Wi-Fi Threatened: Why Congress Might Be Undermining Our Digital Future - Episode 653 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:11):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bats podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul Minnesota, and today I'm coming back to two people that have been on the show many times have long worked in the public [00:00:30] interest. We've got Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge. Welcome to the show.

Harold Feld (00:35):
Thanks for having me.

Christopher Mitchell (00:37):
And we've also got Michael Calabrese, who is the Director of Wireless Future at New America's Open Technology Institute. Welcome.

Michael Calabrase (00:45):
Yeah, great to be on. Thanks, Chris.

Christopher Mitchell (00:47):
I'm excited to talk with both of you, but not thrilled about the topic. We're talking about a threat to Wi-Fi and CBRS. I think this is something that I did talk about last week [00:01:00] with WISPA and some of the threats to CBRS that we are seeing. And we're going to walk through it. We might get a little technical here and there, but we're going to try and bring it back and make sure people know what we're talking about and what they can do to try to make sure that we don't lose any of the spectrum that is currently reserved for people like us to use and small ISPs and things like that. So I want to start by asking, Harold, can you just tell us briefly what is [00:01:30] going on?

Harold Feld (01:31):
So spectrum auctions come up whenever you have a budget crunch because it's viewed by most members of Congress as money without raising taxes. And the estimate here is about 80 to $90 billion that could be raised through the FCC auctioning spectrum. So although fights between the Army and [00:02:00] the FCC over taking back federal spectrum to be auctioned meant that the FCCs Auction authority expired back in 2023. Now it's coming back. Everybody knows it's coming back. And the issue here is are you just going to reauthorize it? Are you going to tell the FCC that they have to do certain types of auctions and how are you going to do that? And that's where the fight comes in.

Christopher Mitchell (02:30):
[00:02:30] And this is a budget bill that is moving through that's going to set the budget for the federal government. And as part of that, they're going to be renewing auction authority. And so there's a lot of policy mixed in with money here is what you're saying basically,

Harold Feld (02:46):
Right. This is the problem is you want to do good spectrum policy, but for 430 of those 435 members of Congress, it's just about the money.

Christopher Mitchell (02:59):
And now Michael, [00:03:00] we are not in the 1940s. We don't have a ton of spectrum just sitting there totally unused. And so when we talk about auctioning off spectrum to try to raise 80 or $90 billion, where do they have to look for it?

Michael Calabrase (03:14):
Well, that's the big challenge they've been trying to get over for two years now, is that all of the best spectrum, the spectrum that the mobile industry wants, that [00:03:30] Wi-Fi uses, that so many other services use has all been assigned and is occupied by someone. So it's become sort of a zero-sum game where in order to auction for exclusive use, you have to clear someone else out of that band. And the mobile industry is only willing to pay billions for [00:04:00] what they call mid band spectrum, which is really a fairly in the whole range of frequencies that we call the spectrum. It's just a small part of that that's recently become the best combination of both propagation. In other words, how far it goes and penetration, how well it would go through into buildings, for example. And so everyone wants to be [00:04:30] in the mid band these days. It's the new beachfront.

Christopher Mitchell (04:34):
So we have a situation in which there's an effort to auction off spectrum and a goal to raise 80 or $90 billion. We currently are in a situation in which the Senate is trying to decide how it wants to move forward, but I want to talk first about how the House resolved it, because I think that'll set the stage for better understanding what might come [00:05:00] next. So the house was presented with this issue, and I don't know how much we'll get into it, but broadly, at and t and others have laid the groundwork with years of lobbying to try to undercut things like CBRS and other forms of spectrum sharing and things like that that probably we won't get into that aspect as much, but we think are very important for the future efficient use of the spectrum. But Harold, give us a sense of what happened in the house, how that wrapped up

Harold Feld (05:30):
[00:05:30] In the house. They struck a compromise. Rather than saying what specific bands had to be auctioned, they said, okay, we're going to take a range from about one gigahertz approximately to about 10 gigahertz approximately. So that's a big range. A lot of it's already full, but they said FC, C find 600 megahertz somewhere in that 10 gigahertz [00:06:00] range that you can auction. And that was not great for us, but it also did something very important. It said that six gigahertz band that is now being used for Wi-Fi six, and that's intended for Wi-Fi seven, that doesn't count towards your goal. So don't auction that because that's not going to help you let Wi-Fi do its thing and keep [00:06:30] growing and given people the capacity they need. So the house gave the FCC and the federal government a choice to try to figure out who could be moved around for what, but it said, absolutely don't touch that new Wi-Fi ban because people are in it, they're using it and it's growing.

