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>> this week on "the communicators," an update on efforts by the federal communications commission to develop a plan to expand broadband in the united states. our guest is blair levin who's leading up the initiative at the fcc. >> host: well, blair levin is back at the federal communications commission, this time as the omnibus broadband initiative executive directer, and he is our guest this week on "the communicators." amy schatz of "the wall street journal" is joining us, joining in the questioning of mr. levin. we're about 50-odd days away from the national broadband plan being presented to congress, could you give us a status update on that report? >> guest: sure. we have been giving status updates all along. in september we laid out for the fcc kind of what we thought the state of broadband was in the united states. in november we laid out what are the most significant problems we need to deal with, a couple weeks ago we laid out how to

think about how to address those problems. and right now we're in the situation where over the holidays we are busy trying to kind of write up our best view of what's in a very, very extensive record, literally tens of of thousands of pages have come in. we've had over 30 workshops where these issues have been debated, we've had a number of field hearings, we've had a number of what are called public notices where we ask people specific questions can, and we're now in the process of taking all that information in, and we'll be talking with the commissioner's staff and the commissioners, of course, in january trying to make the recommendations that'll, hopefully, put our country on the right path toward a very healthy broadband ecosystem over the next ten years. >> host: what is most important to you in developing this broadband plan? >> guest: well, there are a number of things. congress asked for four things very specifically, first to make sure we connect all americans. second, make sure there's a plan

for having broadband be affordable. third, that it be utilize today the maximum extent, and fourth, that we have a plan that broadband is used to solve certain public problems such as how do we reform health care, how do we save energy, how do we improve education and job training? what's most important to me is we find a way to meet the congressional mandate. >> host: cost estimates of the, of getting broadband expanded to all americans or to a great majority of americans vary widely. can you narrow down what you think the cost is right now? >> guest: well, it depends what you want to do with it. for example, in september we gave our preliminary cost estimates, what does it mean to build out a system to what percentage of americans at what speeds? you know, for example, if we think that broadband, if we want to make sure that 90% of americans receive broadband speeds, have at least one

alternative to receive a broadband speed of 10 megabits, it's not clear to me there's any gap at all. that is to say i'm not sure we need any new government dollars or even that many new private investment dollars to achieve that goal. on the other hand, if you want to get 1 00% of americans achieving 100 megabits, that order of magnitude is an incremental investment, either private of public, of about $350 billion. and there's a lot of variation. you know, our basic view is that the market ought to drive those kinds of decisions almost everywhere. but it's also very clear that there's some percentage of americans, you know, somewhere between 5-10%, who aren't going to receive what we think of as a minimum level of acceptable broadband, and that's where the government does have to step in. that's where we look to something like universal service

to solve that problem. part of the problem in solving the problem is that the current universal system, service system is broken. we have to simultaneously fix it as it is and transition it to support broadband instead of supporting voice. and it's a little akin to changing the engine of the jet plane while the jet plane is in flight, but we're doing our best to try to figure out how to do that. >> host: so what would you say the minimum level of universal broadband would be? what speed would you put that at? >> guest: well, we're looking at that now, and we'll be discussing that with the commissioners. i would say, you know, as we talked about at the september meeting, there are a number of different use cases for people. generally speaking, i think kind of the market today is about three megabits, that is to say the average american uses it in the way you need a download speed of about three megabits to do the kinds of things most americans do.

