Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) President Grant Seiffert interviews Commissioner Robert McDowell from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about broadband deployment and innovation during his tenure at the telecommunications regulator.
Much has changed since Commissioner McDowell joined the agency – with smartphones barely on the horizon and a “tablet” considered a way to ingest medicine. Today, these widely used and increasingly powerful computing devices are responsible for much of the bandwidth congestion that is driving the agency to make more spectrum available for wireless broadband.
Echoing themes from his presentation at “TIA 2011: Inside the Network,” held this past May in Dallas, Commissioner McDowell expressed his belief that more spectrum must be accompanied by “spectral efficiency,” given that it will take the better part of a decade to get benefits from this spectrum into consumers’ hands.
At TIA 2011, Commissioner McDowell emphasized that every antenna should be connected to a piece of fiber to provide “spectral efficiency,” while in the current interview he describes Distributed Antenna Systems, or DAS – essentially a series of wireless antennas strung together on a length of fiber, for deployment inside buildings or along highway or rail lines, for example.
Other means for achieving spectral efficiency exist, but the Commissioner’s general point – that making spectrum available alone is not going to solve all of the congestion issues associated with widespread use of increasingly powerful wireless computing devices.
Also discussed in the interview: the FCC’s recent comprehensive transformation of the Universal Service Fund, or USF, which is a roughly $8 billion-a-year subsidy by which one set of consumers, typically in urban areas, pay into a fund to provide telephone service to another set of consumers, such as those in rural areas.
Commissioner McDowell noted that the FCC’s recent vote capped the size of the fund used for rural areas, and tried to provide incentives for companies to provide consumers with telecommunications services in the most efficient manner possible.