Christopher Mitchell (06:53):
So Michael, as we talk about this a little bit, I think I'm curious if you want to go in a different direction, but [00:07:00] let me start you off, and people might be familiar than seeing 2.4. So Wi-Fi started in 2.4 GHz and then it got a chunk of five GHz. That's where most of us are using in our homes now. And then six years ago or so, the FCC opened up a lot of the six GHz span for Wi-Fi that's now on the market. A lot of it, I think when I talked to rural and urban ISPs that are doing wireless, they're really excited about the potential of really getting into [00:07:30] that six GHz space. And so these are areas that are being used. The thing that I'm always curious about when I talk to an expert like you is for people to understand 80 or $90 billion sounds like a lot of money. How do we measure that against the value of Wi-Fi and CBRS and technologies like that?

Michael Calabrase (07:50):
Yeah, so it's actually a small amount of money compared to the value for consumers and the economy of Wi-Fi. [00:08:00] Recent studies by economists are now projecting, I believe they roughly don't hold me exactly to this, but that roughly Wi-Fi is generating about 700 billion a year in consumer welfare and producer surplus and GDP all totaled up for the economy, and that [00:08:30] will hit $1 trillion before the end of the decade. And these next generations of Wi-Fi that can only operate well in this expanded six gigahertz range, have all the capabilities of the mobile carrier networks of 5G in terms of being really high, in fact, higher throughput, low latency, being able to [00:09:00] connect hundreds of devices in the same crowded location and so on. So really, Wi-Fi has become an input to everything in the economy. There was a survey recently and when people were asked about broadband, they equated Wi-Fi and Internet. They didn't know the difference between Wi-Fi, broadband and Internet. It's all one thing because when you're actually on the Internet [00:09:30] with a mobile device, smartphone, laptop, whatever, it's always at the end it's Wi-Fi

Harold Feld (09:40):
And just to add a couple of things that, first of all, we now have just a ton of devices that have to use Wi-Fi. The laptop, the Apple laptop that I'm talking to you from does not have an ethernet plug so that I could actually plug this into a wall or a router. I've got to use [00:10:00] Wi-Fi for this. All of your smart devices in your home, whether you want them or not, are using Wi-Fi. Most of your streaming is not built to have a plug into it anymore. It's Wi-Fi. So we are doing more and more with this. We are putting more and more demand on this. We're putting more and more demand in the home, and people are building the devices and the services in the expectation that you are going to have [00:10:30] abundant available Wi-Fi, you're running maybe a fiber strand to your home to get a gigabit or more going into the home. We're counting on Wi-Fi that can carry that gigabit load because otherwise the speed is just going to drop to molasses. I mean, what good is it to me to pay for a gigabit fiber strand coming into my home if I can't get more than 50 or 60 megabits per second [00:11:00] because I've got all of my devices running and I can't use all of the, I've got very limited space for my Wi-Fi to work, which is the thing we're worried about here.

Michael Calabrase (11:12):
In addition, keep in mind that except for smartphones, none of those devices that Harold mentioned has a cellular connection. I mean, virtually zero laptops or tablets, they're completely dependent on Wi-Fi. And then all the smaller [00:11:30] devices, it would not only be unaffordable, but completely impractical in terms of form factor, battery life and so on. And then there's the enterprise side as well where Wi-Fi, and especially this next generation of Wi-Fi will be powering private IoT networks as well.

Harold Feld (11:54):
Yeah, this is the big wireless carriers are like, oh yeah, [00:12:00] we don't want people to use that free Wi-Fi stuff. We want them to have to pay to use our networks. But the reality is, if all of the traffic or even a chunk of the traffic shifted off of your home Wi-Fi network to try to go through your cell phone, everybody in the neighborhood all doing that at once, the cellular networks would collapse. There's just no way they could handle it. It would be a catastrophe.

