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DOCUMENT SUMMARY – RESPONSE TO NTIA, RUS, FCC BTOP INITIATIVES

The broadband delivery methods as defined by the FCC have been in use for some time and as we graduate to newer high speed broadband wireless technologies it is important to levy these new technologies to provide Urban, Suburban and Rural markets with delivery methods that are uniform and consistent. In every sense it is time to "cut the cord" wherever possible to provide core broadband wireless communications and internet access for all Urban, Suburban and Rural markets at speeds faster than Cable and DSL can deliver today.

The technology exists today to provide all Americans, Businesses, Local Governments (Municipalities), School Systems, Public Safety/First Responders, Health Care Professionals and Low-Income Households, all of which reside or operate in Urban, Suburban and Rural markets, with low cost ubiquitous high speed secure broadband wireless communications and internet access in a variety of licensed and un-licensed spectrums. As of now (due to past Administrations support of large incumbents) the American people are beholding to the FCC and Federal Legislators as to how this spectrum will be sold, leased, registered, and finally deployed and this will determine the future of Broadband within the United States.

The past FCC and Federal Legislators have been influenced by, and have allowed, large incumbents such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Sprint/Clearwire (now "Clear"), to acquire or lease our spectrum assets and use their influence (lobbyist's) to monopolize the wireless industry to the point that every American or Business will be beholding to these large incumbents to provide services at ridiculously high prices. This model has only been perpetuated in the United States and is the reason that Americans pay more for communications and internet access than any other nation in the World.

In today's wireless marketplace these incumbents are simply "middle men" and we pay for that. AT&T/Verizon and other large Telecoms bid $19 Billion+ for the rights to the 700MHz spectrum at auction in January 2008. Where has this money gone FCC? It is an atrocity that a Government organization (the FCC) can monopolize and profit from airwaves that are all around us and that simply exist on our planet. 

Even worse, Sprint/Nextel and Clearwire were allowed by the FCC to approach our local School Boards, Churches, and other Non-Profits in our Communities, Cities and Counties within the United States to secure long term leasing rights (15-30 years) using very questionable business tactics to secure those leases in our Community 2.5GHz Educational Broadband Service (EBS) band for launch of their 'nationwide" WiMAX network. Sprint has now turned over their leases to Clearwire for nationwide launch of “CLEAR”.

With that being said let's first look at the opening remarks of acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps at the first public meeting hosted by the Department of Commerce NTIA and the Department of Agriculture RUS on March 10, 2009 and then take a closer look at what actually happened with our Community 2.5GHz EBS spectrum, the 700MHz auction that took place in January 2008, and the past FCC Administration and Federal Legislators role in allowing these monopolies to be formed.

CHAIRMAN COPPS: Thank you. Good morning. Thanks, Anna, for the very nice introduction. The Commerce Department is truly lucky to have such a terrific FCC alum, and that comes from a Commerce alum that has gone to the FCC. This is a beautiful day. I'm pleased to be back here in this beautiful hall of commerce where I see many old friends that bring back many good memories from my years here in the 1990s, and it's good being here with the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and commerce's Acting Chief of Staff Rick Wade to launch at long last a proactive broadband build-up for our country.

I also want to recognize and thank my friend and colleague from the FCC, Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein who is here and who has been working tirelessly at the Commission as an advocate for rural broadband since he came to the Commission. Together we have been asking for years, where is the policy for broadband? Where is the action? Where's the national commitment? Where's the beef?

The fact that we are here today talking about President Barack Obama's bringing broadband to all corners of the country should be evidence enough for everyone here if you need any more evidence that change has truly come to Washington. Seven years ago, shortly after I went to the FCC, the Commission issued another of its Congressionally-mandated Section 706 reports about whether advanced telecom services were being deployed around America in a reasonable and timely fashion. And the answer was always yes, everything's great. Don't worry, be happy. But I wasn't happy, and I did worry. And just last week we got another of those many reports telling us how far the United States has fallen in the ranking of nations when it comes to broadband.

This one from the International Telecommunications Union concluding that your country and mine has now slipped to a dismal number 17. Too few consumers and small businesses in this country have the high speed broadband they need if they're going to succeed. We pay too much for service that is too slow. It's holding us back as individuals, it has cost our economy billions, and things are only going to get worse if we don't do something about it.

Now, thanks to the vision of the President and the foresight of Congress, we are doing something about it. The years of broadband drift and growing digital divides are coming to an end. We begin to understand how key broadband infrastructure is to the future of each and every one of us. Broadband is a central infrastructure challenge of our time. Earlier generations of Americans, going all the way back to the beginning, met and mastered their own great infrastructure challenges. They built roads and turnpikes and bridges to get settlers' produce back to markets, they built regional and vast transcontinental railroads to bind the burgeoning nation today.

They put power lines and basic telephone service out to every hamlet in America. They built a web of interstate highways to deliver the mobility that we all wanted. They did it by working together, innovative private enterprise encouraged by far-seeing public policy. But you know, we forgot those lessons on how to build our country when it came to the roads and highways and bridges of the 21st century. High speed broadband.

So we lost precious time. We lost golden opportunities. We shortchanged our economy, our kids, and ourselves. Well, today we say enough. We mobilize and we begin to build. And I am pleased at the recently enacted and altogether historic Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 gives the FCC an important role to play in turning our new national commitment into a workable national strategy.

