Clyburn Touts FCC Progress Following National Broadband Plan
The FCC has made “great progress” in broadband availability since the release of the National Broadband Plan, said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. By 2015, the goal was to bring 300 MHz of spectrum to the market, she said during a Silicon Flatirons event Friday evening. “We’re well on that goal.”
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Clyburn pointed to the spectrum auctions and allocation for mobile satellite services spectrum as examples of FCC progress. They were barriers prohibiting small providers from bridging the communications gap in rural, hard-to-serve areas, she said. By year's end, there will be more cellphones than people worldwide, she said. When 40 percent of the population relies only on mobile capability, the discussion on having an open Internet changes a bit, she said. More discussion is needed around reasonable network management, she said, referring to the FCC net neutrality proceeding.
The commission’s role in healthcare initiatives is changing due to mobile capability, said Clyburn. The FCC had a traditional role in terms or rural healthcare initiatives, but “we see how things are migrating, and how people are consuming on the mobile side,” she said. “If we increase partnerships and educate persons in the digital literacy framework, we know we can tackle some serious divides.” Technology can be the “conduit” to handle challenges faced by some communities, she said.
Some technology experts compared the formal FCC adjudication and enforcement process to solve spectrum management issues to a more informal process where disputing parties solve the problem through negotiation. It’s important to ensure that if the industry moves to a more “legalistic” process that “we don’t lose in that process the stuff that works well informally,” said Dale Hatfield, spectrum initiative director at Silicon Flatirons. It’s key to make the property rights firm and clear enough so there will be market and informal ways to work out problems, said Raymond Gifford, a Wilkinson Barker attorney. The property right has to be “adequately defined and known” for the adjudication to be clear, he said.
Interference has rendered the 900 MHz band “unusable,” said Matt Larsen, Vistabeam CEO. A lot of urban areas are seeing cable-mount hot spots being deployed and the noise floor has increased to “unreal levels,” he said. Utility companies have started using the 900 MHz band to read meters and precision farmers also are using it, which contributes to jamming, he said.