Meet the FCC's 5G crusader

A Q&A with Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission.

Commissioner Carr said that he’s looking forward to addressing state and local regulations he believes might be holding up 5G deployment. He also addressed the recent backlash against large internet companies and said he hadn’t been contacted by a watchdog probing the agency’s chairman. “As I have looked at the infrastructure docket I’ve divided it into two main buckets, one is the federal historic and environmental review side, which we’re doing this month. The next bucket is going to be taking a look at state and local laws and looking at our authorities under [the primary communications law] to make sure that we’re all headed in the same direction to enable that deployment... The other big piece of it obviously is spectrum and the chairman in Barcelona a couple weeks ago announced that we’re going to hold a 5G auction at the end of this [year],” he said.