the use case seems to be increasing at about, i think, 25% per year in terms of, in terms of how people use it, in terms of the download speeds. we want to have the universalization mechanism produce kind of the minimum that gets us to, i think, about where we are today, maybe a little bit more. there's kind of a big step up when you go to, like, high definition video and things like that. i'm not sure that's what we need, but, you know, there's a lot of different elements about what we want people to be able to do but also where the step functions are in terms of the economic costs so that if you kind of move up, where do you cost a lot more money? so -- but i think it's somewhere in the kind of order of what people are doing today in terms of what we want to make sure is universalized over the next five to ten years. >> host: so you're talking about having three megabits per second for folks that don't have high

speed now? >> guest: we're starting the economics two, three, four, those are all kind of in range, and i might note that the, you know, a lot of people say, gee, we ought to have really big goals of 100 megabits to every home. when you look at the countries that have said they're doing that, what they're actually doing is things like 100 megabits to most homes. but then in terms of the universalization goal, which is quite different, they're roughly order of magnitude in that kind of one, two, three category. >> host: so recently rick boucher who's head of the house internet subcommittee sent a letter to you guys saying he thought we should have 50 megabits per second to 80% of homes in about five years. what do you think of that, do you think that's i chief bl? >> guest: -- achievable? >> guest: well, there are a number of different parameters. his letter said actual speed as opposed to advertise thed speed,

and that makes a big difference. >> host: doesn't that make it even harder? >> guest: well, if you have it be actual, it is harder. i think that's a very worthy goal the, but i think what we want to point out to decision makers like the congressman is, yeah, that's great. if we think we have a path for doing it, here's a path, but if that path requires congress to act in a certain way or the fcc to act in a certain way, here's what they need to do. so, you know, i think it's very worthy to kind of state, kind of stretch goals and see what we can do to try to get there. but, again, broadband is primarily a function of private investment. the big news the -- in terms of wireless over the next few years will be the investment by the cable industry in updating their networks, and it's not clear

it'll give speeds of 50 actual though at peak times -- not peak in terms of usage, but peak in terms of speed -- they probably can get there. but the question is whether a goal like that requires kind of a fiber upgrade. and then that depends on whether people like at&t and some others decide to, in response to cable, upgrade their networks. >> host: mr. levin, you've talked a couple of times about the broadband plan being market driven. >> guest: yes. >> host: i want to read two criticisms from public interest groups and get your response that that. >> guest: sure. >> host: this is from public knowledge with regard to the meeting just held last week on the broadband plan. there was no discussion of opening telecommunications networks to competitors, there was no discussion of structural separation of carriers into wholesale and retail components. these are factors that the harvard's burkman center told the fcc in a study two months ago were the the reasons other countries have surpassed ours,

and this is from free press, and something has to be done about the duopoly of cable and telephone companies that control virtually every background market in america. >> guest: correct. i have a lot of respect for both public knowledge and free press. i find their criticism not very productive. first of all, as to the unbundling and the ideas of bundling and structural separation, the burkman study did a fantastic job, i think, of pointing out various things that were going on throughout the world. but i think that we very much, we asked them to do that, and we very much wanted to have an understanding of what was going on in the world, but there are certain things where what is happening in some countries really isn't that germane to helping us figure out where do we go from here. and i would just point out as to unbundling, look, the courts threw that out, and we're not

that terribly interested in moving toward things which will just freeze capital investment and have long, complicated court battles. we may be proposing things that will be challenged, that always happens, but that one doesn't really strike me as that productive. structural separation, i haven't heard from anyone in congress or from anyone at the commission or really in the record, people asking for structural separation. but i would also answer both of them by saying that one of the problems i have with their critique is they fail to look at what's really going on in the market. and this goes to the other study we asked for which was the study done by the columbia telecom think tank up at columbia university. and what they're pointing out -- and it's a really big fact -- that there's going to be two very major investments in broadband networks in the united states over the next few years. one is we talked about it just a few seconds ago, the cable

industry is updating. the second is two large phone companies are upgrading the wireless networks to really for the first time provide broadband on a wireless mobile basis, so-called lte or 4g, fourth generation. we know those things are going to happen. those are baked in. that's a profound change in market. that's probably the biggest change in the last five years. what we don't know is, number one, how will consumers respond to that? we pointed out in the september meeting that if consumers respond to those changes by suddenly saying, hey, we really love the greater speed and we're going to move up to higher levels of speed, cable's going to be in a fabulous position. and, in fact, they'll actually be the only provider of what will then be the generally-accepted broadband. and that's an interesting scenario, you know?

