Thank you, Chairman Walden, Ranking Member Eshoo and members of the Committee, for this opportunity to testify today on the critical issue of how best to reallocate the nation’s public spectrum resource to promote mobile broadband, while promoting public safety communication and preserving the public benefits of over-the-air broadcasting.
My name is Michael Calabrese, Director of the Wireless Future Project at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. New America is a nonpartisan public policy institute based here in Washington, DC. On issues concerning spectrum and wireless broadband policy, New America is part of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition (PISC), which represents national consumer and advocacy groups including Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, Public Knowledge and other nonprofits. New America is also a member of the broader Wireless Innovation Alliance (WIA), which includes most of PISC as well as high-tech companies both large (e.g., Dell, Microsoft, Google) and small (e.g., Shared Spectrum, Adaptrum).
My testimony will focus on the importance of designing TV band incentive auctions in a way that preserves the current access to unlicensed spectrum (the co-called “TV White Spaces”) in every local market and nationwide for “Super WiFi” and other new technologies and services. At the end I also comment on the Spectrum Relocation Improvement Act of 2009, H.S. 3019. I will make the following main points:
- The voluntary incentive auctions described in the Discussion Draft appear to strike a reasonable balance with respect to reallocating and repacking broadcast station licensees in order to reassign a portion of the band to meet the surging demand for wireless broadband services.
- While local broadcasting should be protected, it is likewise essential that any incentive auction authority also give the FCC the ability and obligation to preserve substantial access to unlicensed spectrum in every local TV market.
- We have serious concerns with the Draft’s provision (Section 104) requiring that the “Allocation of Spectrum for Unlicensed Use” must be done only subject to competitive bidding through a system where the highest bidders – rather than the expert agency – determine whether the service rules for a particular band in a particular area will be exclusively licensed or unlicensed.
- This provision, requiring auctions for unlicensed spectrum, is unstudied, untested, unworkable, and virtually certain to ensure that no new unlicensed spectrum is actually allocated.
- It will effectively preclude the FCC from repacking the TV band in a manner that maintains access in every market to the unlicensed TV White Space channels, the “Super Wi-Fi” service that industry is in the process of deploying after unanimous approval by both a Republican-led and a Democrat-led FCC.
- The FCC economists who hypothesized the Draft’s proposed auction mechanism for unlicensed spectrum also made it clear why problems with “free riders,” bid aggregation, collusion and the need for spectrum caps and other eligibility limitations likely make this idea unworkable in the real world.
- Putting service rules up for auction creates tremendous uncertainty about how much of a band will end up licensed or unlicensed, undermining the revenueraising potential of the auctions to a degree that will undoubtedly lower the score that CBO can put on what would be an unpredictably contingent auction.
- Unlicensed technologies, pioneered in America, are increasingly so complementary and critical to the mobile broadband ecosystem that Congress can best optimize TV band spectrum for broadband deployment, job creation and economic growth by ensuring continued unlicensed access to substantial amounts of TV White Space spectrum in every local market and nationwide.
Concerning H.R. 3019, many Federal bands are particularly well-suited for increased sharing with the private sector, but this will require not just streamlining the CSEA’s Spectrum Relocation Fund process but also broadening eligibility so that agencies have the resources to upgrade systems to share capacity on a far greater number of bands.
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