By Eliza Krigman
The spectrum deal Congress passed is only the beginning, telecommunication experts said Wednesday.
Incentive auctions authorized by the bill are “a down payment” in terms of what the U.S. needs in terms of access to airwaves, said Mark Stachiw, general counsel of MetroPCS. “We need a lot more.”
His remarks came at a communications summit on Capitol Hill convened by the Institute for Policy Innovation.
Charla Rath, vice president of wireless policy development at Verizon, agreed with Stachiw.
“It is, in a way, a down payment,” Rath said, who spoke on the same panel as Stachiw. “We need to be thinking about how we get a continuous supply.”
“One of the key places to look is government spectrum,” she added.
Earlier in the week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made the same point emphasizing that the time table for reallocating federal spectrum to the commercial sector must be sped up.
Panelists discussed finding new ways to incentivize federal users of spectrum to vacate their airwaves, but fell short of identifying any compelling ways to do so.
Thomas Hazlett, director of the Information Economy Project, argued that the infrastructure for spectrum management needs a wholesale change.
“If we are interested in consumer welfare and innovation and growth in the economy,” Hazlett said, “we need to” back away from “case-by-case allocation” of airwaves by the FCC.
“What we need to be thinking about are plans B, C, and D … so we can create much more generic proceedings” that don’t get “bogged down” the way current rulemakings work. Hazlett pointed to the LightSquared-GPS fiasco as a sign of what happens when the agency manages spectrum the way the FCC currently does.
The process of moving airwaves to market through the incentive auction will likely take somewhere between six and 13 years and that’s a “conservative estimate,” Hazlett said.
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