July 2011

The House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, chaired by Rep Greg Walden (R-OR), held the fourth hearing in a series discussing the role of spectrum policy in promoting wireless broadband, bringing interoperable broadband communications to public safety, creating jobs, and reducing the deficit.

Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information in the Department of Commerce and Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, shed light on how to improve federal government use of spectrum and reallocate resources to meet growing consumer demand for wireless broadband services. “The Ten-Year Plan and Timetable, developed with input from other federal agencies and the Federal Communications Commission, identifies over 2,200 MHz of spectrum for evaluation, establishes a process for evaluating these candidate bands, and lays out the steps necessary to potentially make the selected spectrum available for wireless broadband services,” Strickling testified. “In addition to identifying additional spectrum for repurposing for wireless broadband use, NTIA is intently focused on ensuring, to the greatest extent possible, that federal agencies use and share spectrum efficiently and effectively, while protecting critical Federal government operations.”

Strickling also relayed the administration’s support for “Congress to adopt proposals to improve the process for reassigning spectrum encumbered by federal users to private use, grant authority for the FCC to hold incentive auctions, create governance structures and channel auction proceeds to manage the deployment and operation of a nationwide interoperable public safety broadband network, and spur innovation in wireless services by both providing for unlicensed access to wireless spectrum and funding critical research and development.”

Mobile phones have helped close the gap between people, connecting friends, family and co-workers across wide distances. But the lines of communication don't follow traditional state and city boundaries and instead reflect different social influences and relationships that are sometimes harder to understand.

But a new data and visualization project called the Connected States of America helps bring some focus into the way mobile phones facilitate communications and shows how conversations and text-messages bind areas and regions together, even ones that are far apart. Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research today have showed off their work, which takes anonymous aggregated AT&T mobile phone data and creates interactive maps illustrating where calls and text messages are placed and where they connect to. The maps show what areas are likely to be in communication with each other and how some places, sometimes in the same state, remain separated. Metropolitan regions, even ones that spill over state lines, understandably facilitate a lot of communications among people in one area. But there is a lot of back and forth that emerges between states too. For instance, Alabama and Louisiana are sister states because of the cellular traffic between the two, while parts of Tennessee, like Chattanooga break away from the rest of Tennessee and join other neighboring states.

[Commentary] Lightsquared does, in fact, cause interference with GPS, even though it is operating under rules the Federal Communications Commission approved in 2003. This brings us to the question of who bears the cost of trying to make Lightsquared, or any new system, work. Which brings us to the expansion of the Lightsquared fight into the Satellite band generally, and the curious partnership between CTIA and the GPS Council.

Both filed petitions asking the FCC to reconsider this order moving toward greater flexibility for satellite providers trying to offer “ancillary terrestrial component” (ATC) based services. Both object to a single, specific paragraph in the order in which the FCC (addressing the Lightsquared fight, which the GPS Council had raised in comments) stated that even existing incumbents have some responsibility to enable new services by making some adjustments to work more efficiently. Needless to say, organizations that represent incumbents, like CTIA and the GPS Council, do not like this one bit. From their perspective, once you get a license, you should never, ever, have to change what you are doing to accommodate someone else — even if that is the right answer from a spectrum efficiency/public policy standpoint. (We will pause a moment to appreciate the irony of CTIA arguing that incumbents must be protected under all circumstances no matter how old and useless their technology while simultaneously pushing to eliminate broadcasting and take their spectrum on the grounds that broadcast television is old and useless.)