Christopher Mitchell (12:26):
It would be a super inefficient use of spectrum, is what it would be. [00:12:30] The way to use it efficiently is what we've been doing, which, so I'm curious, Michael, as you watched, we're going to come to the Senate in a minute here, but as you watched in the house, I'm curious how you were reacting to what you saw and how the compromise ended up.

Michael Calabrase (12:46):
Well, we were certainly not happy that in order to maximize what they thought was to maximize revenue to help offset tax cuts and other things, they [00:13:00] wanted to pay for that the house was mandating 600 megahertz to auction, and not only to auction, but for I guess what they call full power exclusive use, which means that it's really only the three big mobile carriers that would be bidding billions of dollars. So that [00:13:30] part was not good. On the other hand, there was,

Christopher Mitchell (13:32):
Can I cut you off for a second? I feel like as you said that I have this vision of these representatives feeling like, well, there's free money out there and we're going to get that free money from the spectrum, not realizing that it's not free money. They're taking that money from our future. That is we're going to have less effective home networking and we're going to have less innovation in the future because that's where they're taking the money from. I mean, I think that's an accurate way of representing it, wouldn't you think?

Michael Calabrase (13:59):
Well, [00:14:00] that's a pretty common complaint about Congress, that it very much discounts the future that extends beyond their next reelection. Yeah. And most of them don't even understand the interaction. What most of them are hearing is, oh, the mobile carriers need more spectrum. They'll pay billions for it, and oh, we happen to need billions. So let's just do this without thinking of, in fact, just [00:14:30] a complete so you understand maybe the somewhat bright side was that at least the House Energy and Commerce Committee recognized that there was potential collateral damage. They didn't want the FCC to run roughshod. So they included, as Harold mentioned, two exclusions. One was the military spectrum in the lower three gigahertz band that was considered [00:15:00] the most sensitive military spectrum that the mobile industry most wants. They've been trying to get their hands in that for years. And so they excluded that and they excluded the six GHz Wi-Fi band, and then things only got worse in the Senate.

Christopher Mitchell (15:16):
And when you say that, it means that the Congress under this set of rules, which has yet to be adopted officially, they're still working on it. The federal communication has to auction off a certain amount of spectrum, [00:15:30] but they get no, if they auction off a bunch of this stuff in six gigahertz or in the lower two gigahertz, they would not get credit for that. They still have to find a bunch of other stuff. So they'd have no incentive to do it. So the house version is protecting this right now, which is what we would like to see.

Michael Calabrase (15:47):
Yeah, no credit for it. And also, it's a pretty strong congressional statement to actually write an exclusion in it because this is passed what entirely only what Republican [00:16:00] votes. So the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is probably not going to then turn around and try to do that.

Christopher Mitchell (16:09):
So last question before we turn to what's happening in the Senate is I just want to get a quick sense of when we know that at and t and other wireless mobile companies, the other two, Verizon, T-Mobile are willing to pay billions, tens of billions of dollars for this. Is that because they need the spectrum to put it to use right away, or is that because [00:16:30] they need other people not to have it so they can maintain their value as a monopoly more or less?

Harold Feld (16:38):
Well, you have to say what? You have to look at who they're talking to when they're talking in front of Congress. They're like, we need this right now. China is already allocating more spectrum, and somehow that means that they're going to win something and give it to us. We totally need it. When they go and talk to [00:17:00] their shareholders and they're under oath to tell the truth to the Securities Exchange Commission, then they're like, oh, we've got plenty. We're good AT&T's CEO. I think Michael just said, well, we've got enough for 20 years, 25 years, something like that.

Michael Calabrase (17:18):
Yeah, certainly. Certainly 10 at least he said, we don't know how technology is always evolving. We will probably need more in the future, but they're good for five to 10 years [00:17:30] at least.

Harold Feld (17:31):
So for a lot of these guys, two things. One, the wireless industry has always hated unlicensed spectrum. It's less bad than it used to be, but they spend a lot of time trash talking it. They spend a lot of money to generate reports, trash talking it, because God forbid you should use for free what they want to sell you. So [00:18:00] I got to download a big download, or I want to stream something. Well, I can blow through my data cap and pay extra if I'm on AT&T or I can go home or somewhere else that's got a Wi-Fi hotspot and do it for free. Which do you think AT&T wants you to do?

