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NTIA's Davidson Defends Administration Progress on BEAD and Spectrum Strategy

NTIA remains “on track” to deliver on initial commitments under the national spectrum strategy that the Biden administration released in November (see 2311130048), NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson said at the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas. Davidson also defended the administration’s progress under the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program, a recurring target of Republican criticism (see 2409270032).

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Davidson returned fire in a late Tuesday keynote, noting continuing problems with the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program, launched under former President Donald Trump. CTIA and GSMA jointly sponsor the conference.

In 2020, the FCC “rushed to begin the RDOF auction during the election season,” Davidson said. “Leadership chose to move forward without accurate maps to guide the funding.” The result is that $3 billion in funding was never awarded and “defaults continue to mount, affecting 1.7 million locations and counting,” he said: Millions of families believed “the promise that faster internet was finally coming, only to be disappointed.”

BEAD instead gives states “the financial resources and the time they need to make sure they finish the job and connect every home and small business,” Davidson said. “We've met or exceeded all the statutory deadlines to keep this program on schedule, and anyone who tells you otherwise … they're just not telling you the truth.”

Davidson said some of the bands the administration is looking at under the national spectrum strategy are those “that for years no one wanted to touch.”

“If there were a mythical band of desirable and unused spectrum ready to repurpose, I'll tell you, we would have done it by now,” Davidson said. Some of the bands studied were considered “too hard to make viable for sharing or for repurposing,” he said: “I'm pleased to say the U.S. has a strategy that takes on those hard problems.”

The 37 GHz study “is a huge amount of work for the people who are doing it,” but it should be ready by year's end, Davidson said. Federal agencies are working, “I'd say furiously,” to complete the lower 3 and 7/8 GHz studies. “We're already looking at models and testing scenarios.” Agencies are “doing the hard work to build out their technical plans and line up funding for studies.” The work isn’t “necessarily visible to the public, but it's no less intense.”

DOD is also working on dynamic spectrum sharing studies, Davidson said. NTIA held an initial stakeholder meeting on the federal bands in August and plans a second meeting Oct. 28.

“If we believe in evidence-based processes, if we believe that that is the right way to go, this strategy, this is what it looks like,” Davidson said: “This is the hard work that we need to do to ensure that American industry and the American people have the spectrum they need to continue to be world leaders in wireless technology.”

Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr defended RDOF and slammed the BEAD program.

“Zero homes and businesses … have been connected” by the Biden administration under BEAD, Carr said: “That's not an enviable situation to be in. I get it.” Currently, thousands of homes and businesses have been “brought across the digital divide because of the FCC's hard work on the RDOF auction and the carrier’s work to build out.”

Under Trump, and former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, “We went about doing the hard work of reforming permitting and infrastructure laws, and that helped to result in massive, unprecedented new builds,” Carr said. Today, as when the last administration took office in 2016, “the spectrum cupboard was empty.”

Carr also criticized the Biden administration for not making spectrum available for 5G. “We have to get back to freeing up spectrum,” he said: “Right now we're spending or supposed to be spending billions and billions of dollars for new infrastructure build, but we're not streamlining permitting along the way. … That's like stepping on the gas and the brakes at the same time.”

Notebook

“At Verizon, we believe AI is a powerful tool that should complement, not replace, humans,” said Shankar Arumugavelu, president of Verizon Global Services. Humans should work with AI so that work processes can be reimagined, he said. Verizon has used AI for more than a decade to “create a competitive advantage,” and “to plan, build and run our network, deliver differentiated customer and employee experiences, optimize internal processes” and “drive operational efficiencies.” Verizon is creating offerings that use AI and generate revenue streams, he noted. It sees generative AI as a tool for making employees more productive and enabling “intuitive, natural language interfaces in our digital tools for customers and employees.” To realize the value of AI, it’s not enough to “deploy the technology,” he said: “Creating value with AI requires redesigning processes. … We’re applying AI across workflows end to end.” Verizon has a base of 130 million customers and “AI has enabled us to fundamentally transform how we manage our customer base.” Verizon uses predictive AI to decide which offers to make to customers and generative AI in customer communication, he said. “We know hyperpersonalization is everything” and “we are tapping into personalization like never before."


AI in telecom isn’t new but something the industry was looking for 10 years ago when “we were searching for [a] killer use case” to take advantage of all the data that carriers were collecting, said Matt Roberts, head-global customer marketing at Amdocs: “It was the question … that was asked almost every day,” he said. Carriers have used AI in different ways, from optimizing their networks, to providing customer support, he said. Two years ago, generative AI “came along and propelled and resurrected the hype around AI,” Roberts said. “There’s never been anything quite so transformative as AI, and particularly generative AI.”