but it's just as plausible that people could react by saying, you know what? we really don't need these higher speeds, what we really like is the mobility. so instead of doing, moving to dock sis 3, we'll just buy the slightly more expensive wireless mobile, but we aren't really that interested in the fix because, you know, we only need four or five megabits. we don't know what's going to happen, and it seems to me that's a very profound thing, and if you really don't know what's going to happen, the kind of very major surgery that those public interest groups are proposing which there's really no support for in the the record or on capitol hill and you really have to wonder why looking at as a practical matter given what the courts have done, you have to ask yourself, is that really on the table? but the bigger thing is it's really, in my view, not appropriate to be looking at those kind of major things when

there's such uncertainty about the market. i think it's great that we have a market that is moving, responding to certain kind of competitive dynamics. people are making very big investment bets, moving in different directions. and i think we have to wait and see kind of what happens there. i do think that there are concerns about competition. i don't accept their criticism that we're doing nothing about competition. and, indeed, there are a number of things whether it be allowing consumers to know far better about what kinds of performance they're getting, what kind of performance their neighbors are getting -- not their little neighbors, what other kind of performance is available in their neighborhood -- lowering the cost of deployment, the spectrum initiative we've been working on. we don't know whether wireless will be able to ultimately compete with wired. if we don't have more spectrum out there, the possibility of it competing is almost none. and one of the things the city

report did say which is troubling in terms of competition is that no new wired, fixed competitors are really on the horizon is. so i think there's certain levels of uncertainty. we're going to try to do all the things we think are positive, but again, while i have great respect for those two organizations, i don't really accept their criticism as being useful and practical at this time. >> host: this is c-span's communicators program. our guest is blair levin, he is at the federal communications commission, he is the omnibus broadband initiative executive directer, he previously served as chief of staff to former chairman reid hunt. our guest reporter, amy schatz of "the wall street journal." >> host: i don't want to beat a dead horse, but one of the reasons why open access became such an issue is because of the burkman study which the fcc asked for, and you say there's no support on the hill, but there was arguably not that much support on some parts of the

hill for net neutrality either. >> guest: i completely disagree. >> host: i think it depends on the party how much support there was for net neutrality, but when you're talking about competition issues like this, it sounds like your basically saying from your perspective open access is not ab issue -- an issue, and that's sort of off the table now. >> guest: no, that's not what i said, and let me say we did ask for the burkman study, and we gave them complete and totally editorial freedom in doing it. we simply asked for, as we said when we announced it publicly, we'd like a review of all -- basically a literature of everything that's gone before. we thought that was an important foundation stone for having a data-driven, analytic record. they did a lot of things that are very helpful to understanding what's going on, but fundamentally it's backward-looking. that's valuable, but it's fundamentally backward-looking. and we also asked the columbia

folks to be for forward-looking. we thought both of those were very important. unbundling covers a wide spectrum of things. the court threw out certain kinds of unbubding things, but, you know, there are still uninies that are unbundled network elements that are still provided for in the law and still exist, and there are certain kinds of categories where we'll be looking. but kind of the large-scale, let's say, let's kind of go backwards to precisely where we were in 2003, 2002, 2001, that's really not practical. and the court decision definitely tied the hands of the fcc in moving forward. we have, you know, there's always a choice when you do a plan like this about whether you want to be kind of, what you want to say, how you want to approach it, and we want to approach it simultaneously visionary and practically. and, you know, the notion, you know, you can say there's not

that much support for the hill on net neutrality, i definitely disagree, and you could look at the committee chairman and subcommittee chairman and a number of -- admittedly, there seems to be a partisan divide about it -- but i haven't heard anybody on the hill say the structural separation is where we ought to be heading. >> host: so then if the competition -- >> guest: and by the way, just to be clear, i'm not sure that's a good idea either. but that's not the only measure of things. there's certain things that are very different about america. in a lot of the countries that the burkman center covered, the -- bergman center covered, here in the united states we have both a cable company and a telco/cable providing broadband. now, there's advantages and disadvantages to that. but that's where we are, and we plan on building a plan based on america's strengths and trying to compensate for certain kinds