Christopher Mitchell (18:19):
Yeah, that's for me is one of the key parts of this is that when they have the spectrum that they have, the market [00:18:30] more or less works to allocate that efficiently where if they have an issue where they're starting to run out of spectrum, they can do more localization and going to the small cells and offloading it and using it more efficiently. They have opportunities available. And so when I'm looking at them needing to warehouse spectrum, to me it looks like it's more about maintaining their value and foreclosing competition than it is other things. But I'm also the Institute for Local. I'm primed to look for [00:19:00] that sort of thing. So it's not too surprising. That's what I,

Harold Feld (19:04):
I'd say, look, there's a little of both because one of the problems about spectrum auctions is you never know when the next one is going to be. So the wireless industry is always, give it to us now, give it to us now, give it to us now. Maybe we'll need it someday and we want to have it in the bank, but additionally, give it to us now so that nobody else can get it. We don't want new competitors in the mobile space to come along. You have EchoStar that's [00:19:30] trying to come in with boost. So they're all give it to us now while Boost is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, so we can outbid them and keep a competitor out. Technical term for that, as you know, is foreclosure, but it's also like, yeah, we don't want other people doing for free what we want to sell back to you

Christopher Mitchell (19:50):
Now, Michael, does that bring us up to the Senate and what is happening there?

Michael Calabrase (19:55):
Yeah, I think so. So I can tell you how the Senate [00:20:00] version is different at this point. Although while the House has passed their BBB: Big, Beautiful Bill, the Senate is still a work in progress. But what the Commerce committee has or what the chairman of the Commerce Committee Ted Cruz has put forth is from our point of view, much worse. So I mentioned a few things. First, [00:20:30] he increased the auction mandate from 600 to 800 megahertz. So that by itself puts a lot more pressure on the FCC to find whatever spectrum it can get. Its hands on to auction.

Christopher Mitchell (20:50):
So a 33% increase, it's not like there's a bunch of spectrum that's not used. You've got the Department of Defense, you're probably not going to take their spectrum away from them, or at least not very much. You've got like [00:21:00] at and t, Verizon, those other companies, they're not going to give it away. There's a lot of companies for whom they might have a small amount and they can't possibly give it away, then they would have none. So if you go from 600 to 800, it's a huge difference, I'm guessing.

Michael Calabrase (21:14):
Right. And one reason they increased from 600 to 800 is the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee decided that the house bill did not [00:21:30] protect the military enough, and so they wanted even stronger language and they wanted to add another thousand megahertz of spectrum that the military and the intelligence agencies use to the protected list to the excluded. So they added an exclusion for the seven gigahertz band for a full thousand megahertz, and they took off, they dropped the exclusion for Wi-Fi [00:22:00] for the six gigahertz band.

Christopher Mitchell (22:01):
So they're trying to get more spectrum auctioned off of a smaller base after

Michael Calabrase (22:07):
Exactly. And because they excluded an additional 1000 megahertz, the score actually went down a little. The congressional budget office calculation of estimated revenue from future auctions went down to 85 billion from 88. So they actually would be raising less than the house bill, [00:22:30] but it's a really bad sign that they would explicitly drop the exclusion for six gigahertz. They must have done that to try to keep the budget number up, the revenue estimate up, and it really paints a target on Wi-Fi as something that, or at least a big portion of the upper six gigahertz band as something that could be auctioned.

Christopher Mitchell (22:57):
Yeah, that's the future Wi-Fi where we'll [00:23:00] be, might not need it today, but we'll be using it soon.

Michael Calabrase (23:03):
And not future as in hypothetical or years from now as in it's already, it's going to market this year, later this year we're moving, starting to move from Wi-Fi ^E to Wi-Fi seven beginning with enterprise users. So this really high capacity Wi-Fi [00:23:30] with little delay and much better in crowded places. That's all just about on the cusp, just about to happen. And the reason I think we missed saying this earlier, but just so folks understand, is Wi-Fi, as you said, when it started in 2.4, it was 20 megahertz channels, and so you could have maybe the total capacity might be [00:24:00] a hundred, a hundred or 200 megabits per second in your home. And Wi-Fi ended up creating, there was kind of a home Wi-Fi bottleneck as people started to get fiber to the home or even cable. The Wi-Fi didn't have enough capacity. So then they added a lot of spectrum into five gigahertz. So we got up to say 60 megahertz channels. Well now in the six gigahertz [00:24:30] band, which added 1200 megahertz, and this was during the first Trump administration in 2020 by unanimous five oh vote, everyone thought it was brilliant to add all the spectrum for Wi-Fi to make it future proof. They can get up to 320 megahertz wide channels, multi gigabit capacity, which is so important for homes, might not even need all of it, but certainly schools, libraries, public public spaces, [00:25:00] community, wireless networks, enterprise, everybody who has

