For Smartphone Users, Spectrum Is Speed

[Commentary] Why is the federal government against faster smartphone Internet access? Your smartphone surfing is only as fast as the spectrum (wireless frequencies) available for it to use. In just eight years, a remarkable three quarters of Americans have become smart-phone users. More wireless users are using more apps and video streaming, more often, which means that US wireless data traffic will increase six-fold over the next five years, per CTIA estimates. However, this exploding speedy smartphone demand is not being met with any government urgency to make more spectrum supply available to the marketplace for consumers. That’s because the controller of roughly two-thirds of the nation’s spectrum resource -- the US government -- already allocated most all of the nation’s spectrum to federal bureaucracies for 20th century bureaucratic priorities prior to the advent of the mobile broadband revolution. It is also because of an Obama Administration decision to no longer make available under-utilized government spectrum for commercial auction. As CTIA, the wireless association explains: “the traditional licensed spectrum pipeline is empty” and the US has “no plan beyond 2020 to accommodate mobile growth.”

The only spectrum coming into the marketplace in the next five years is not from the federal government’s spectrum hoard. TV broadcast spectrum is being repurposed for commercial wireless broadband use in the FCC’s planned 2016 Incentive Auction. In sum, think of the federal government’s no-more-commercial-spectrum-for-consumers policy as the little spinning wheel on a smartphone as one waits longer for apps or websites to load, because spectrum is speed. No more spectrum supply and exploding demand will slow smartphone Internet access to the speed of government.

[Scott Cleland is President of Precursor LLC, a research consultancy for Fortune 500 companies]