FCC Chair Pushes Mobile Broadband

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski says deploying 4G wireless networksquickly is key to driving innovation and taking advantage of mobilebroadband

Federal Communications Commission chairmanJulius Genachowski says one way to help change the nation's status as abroadband laggard among industrialized nations is to deploy 4G wirelessnetworks as quickly as possible. During an on-stage interview Wednesday at The Wall Street Journal's D8tech conference, Genachowski acknowledged that Americans pay too muchfor broadband service that is slower than what exists in other advancednations. Worst of all, a recent survey of 40 industrialized nationsranks the U.S. at the bottom in terms of the speed in which it ismoving to improve the situation.


"That's the canary in the coal mine," Genachowski told WSJ tech reporter Walt Mossberg.
To help fix the problem, Genachowski said the nation had to continue tofocus on deploying 4G wireless networks as quickly as possible. TheU.S. was one of the first nations to start deploying the successor totoday's 3G networks.

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"Unleashing mobile is one of the most important if not the mostimportant thing we can do," Genachowski said. "The biggest opportunityover the next decade to drive innovation, to drive broadband's success,to drive competition in broadband, which will help on prices and manyother things, is to take advantage of mobile broadband."
Of course, certain hurdles will have to be jumped first. One majorproblem is having enough spectrum to handle the increasing number ofbandwidth-hungry smartphones, tablet computers and other devices beingadded to networks.
While current government policies are expected to eventually free upthree times the amount of spectrum available today, studies show thatat the current rate of demand for mobile broadband, 30 to 40 times thespectrum will be needed, Genachowski said. To meet the challenge, thegovernment needs to institute "smart policies" to take full advantageof available spectrum.
"There's enough available if we put in place smart polices to improvethe picture," the chairman said. "We've got to work on spectrumpolicies that themselves generate greater efficiency."
One way to ease the pending congestion is to create new and better secondary markets to offload traffic, he said.
Genachowski in the past has pointed tohow well Wi-Fi use has added unlicensed spectrum to the national mix,making it possible to offload from carriers' networks as much as 40% oftraffic in the home. He also supports reallocating existing spectrum to4G deployments.
During the D8 interview, Genachowski called for changing the UniversalService Fund, which spends $8 billion a year to provide telephoneservice throughout the nation. The FCC created the fund in 1997 to meetrequirements of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Genachowski said the fund should be used to support broadbandcommunications not telephone service. "It's crazy not to do it," hesaid.