of weaknesses, but building on where we are. >> host: so if cable and wireless and phone -- so basically it's cable and phone companies moving forward, and they're going to be really driving the next generation of broadband and you're expecting them, whatever they're going to be doing to increase their speeds, are there things that the government could do to help those companies increase faster? i mean, tax credits or other things? >> guest: first let me say that i disagree with the premise of the question because when you look at the broadband universe, you're just talking about the networks. competition -- there is a function where there's competition within, between the networks. but what we see happening in the broader broadband ecosystem is a lot of the innovation, a lot of the job growth, a lot of the investment, a lot of the new applications, those are being driven by other forces that are not simply ant the network. -- about the network. probably the single biggest driver in growth of broadband today is the iphone.

that is driving people to all kinds of uses. it's, you know, the demand for spectrum is growing up hugely. but people are experiencing broadband in a completely different way than you would have anticipated prior to the arrival of the iphone. and by the way, i think even apple itself didn't anticipate it because when they originally came out with the iphone, they weren't really creating a platform for the applications. that kind of developed later, and that's really a stunning and very important development. so, yes, we are focused on trying to see what we can do to make sure there's a better competitive the dynamic between existing providers, but we're also trying to make sure there's kind of healthy competition within the ecosystem, that's one of the reasons why we focused on the settop the boxes. that's one device that hasn't seen the kind of innovation that you seen with computers, laptops, notebooks, etc., nor mobile devices. so that's one of the reasons we're looking at that.

>> host: what about the national broadcasters worried about their spectrum being taken away? what do you say to them? >> guest: yes. look, it's not that, first of all, we're not taking away anybody's spectrum. here's what we are saying, number one, we believe the record is very clear on this. in three or four years, our country will have a very big problem with its mobile broadband. unless we act now to start making sure there's more spectrum put into the system. you know, there are some broadcast canners who are saying there's no evidence in the record. i don't know what record they're looking at, there's very significant evidence in the record that that will occur. number two, we have to have a plan that gets more spectrum or the consequences will be that the american mobile broadband experience will be much more expensive, and the service will be lousier than our international competitors. and when you consider that the

mobile broadband platform will probably be the most important platform for economic growth, the most important platform for job growth, the most important platform for investment in the next ten years, this is a very, very serious problem for the country can. it's a huge opportunity for america. we're extraordinarily good at applications. it's not an accident that apple is here, it's not an accident that google is here, that facebook is here. this is a tremendous opportunity the. but if we don't have the spectrum necessary to build that platform, all of that is going to go elsewhere, and the great companies of the next decade will be enter else. so that's the problem. so if you accept that as a problem -- and you can argue about that, but it seems to us the record's pretty clear -- then the question is, what do you do about it? interestingly, the broadcasters have the spectrum that is well

suited to help alleviate this problem. we're not talking about taking it away from broadcasters. rather, what we're talking about is asking the question, can we create a market mechanism so that as the importance of this becomes clearer and as the cost of not having it becomes clearer we can have those broadcasters who don't need all the spectrum -- and by the way, most broadcasters, not all, but most are using all of their spectrum very infrequently, if at all. some broadcasters want to do big high-definition programming at some times, but almost no one is using the entire 19.4 million bits of information stream all the time the. it's just, it's not happening. so it's perfectly fine. i, it's kind of an interesting debate. we're trying to figure out market-based solutions so that those broadcasters who think it is worthwhile to keep all of theirs, if that's what they think is worthwhile and are