We are already hard at work on the job and it's my intention that at our next full Commission meeting on April 8th we will kick off an open, articipatory public process with a far-reaching notice of inquiry to marshal the data and expertise we need to have to make sure that we can meet our legislatively mandated date of one year for presenting Congress and the American people with a national broadband strategy worthy of the name.

In doing so, we will put the FCC in the position of having the hard data necessary to support sound policy-making for the future. And working with NTIA, we will have important new tools, like a national broadband map to help us gauge how the efforts begun today are actually progressing. This will be a truly inclusive process. It will have comprehensive private sector and public sector input. It will ask the tough questions that must be answered if we are going to succeed. It will search out a myriad of traditional and nontraditional stakeholders who deserve to be heard, consumers, industry, labor, public interest organizations, local, state, and Federal government, all the agencies gathered here for openers, but very likely just about every other agency of government, too.

Because the goal of our national strategy must be to bring value-laden high-speed broadband to all of our citizens, no matter who they are or where they live, rural or needy, living in a comfortable condo or not-so-comfortable tribal land, physically able or dealing with a disability. “All” must mean everyone.

And we will endeavor to ignore no sector of our national life. Stop to think about it for a moment. What doesn't broadband impact as we look to the future of America? Not just the basic ways we communicate with one another, but health care information technology and the need to computerize medical records. Better utilization of scarce energy resources through the use of smart grids. Higher education and the needs of schools, libraries, and students as they gear up for the challenges of the 21st century. More efficient agriculture. Better housing. Public safety and cyber-security. Education. The environment. Each of these presents its own questions and new opportunities which need to be examined as part of a national broadband plan. I should note that as a preliminary step today, the Commission issued a public notice asking for comment on how there can be better interagency coordination of broadband initiatives in order to develop a report on a rural broadband strategy by May of this year in response to the farm bill passed last year by Congress. This is just a first step in a larger picture, and it's one that should have been addressed by the Commission much more seriously many months ago.

So I am pleased to be here as part of this interagency effort, to put us on a real road to broadband, a road carefully laid out, funded and incentivized and solidly built to meet our country's pressing needs. If business and government and stakeholders of every kind can all work together to make this happen, it will happen. We can do this job. Success will be measured in jobs for our people, better health, education, self-fulfillment for each of us as individuals, and renewed economic opportunities for our country's goods and services around the world. Talk about the game being worth the candle.

This is precisely how we built this country of ours… infrastructure challenge by infrastructure challenge. And it is how we will get it growing again and how we will keep it great. So thank you for having me here and consider me and the agency I have the privilege of representing here signed up for the duration.
Thank you very much.

While Chairman Copps remarks were encouraging and expressed the need for change the fact remains that the damage has already been done by the past FCC administration. AT&T, Verizon, and Clearwire now control much of the 700MHz and 2.5GHz spectrum to monopolize wireless communications and services in major markets nationwide.

One comment was particularly interesting during Acting Chairman Copps introduction in that he mentioned "Earlier generations of Americans, going all the way back to the beginning, met and mastered their own great infrastructure challenges... They put [power lines and] basic telephone service out to every hamlet in America."

Back then, what was borne of this was a Monopoly. It’s been 25 years since Judge Harold Green ended AT&T Inc.’s monopoly of the phone business, and while the industry has indeed seen unprecedented innovation, the state of competition continues to fail the consumer in the new wireless communications and internet access markets… thus the reason for our dismal 17th ranking among Nations deploying broadband. Are we headed down the same path here? http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/ma-bells-break-up-25-years-later.html.

And not to knock Acting Chairman Copps vision, but where is Julius Genachowski (appointed by President Obama to head the FCC) and when will he take office? Why have we not heard from him? Genachowski is replacing Kevin Martin, who has proven to be such an enemy of the citizens, so obviously biased in favor of the big phone and cable companies (he was a lobbyist, after all), that anyone with a sense of fairness and common sense would look like an improvement.

So how can the United States and our new Broadband initiatives come to the forefront so we can become a World leader and rebound from our dismal 17th world ranking in such deployments?

And how can we justify spending $7.2 Billion on broadband deployments that address mostly rural markets without taking into account the needs of Local Governments, Municipalities, Communities, Cities and Counties and their desire to provide revenue generating core communications and internet access for their citizenry and businesses?

We cannot look to Sprint/Clearwire because what City or County would want Sprint/Clearwire operating their City or County network, receiving revenue, and pulling every dollar possible from our Cities and Counties for basic core communications and internet access?

And how can the BTOP justify spending $7.2 Billion for segmented markets while Sprint/Clearwire, Comcast, Time Warner and others are budgeting (only) $3.2 Billion for a nationwide, high speed mobile WiMAX network?

What we need to do is present a solution that will benefit Communities, Municipalities, Cities and Counties in Urban, Suburban and Rural markets and will allow these Communities to define their own broadband futures. To do this we must first look at the overall desire of the American people and Businesses to accomplish this goal.

Many Americans and Public Officials are not aware of how the all important spectrum has been “sold” or allowed to be “leased” by ousted FCC Chair Kevin Martin and Federal Legislators so let us take a closer look.

Go to History of Municipal, Community, City Wide, or County Wide Wireless