Harold Feld (25:07):
Lot are going to need it. I mean,

(25:09):
You're not going to pay to get a 10 gigabit connection from Comcast or Fios or whoever, just so that it can drop to 300 megabits per second as soon as it gets into my house. I mean, nobody does that. And the things you have to understand are, there's two things [00:25:30] that go on here. One is how big are these channels and how many of these channels are there? And the size of the channels tells you how much the capacity is for a device, and the number of devices tells you how much you can squeeze in there, because the more crowded it is, the slower it's going to be. The longer it takes for a device to find an open channel, [00:26:00] the more buffering you get, the slower it gets. And all of this, as we said before, keeps increasing. And just to make it even more fun, it's not like the only thing in this band is Wi-Fi. There are a couple of licensed users in here, mostly electric utilities and power companies. They use this stuff on their poles. So Wi-Fi six [00:26:30] and Wi-Fi seven are structured so that they don't interfere with that. But you're talking about if we have to auction off a chunk of this, you're talking about moving everybody into half the space. So that's a lot of crowding.

Christopher Mitchell (26:46):
Now, I'm curious about is this, normally the way we sort out spectrum issues is in IMOs budget bill, which I say partially it doesn't seem ideal, but also it might be just the way Congress [00:27:00] works. Is this something, I don't remember it happening that frequently before. Is this something that's kind of new?

Harold Feld (27:06):
Well, a lot of times you get this as part of a budget bill, but what has traditionally happened was first they said, okay, FCC have 10 years of auction authority. And a lot of this are what I call stupid budget tricks. Why 10 years? Because that way every time you do another budget, you can rescore to get more credit for the same. [00:27:30] So when I stretch it out another five years, I get to count more money again, even though I already authorized auctions before. A lot of times when they do that, they'll point to particular bands sometimes, like when we did this with the digital transition, they said, okay, we're going to take back broadcast spectrum and we're going to auction it off as part of this to raise money. Sometimes they say, [00:28:00] we're going to do this incentive auction where we're going to let broadcasters put some of their spectrum up for auction.

(28:07):
Sometimes they take a little bit here, a little bit there. This is a big chunk, and that's because this bill is generating a lot of deficit, and so they need a lot more revenue. So this is going bigger than we've gone before with [00:28:30] a lot more impacts on wireless policy than we've had before. What's worse is the Senate version is taking away the FCCs flexibility to do things in the public interest. Right now, the way the auction language is written, it says, well, the FCC has to do a bunch of things with auctions. It has to make sure that there isn't excessive concentration of licenses. It has to make sure that people get the benefit of the technology. It has to make [00:29:00] sure that we put licenses in the hands of native tribes and women-owned businesses and other things. And now the language that cruises put in, which is language that the wireless guys have been pushing for a long time, no surprise says the job of the FCC is to maximize revenue and maximize efficiency, which turns out to be another way of saying maximize revenue, because how do we measure efficiency by what produces the most revenue?

(29:30):
[00:29:30] So this is taking away the FCCs ability to do any kind of balancing to say, well, maybe we should have some unlicensed here in addition to the licensed, maybe we ought to do something different like CBRS where we have different tiers that are allowed. Maybe we ought to have some limits on how many licenses you can win at the auction. Now, it's all just about maximize the revenue, which means give [00:30:00] it to the big three.

Christopher Mitchell (30:01):
Right? It doesn't mean maximize the economy. I'll tell you that right now because one of the things I always get frustrated with when Michael said earlier, maximizing revenue for the FCC does not maximize the economic power of this band to produce revenue that would be diffuse into the hands of millions of people and small businesses and things like that, right? So much like a public park, if you maximize the revenue by building [00:30:30] ugly apartment buildings on it, you're not necessarily maximizing the benefits to the community which needs a park here or there. So you actually can drive down to torture the analogy. You can drive down the value that everyone has by trying to maximize the value individually, you collectively impoverish everyone. Well, yeah.

