The announcement yesterday indicates that there maybe spectrum reform on the way per the White House. Larry Summers was sent to discuss the ten year plan. There aren’t many details that have been disclosed as of yet but one of the hopes from this plan is jobs. Will it take ten years to produced possible jobs for Americans? So many are still out of work.
Wireless access for those that can not afford to incur the cost of land access is another aspiration for the plan. (for those that don’t know, there are still people in the U.S. who don’t have 911 service and may never have it do to lack of phone service). This spectrum plan can be one way to address it, however where will we be technologically in ten years. Can we afford to not have the capacity to build the skills needed to survive in this new economy for another ten years? Imagine what life was like ten years ago. Can you imagine our technological capacity in the next ten?
This battle will go on but think about how much ground we are loosing to create technological innovation. We should all be watching this closely.
This is somewhat outside our bailiwick here, but President Obama issued a pretty major tech policy memorandum earlier today laying out his ten-year plan to free up some 500 megahertz of public radio spectrum that could, the thinking goes, be used to build out robust digital connectivity across the country. Radio spectrum is a public resource, managed by the federal government on behalf of the American people, and spectrum reform advocates argue that we could be doing a much better job of using that resource to actually benefit the public — including through using it to connect Americans to high-speed broadband in places where geography can make wired connectivity impractical.
Dow Jones’ Jared Favole has more here. In brief, the major deal is that Obama is laying out a decade long timetable for reclaiming a considerable chunk of the wireless spectrum for new and improved uses. One element of that proposal, and one which puts Obama in the position of being a strong reformer of federal operations (whether or not the rest of the executive branch is all that happy about it), is that agencies have to finally fess up about just what parts of the radio spectrum they have, and what of it they aren’t using. A 2006 Government Accountability Office report on spectrum reform (pdf) critiqued the lack of competitive pressures on government entities to justify their possession of spectrum bands. Or, to put it another way, government might be biting off more spectrum than they can use simply because they don’t have to pay for it.
Obama’s announcement is closely tied to the Federal Communications National Broadband Plan, released in March, particularly where it calls for spectrum “auctions” to shift spectrum from its currently licensees to new uses and new users. (Related: The FCC’s new online Spectrum Dashboard.) Incumbent media and communications companies have much at stake, and so there’s a considerable amount of money involved. Passions are running high, and so the Obama administration’s commitment to transparency is likely going to face a test.
The first milestone called for in the new Obama spectrum reform policy is for the Federal Communications Commission to present a detailed road map for moving ahead by October 10th of this year.
Read more at techpresident.com
