Industry tells House panel private sector will be key in fixing spectrum crunch

Experts and industry advocates told members of a House Science, Space and Technology subpanel that new technology allowing scarce radio spectrum to be shared won't be enough to meet demand.

CTIA Vice President Christopher Guttman-McCabe said such technologies are neither feasible nor desirable at this time, when available spectrum must support increasingly complex mobile devices — which Americans depend on more and more. While the recently announced National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NIST) plan to release some government-held spectrum is a good start, he said, more spectrum must be cleared and released to the consumer market if a spectrum crisis is to be prevented. "Without exclusive licenses [for the private sector]," he said, "it is doubtful that the massive investment … in [wireless services]" would have happened. Cisco spectrum policy director Mary Brown agreed, saying "there is no end in sight" to the exponential growth in consumer wireless device usage.

Ranking member Donna Edwards (D-MD) asked what government and the private sector could do while reallocating spectrum to "step up research and development" of spectrum-sharing technology that would meet future needs. Richard Bennett, an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation senior research fellow, suggested redesigning applications to use commercial networking technologies. "One of the things that it's important to realize is there's no downside" to acting on the assumption that the spectrum crunch is real. Subramanian added that we've "started too late" and that as a result, there isn't much spectrum to repurpose. Offloading traffic to landlines or Wi-Fi can only do so much, he said.