Harold Feld (30:51):
And it's even worse because auctions are a single snapshot in time of who happens to be here and how much they're willing to bid based on [00:31:00] everything from competition to interest rates. So rather than saying, okay, there's a bunch of different ways we could use this that are going to return a bunch of revenue, that are going to do anything, it's like you have to give us the most cash for this single instant in time. Never thinking about the future, never thinking about other people, never thinking about all of the other uses that we could be having. [00:31:30] Just show me the money, Michael.

Michael Calabrase (31:35):
Yeah, no, that's all right. I would just reiterate that although Congress has taken advantage of auctions in some prior budget bills, it's never been on this scale and so narrowly focused and so specific disregarding all the other values. In fact, typically [00:32:00] they've restrained themselves to a degree that left the FCC with the discretion to adopt a more balanced spectrum policy. In fact, in one case, the MOBILE NOW Act, which was the lead co-sponsors, were the current Republican majority leader, John Thune, ironically, and Senator Schatz from Hawaii that explicitly required balance, [00:32:30] in other words, both more licensed spectrum for auction and more unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi. In fact, that Bill was what got the ball rolling to create the six gigahertz band in the first place because Congress was under an obligation, I'm sorry, the FCC was under an obligation to create a new unlicensed band and then decided to go big with what they did in 2020.

Christopher Mitchell (33:00):
[00:33:00] I'll just say that when you take a look at our economy and how it's grown because of so much tech, and granted who doesn't have a critique about the amount of tech and how it's organized, but nonetheless, if we did not have Wi-Fi available, if we had maximized revenue in previous decades, I think we'd be much worse off today. We'd have a lot less freedom and ability to share our thoughts [00:33:30] and generally benefit from the benefits of so much communications capacity that we don't need to get AT&T's permission to use. And so that's where it often comes back to, for me, is a concern about whether we're leaving Spectrum available for us in the next couple of years or future generations, or they have an ability to innovate and make sure that there's still space that's not claimed by a multinational company, not because multinational companies are inherently evil, [00:34:00] but because there should be a balance of different opportunities for the spectrum.

(34:04):
So that's where I just feel like you're right though Congress is very focused on the short term. So for right now to make sure people understand where we are, the house passed a bill, and a lot of us are not really thrilled about the idea that the FCC has to auction off a certain amount within that area, but it did at least protect the areas that we're pretty concerned about. [00:34:30] The Senate now has a bill that is much worse, and the Senate will decide on that. And if that has bad language in it, there would still be a time to fix it in reconciliation. But ideally, the Senate would change the current language that Cruz has put forward, and the Senate would have language that was more balanced, and then that would go to reconciliation, and we'd still have to fight about it, but we would be on better terms. We would like to see the Senate just go ahead with the House language, [00:35:00] right?

Harold Feld (35:01):
I mean, at this point, ideally it would've just been a clean FCC, you're the expert agency. Go figure it out. That's clearly not going to happen. But go back to the house language. Give the FCC as much discretion as possible. Get rid of this language that says maximize revenue. Put back the language that protects the six gigahertz Wi-Fi band. That's what we're looking for, because otherwise, [00:35:30] 10 years from now, your Wi-Fi is going to run the way it runs today on Amtrak or on airplanes because there isn't going to be enough space. There isn't going to be anywhere for it to grow, but we keep making more and more tech that depends on more and more Wi-Fi, and unless we protect the space that's been set aside for that growth, it's not going to be there. Anything you want to add, Michael?

Michael Calabrase (36:00):
[00:36:00] No, I mean that's really it. I just really can't emphasize enough that Wi-Fi is just so central and in fact, a statistic. I think most people aren't aware of this. We should have mentioned it earlier, that even on, we're talking about how smartphones are the only device for the most part, that are connected to both cellular and cellular networks and Wi-Fi. And even on smartphones. [00:36:30] I don't think many people realize that close to 90% of all the data traffic on your smartphone is carried over Wi-Fi and back and forth to the Internet and does not touch your mobile carrier's. Infrastructure does not go over the mobile carrier spectrum that they buy at auction because the iPhones, [00:37:00] the other phones today, they all are built to automatically shift over to Wi-Fi. As soon as you come in range of a friendly Wi-Fi and with fiber going out everywhere, that's only going to increase. So our dependency on Wi-Fi for big bandwidth, for quality of connectivity is just increasing. Mobile signals don't even penetrate into buildings very well because [00:37:30] the mobile carriers don't build those small cells. You mentioned earlier, there's this trade off between spectrum and infrastructure, and they don't want to make the investments in bringing cell towers very close to your home, nor do we necessarily want that. It's much better to be using the invisible Wi-Fi that everybody can reuse in each different building.

