for innovators then they get discouraged because they can't see an investment opportunity or an investment window and I'd like the panel just comment on that thought that the underlying politics really are about allowing competition to flourish versus sustaining the established providers. There has always been a paradox not just in this industry but in broadcast TV FM radio you can go on and on where there has always appeared to be a scarcity of spectrum but the reality is is there's an abundance and I think there's plenty of blame to go around for that situation. Some of it can be late at the feet of Congress some of it can be late at the feet of the FCC some of it can be late at the feet of the people who own those resources and as you say want to limit access to them. I think the single biggest message that I would like to see taken away from this is that our country has a whole benefits when we allow more people to participate in any economy including this wireless economy and the single biggest thing that prevents people from truly engaging into a new market in white space is all the uncertainty and lack of clarity in the regulatory domain with respect to white space. Any other comment on that or? I'll just add to that I think that another good message point to come out of this event is that it's not just about sheer numbers you know there's an economic benefit that isn't directly tied to spectrum auctions so whereas politicians can easily latch on to that I think it's important for them to realize that there are economic benefits far beyond just spectrum auctions that go a lot with the unlicensed. And I think that and I can't speak directly to this but I think that there's a sense that in some cases auctioning spectrum for a single user is a more efficient way to utilize spectrum and I think that that's actually not accurate and I think history has shown that you will have people who view it as a rational economic decision to spend a lot of money on spectrum so that they can prevent somebody else from using it. I mean if I have to spend $20 to rent the store next door to me to prevent my competitor moving in if my competitor moves in I lose $50 that's a rational decision and there's a lot of spectrum warehousing that happens and that to your point which is bad national policy it's not good for anybody not even the people warehousing the spectrum and it stifles innovation. And I think that's where that those comments earlier about a user to share policy would go a long way toward really disrupting any of that sort of foreclosure or waste of fellow public resources. And if I can add to that it also would prevent that gamesmanship because if they knew that to buy the spectrum they would have to totally utilize the spectrum or share the spectrum it would disincentivize a desire to purchase simply to sit on it. It would actually force them to maximize the spectrum that they have or somebody else would get to use it and I think that it disincentivize what is now actually a very good economic incentive for warehousing spectrum. Any final thoughts or else we can close it out I think. All right well thank you all thanks to our speakers first of all and some of them traveled a long way and thanks for you all for coming out this first day back from our latest snowstorm. Thank you.