Gordon Smith on Spectrum Reclamation: We Won't Be Rolled

National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith appears on C-SPAN's The Communicators this week.

He says that broadcasters are willing to volunteer spectrum, but won't be "rolled" into a degraded position on the spectrum band. Asked whether broadcasters were hoarding spectrum, Smith said viewers needed to understand the difference between the way broadcasters use spectrum and how wireless uses spectrum. He pointed out that broadcasting is a one-to-many service, rather than the one-to-one model of wireless video delivery. He said that video is what creates the congestion, and broadcasting is a more efficient way to deliver video. "There is probably not enough spectrum in the universe to manage one-to-one video on every mobile device in the wi-fi broadband world," he said.