Christopher Mitchell (37:56):
Yes, and I know that people don't like the towers locally, but [00:38:00] I will say that the closer the tower is to you, the less power it uses. And so it's another reason to love being on Wi-Fi to use less power in your handsets, get better use out of your batteries in Additionally, I'll say I'm a podcast nut. I download many gigabytes of data every day, and my phone is set to just download when I'm on Wi-Fi. I don't think that I would want to pay, I'm not on an unlimited plan, and so I pay, and [00:38:30] I would not want to see the bill at the end of the month for my podcast addiction if I had to get all of it over the cellular data lines.

Harold Feld (38:37):
And the reality is you, I mean, that's the problem is it'll just get, I mean, you've been on at and t when it's having a bad day. You're not going to be able to get the stuff that you want. You keep having the shortsighted policy of selling everything off and selling everything off every day is going to be a bad day. [00:39:00] And the sad thing is people aren't going to know why. If you ask people, where'd Wi-Fi come from? I don't know, smart people in Silicon Valley invented it cellular, what does that have to do with it? I don't understand what any of this has to do with me. And it's like, yeah, and you shouldn't have to worry about that. But the reality is we're talking about taking half the spectrum that was allocated for [00:39:30] future Wi-Fi so that it could run at the speeds that are coming into your house, chopping it in half, shoving everybody down there just so that AT&T can get this at auction and try to sell it back to you, and they're not going to do as good a job.

Christopher Mitchell (39:46):
And on top of it, I'll just a final note is that this is a bill that will have a deficit depending on who you listen to, multiple trillions. It's hard for me to imagine that someone being like, oh, you know what? We saved another 30 billion. Like, [00:40:00] okay, but you stole it from my children and my future. That's that's not the trade off that I want

Harold Feld (40:08):
Here. And it's worse because it's like Cruz is saying, I want to earn less money. I want to have more deficit. I want to take the stuff away from you and sell it to AT&T. And because it's going to cost money to move people around, and because we're protecting certain military bans, that means the federal government is actually [00:40:30] going to make less money than they would under the house version. But hey, AT&T's in Texas and they're going to be happy.

Christopher Mitchell (40:39):
There's going to be a call to action from Public Knowledge, we believe at the end of the week with some more details. This is something that is moving quickly, so it is well worth making sure that your elected officials know about it. Reach out to them. Let them know that you're paying attention and follow that call to action, and let's [00:41:00] make sure that we protect these bans.

Harold Feld (41:02):
Remember, you don't have to oppose the whole bill. It's a big bill. I get it. If you do oppose the whole bill, great. But Republicans will just tune you out. But if you say, I oppose what Ted Cruz did to the spectrum, I want you to go back to the house version. That's something Republicans can listen to

Michael Calabrase (41:22):
And protect. The six gigahertz Wi-Fi band. Save our Wi-Fi,

Harold Feld (41:26):
Save our Wi-Fi, protect our Wi-Fi, protect CBRS.

Christopher Mitchell (41:30):
[00:41:30] Yeah, these are our small outposts in which we can make sure that we have a lot of future innovation and use in our homes and things like that. Thank you, both of you for the decades of work you've done to get us here and then to make sure there's still more benefits coming down the line. And thank you for your time today also.

Harold Feld (41:50):
Thank You.

Michael Calabrase (41:51):
Thank You

Harold Feld (41:51):
Thanks, Chris, for doing this and spreading the word.

Ry Marcattilio (41:54):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available at muninetworks.org/broadbandbits. [00:42:00] Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter, his handles @CommunityNets. Follow muni networks.org stories on Twitter: that handles @muninetworks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe [00:42:30] to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arne Huseby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Comments. This was the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Thanks for listening.