US FCC chairman Julius Genachowski dropped heavy hints about the final shape of his new National Broadband Plan this week, at a speech at the New America Foundation in Washington DC.
He revealed that the National Broadband Plan would look to free up 500 Megahertz of spectrum over the next decade and talked in detail about how a great chunk of this would come from the Broadcast industry through voluntarily giving up spectrum in order to get some of the auction proceeds. But his plan appears to be short on many other original ideas and the entire mobile industry in the US is nervous of his final published plan ‘ will it go far enough, and will it detract from the value of their existing spectrum holdings?
The move will tempt broadcasters across the nation and in particular Genachowski highlighted the fact that in many US cities of more than 1 million people, only between 36 MHz and 150 MHz of UHF spectrum is used in delivering broadcast TV, when 300 MHz is allocated.
Even in the largest US cities only about 150 MHz out of 300 MHz is used he said. Given the likely value of 150 MHz of ‘beachfront’ spectrum’ broadcasters that have left spectrum fallow will immediately embrace the idea which Genachowski calls ‘Mobile Future Auction’ and give up part of their spectrum for windfall profits. He insisted that this would still leave plenty of spectrum out there for HD and Mobile TV.
His entire speech was about how central mobile broadband was to his broadband plan, though cynics will see this for what it is, an opportunistic smash and grab of as much auctionable spectrum as possible, under the guise of catching the US up with overseas broadband initiatives. The same result would be achieved by copying other regulators and making spectrum tradable.
The US needs more than anything to lay fiber, and what more national mobile broadband projects will do is create even more use for fiber to backhaul it all. The broadcast spectrum most likely to be given up will be in rural areas, already underserved by sufficient fiber to backhaul services. Optimists hope that the FCC will address this issue in the final plan.
But this is the American way, throw down a carrot, not a stick, and see what broadcasting does with it. All the FCC proposes to do is to create the mechanism for trading the spectrum.
Genachowski said that analysts believed there was as much as $50 billion in value that can be unlocked in this way if the FCC adopts policies to convert most fallow broadcast spectrum to mobile broadband.
Other initiatives he talked about were allowing holders of Mobile Satellite spectrum to use it as Mobile Broadband spectrum, or sell it on to companies that were willing to invest in this way. We assume here that he is talking about the idea of Ancillary Terrestrial Component, whereby the 2.0 GHz spectrum can be used not only to send signals to a satellite, but also from point to multipoint on the ground, just like cellular. This could trigger an immediate sell off of this spectrum, or the companies that hold it. Genachowski said the same about WCS spectrum, which he promised more flexible licensing for.
Finally he talked about a new Mobility Fund, as part of broader reforms of the Universal Service Fund, where the money could be used to pay for one time infrastructure deployment. Basically this is an existing tax on all telecoms services, used to promote nationwide footprints of services.
Genachowski mentioined this almost in the same sentence as an idea where entrepreneurs could create new types of devices and ad hoc networks, enabling innovative new uses of spectrum, perhaps suggesting that where it was possible in any given area is to temporarily re-use spectrum, a little like the White Spaces idea. Mentioning the fund right after gave the impression that the fund would be used to help build out the infrastructure for such entrepreneurs as well as be spent on an element of R&D to prove the science of White Spaces type projects.
The final plan will be delivered to Congress in under a month and Genachowski said it will mean that devices, with the power of a PC, but capable of being kept in your pocket, will bring the Internet to anyone, anywhere, anytime and he praised the iPad and the Kindle as examples of this, wanting to put such devices to work in education, remote health monitoring, energy saving apps, roadside emergencies and public safety.