Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on February 16, 2012 at 1:37 pm
The following may be attributed to Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs:
“We applaud House and Senate negotiators for doing something truly important to our Nation – successfully crafting major spectrum legislation. Our company has been working on this with key leaders in both chambers for over a year, and the members involved should be proud of what they’ve achieved. In particular, we are pleased that despite opposing voices, the legislation will not only free up more spectrum, but will finally provide public safety with the spectrum it needs to do its vital work. Access to more spectrum will also help AT&T continue to create more jobs and support next-generation services for our customers.
“In our industry, there has been much focus in recent weeks on whether the FCC should or should not be able to exclude qualified wireless carriers from bidding in these spectrum auctions. The final legislation speaks clearly on this point: the FCC may not do so as part of any auction proceeding. Instead, it could only make such a decision through a separate public rulemaking with general industry applicability, and not through the backdoor of special auction rules. This provides procedural safeguards, and also an opportunity for a court challenge. We take the FCC Chairman at his word when he says there is no intent to have closed auctions that deny AT&T and other carriers the ability to fairly and fully participate, but we also feel it important that Congress has now made its views clear as well.
“We also want to commend Chairmen Upton and Walden for not only asserting the right of the Congress to set policy when it comes to auctions, but also for showing a willingness to deal with the FCC’s concerns about procedural flexibility in its conduct of those auctions. We believe their language strikes the right balance between all these concerns, and are pleased with the outcome, which is very significant for our industry and our country.”
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Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on February 15, 2012 at 12:12 pm
The following statement may be attributed to Joan Marsh, AT&T Vice President of Federal Regulatory:
“The current site-based licensing rules used for cellular services are outdated and administratively burdensome, not only for licensees but for FCC staff and the public. We are pleased that the Commission is proposing a transition to a geographic-based licensing regime, which makes records maintenance easier and enables licensees to promptly implement network changes in response to customers’ needs. We look forward to continuing to work with the Commission as it modernizes its cellular rules and brings them into alignment with rules for almost all other commercial wireless services.”
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on February 9, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Yesterday, Kevin Fitchard over at GigaOm wrote a blog post on my Super Bowl post, in which I highlight some spectrum lessons from the big game. While he acknowledges that we need more spectrum in a tweet, I want to focus on a couple of points in his blog post with which I disagree. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading his take, and appreciate his time.
First, he concludes that it’s “strange” for AT&T to use a one-off event like the Super Bowl to make a point about the need for more spectrum, asserting that this is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. That’s not correct. As I note in my blog, one of the core network enhancements AT&T made to prepare for the Super Bowl was to add more UMTS carriers to its existing cell tower infrastructure. You can only add additional carriers if you have spectrum free to support them (a minimum of 10 MHz for a UMTS carrier). In many areas, AT&T is close to exhausting spectrum available to add additional carriers and thus will no longer have that tool available to it to increase local capacity.
Setting that aside, there’s a broader point that I was trying to make. Customer usage at a big one-time event is simply a window into the average data usage profile of tomorrow. Five years ago, carriers did not worry about supporting massive video uploads at Super Bowl-like events because video (upload and download) simply wasn’t part of the customer wireless experience. That has now dramatically changed and the gigabytes being driven in Lucas Oil Stadium demonstrate that. In its most recent traffic study, Ericcson predicted that by 2016 the number of high-traffic smartphones will increase more than 5 times and generated traffic will grow around 12 times. Tablet subscriptions will grow 10 times and associated generated traffic will increase about 40 times. Those increases will be driven predominantly by video. The Super Bowl numbers simply give us a glimpse into that video-centric wireless broadband future.
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