Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Glenn Hutchins, Co-Founder of Silver Lake, spoke at the Brookings Institute last week on how to further the mobile technology revolution.
Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Hutchins agreed that to fully realize the promise of the mobile broadband revolution much needed to be done in order to more efficiently utilize spectrum and to get additional spectrum into the marketplace. Suggestions included greater spectrum sharing, utilizing Wi-Fi networks to offload mobile data traffic, requiring holders of spectrum to build-out more quickly, identifying dormant spectrum and unused government held spectrum and making it available for mobile broadband use, ensuring a functioning secondary market for spectrum, and moving forward with incentive auctions for broadcast spectrum. CCIA couldn’t agree more.
And in addition to supporting the proposals above, CCIA has been working to facilitate increasing the amount of spectrum available for mobile broadband use. In May and June CCIA led Comments urging the FCC to move quickly to complete its 2 GHz rulemaking and allow DISH Network to begin deployment of its planned nationwide 4G LTE network. And CCIA continues to support creative solutions to allow LightSquared to launch its planned nationwide 4G LTE wholesale network.
Increasing the amount of spectrum for mobile broadband use, more efficient use of existing spectrum, and enabling market entry by new competitors will help expand access to mobile broadband, more efficiently utilize scarce spectrum resources, and facilitate increased innovation and investment in mobile broadband infrastructure, applications, operating systems, and devices.