making a market-based decision, that's okay. other broadcasters who feel that, you know, most of the broadcaster value now is created not by the over-the-airstream, 80-90% of it is being created by the transmission over cable and satellite. so the value to them of that spectrum is less than i think people know. people tend to put it in a binary framework like, you know, we either have it all, or we're dead. and that's just not, that's not the way any business works. business is always shifting the value of assets. you know, as a country the investment of spectrum into certain things is probably the single most significant investment it makes, right? the value of the asset that broadcasters control, which is an asset that belongs to the people of the united states, is order of magnitude the $60-$80 billion. now, that was an investment that was made basically 60 years ago

at a completely different time in a completely different context, and you have to ask yourself, should the -- if the country looks at that as an invest. as it should, you know, is that the the right way to be investing that asset in terms of job growth, in terms of investment, in terms of innovation, in terms of what we want our country to be? there's an an lust, craig moffett -- analyst, craig moffett, who said the critical question is, ten years from now do we want to be known as the best broadcast can television country or the best broadband country? i think we can do both, but here's what's almost certainly true, if we don't get more spectrum into the system, we will not be the best mobile broadband country, and i think that's really important for this country to aspire to. >> host: you seem to be focusing a lot of your time on commercial spectrum, and if you're talking about inefficient use of spectrum, arguably, there are

some folks who say the government's not necessarily using its spectrum most efficiently either. there's plenty of federal agencies who are sitting on big chunks of airwaves and really aren't doing much with it. why are you focusing so much on commercial when the government's sitting right there? >> guest: again, i just have to disagree with the premise. it's absolutely true that the press in covering us has focused a lot of time because the conflict with the broadcasters is always fun to write about. we are spending a lot of time working with other government agencies in a much quieter way trying to figure out, again, what are market-based incentives that can help drive government officials to the a more accurate assessment of spectrum? that is to say, you know, if they're not really using it, then we need to put that into some kind of commercial play as well. it's just that those discussions tend to be quiet whereas the

discussions with the broadcasters tend to be more public. >> host: so -- >> guest: but we're spending a lot of time. >> host: okay, let's say you get the airwaves, so arguably you're probably going to auction them off, i guess you could use them -- well, you're probably going to auction them off. >> guest: i think there's a license, and you can't really make the decision about what percentages go where until you know how much you're getting back. >> host: so if you auction them off, let's go with the premise that if you do auction them off, how do you auction them off in a way that you just don't allow at&t, verizon to get even more dominant in the the u.s. wireless market than they already are? because if you look at their spectrum positions, they're so far ahead of t-mobile. >> guest: it's a great question, but the problem is until you know how much you're getting back, it's an irrelevant question. and, believe me, the broadband plan has plenty of questions we need to address. we've talked about spectrum,

we've talked about competition, there's a whole bunch of things we're working on. how do we make sure broadband works for education, for health care, for public safety, for saving energy? how do we improve adoption? we're dealing with a lot of questions. the specifics of how the fcc should address spectrum, and again, this is not a problem that's right in front of our face, this is order of magnitude for 2014, 2015 which means you have to start the process now. but those questions should be addressed when you know what the market conditions are and when you know how much spectrum you're getting back. >> host: will we see in the national broadband plan a plan for public safety issues in spectrum? >> guest: yes. >> host: amy schatz, last question. >> host: when might we get more ce tails about this plan? >> guest: the public safety plan or -- >> host: the plan in general. >> guest: yeah. look, even our critics have

admitted this is the most open and transparent process the fcc has ever done. you've never had a process where pretty much every month we've begin benchmarks and told people where we are. what the public already has is essentially a first draft of kind of stating where we are, what the problems are, stating ways of thinking about the problems. you know, i suspect that over the course of the month of january people will hear a more granular version of ways we're thinking about solving the problem. so i think that's, that's where we have to kind of leave it for now, but i suspect in january there'll be a lot of discussion about it, and then in february we'll release it. >> host: and february 17th is still a firm date? >> guest: that's the date that congress set, that's the date we plan on meeting. >> host: blair levin is the omnibus executive directer for the federal communications commission. hope you'll come back and give us an upd