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documentary competition with a short video on one of our country's greatest strengths or a challenge the country's facing. we'll announce the winners on march 10th and show you their winning videos at studentcam.org. >> this week on "the communicators," a discussion about the current wireless industry with martin cooper who's credited for the creation of the mobile cell phone. >> host: well, recently on this program robert mcdowell was our guest. he's an fcc commissioner. and during that interview he mentioned somebody who's very influential in telecommunications industry. here's what he had to say. >> guest: i was recently speaking to the inventer of the cell phone who is, we all know who the unventer of the wire line phone is, alexander graham bell -- [inaudible] >> guest: his name is marty cooper. 99.9% of america has never heard of him. he's the most influential person nobody's ever heard of, and he's

in his 80s now, and you should have him on this program. >> host: and here he is. this is marty cooper on your screen. we're not sure whether tow curse you -- to curse you or thank you for inventing the cell phone;. >> guest: well, peter, would you give up your cell phone because of all these disadvantages? i don't think so. and that's true of most people. so the benefits, i think, outweigh the curses. >> host: could you briefly tell us what your role was or is in the invention of the cell phone? >> guest: well, it's a long story, and it has to do with the fact that at&t invented cellular telephoneny. as far as back as 1946, if you would imagine. and then in the 1960s they suggested they were prepared to commercialize it, and they had two conditions. one is that they were the only people technically and financially capable of creating this new concept of cellular

telephoneny and, there therefory wanted to have a monopoly. and the second thing, their version of cell phones was with car telephones, if you could imagine that. and i was with this little company in chicago called motorola, and our vision was that the time was ready for people to have the freedom of personal portable devices that would let them communicate wherever, wherever they were. so this little company decided to take on the largest company in the world. and we did. and by 1973 the fcc was ready to make a decision, and that decision was monopoly or not and will the industry get to pick the technology so that you could have portables in contrast with car treasons? telephones? so i decided the only way to do this was with a dazzling

demonstration, and i conceived of the thought of actually building a portable, not only a portable telephone, but the complete system and taking it to washington to show it to people who are influential there, take it to new york and let the press look at this and persuade the world that the time was ready for competitive portable, personal portable communications. and history tells us we were successful. >> host: how big was the original cell phone, and how much did it cost to develop the technology? >> guest: the cell phone weighed two-and-a-half pounds, it was huge. so big. i wish i had brought my model -- >> host: we have a picture of it on the screen. >> guest: ah, good. so you know what it looks like. the battery lasted for 20 minutes, but that was not a problem because you couldn't hold it up for 20 minutes it was so heavy. and in order to create this phone, which we did in a period

of some three months, we literally had to shut down the engineering in our company. we had everybody in the company working on one aspect or another so you could not have afforded to own that cell phone yourself, peter. >> host: what did it cost? >> guest: oh, we spent literally hundreds of thousands of 1973 dollars to create that phone. by 1983 the price hadn't gone down that much because in 1983 a comebl cell phone cold -- commercial cell phone sold for $4,000. not many people could have afforded that at that time, but we sold a lot of them. >> host: and where did the word cell come from? >> guest: well, the whole concept of cellular telephoneny has to do with spectral efficiency, and i hope we're going to talk about that later. it's the idea of being able to reuse the radio spectrum many times in one geographic area. the old way was you put up a tower in the middle of the city,

and you occupied a radio channel for a single conversation over the entire city and maybe 50 or 100 miles beyond that. with cellular to beny, you -- telephoneny, you divided the city up into little areas. naturally, we engineers had to come up with a new name for that. we called them cells, and it's possible to use one frequency in one cell, and then a few cells over you use is same frequency over and over again. and, of course, when you do that, people do move. that's the whole principle of being portable. you have to hand off. you have to have a continuous conversation as you move from cell to cell. so that is what the fundamentals of cellular telephoneny is, reuse and handoff. >> host: well, marty cooper, robert mcdowell, the commissioner, went on to talk about your theory of spectral efficiency, and what is that theory?

>> guest: well, the real issue i i -- has to do with what the size of the spectrum is. you hear a lot of people talk about spectrum is beach front property, there's only so much. well, if you go back, we've been using the radio spectrum for well over 100 years, over 110 years. and when marconi used it, he would transfer bits and every bit took six seconds for one bit of information. and we had a very limited frequency range in the spectrum. somehow or other we now transmit billions and billions of bits of information every second over the spectrum, and we repeat the spectrum over and over again. well, the ability for us to transmit information through the spectrum has improved by a trillion times since marconi did his transmissions. it's literally doubled every 30 months for over 110 years, at

least for the telecommunications area. so the spectrum is not a fixed entity, it's a continuously expanding entity, and we believe, we know -- those of us that are involved in the technology -- that we can keep doing this for the next 50 or 60 years, and the next generation is going to keep that going even beyond that. >> host: well, joining us in our conversation is paul kirby, senior editor of "telecommunications reports." mr. kirby. >> host: you talk about spectral efficiency. the fcc's broadband plan is coming out later this month recommending freeing up 500 megahertz of spectrum over the next decade. it will also talk about opportunistic uses of the spectrum. is your concern that the plan will focus on freeing up more spectrum rather than making better use of the frequencies? >> guest: well, freeing up more

spectrum is a wish and a hope. considering the way the congress and our regulatory agencies have set up the environment, it's very difficult to take spectrum away from somebody once they are licensing it. now, i must preface that with a comment that the spectrum belongs to the public, belongs to us, and it ought to be used in our benefit. but the system we have set up, auctioning, identifying a segment of spectrum with a specific service, has made the spectrum almost an issue of ownership. somebody gets a piece of the spectrum, and they treasure that spectrum and don't want anybody else to have access to it. very hard to gain if you take spectrum back from somebody that has it. but that's not the real issue, paul. the real issue is how badly do we need new capacity in this spectrum?

and cisco has made an estimate that within the next ten years the amount of information that's going to go over our wireless system is going to increase by 40 times. well, if you're an iphone user in new york, you're already experiencing some really difficult problems squeezing stuff through. now just imagine what happens if you increase that by 40 times. you're not going to solve that problem by getting 40 times more spectrum. there isn't 40 times more spectrum. the cellular carriers now have some 250 megahertz. the chairman has said in his broadband plan that he seeks to add perhaps another total of 500 megahertz only part of which would go to the cellular carriers. so there maybe is a potential to double the amount of spectrum. how are you going to solve the problem with 40 times an increase in capacity? it's new technology, and there

is lots of technology available today that the carriers can use and will use when it's in their interests, and there's more coming down the pike. we can talk about those things in detail if you'd like, but the solution to the spectrum problem is not redistributing the spectrum, it's not taking spectrum away from one entity, not even sharing the spectrum. it is, in fact, creating new capacity, in effect creating new spectrum. and that potential, that process has been going on for 110 years, and the potential for increasing the amount of spectrum is enormous. >> host: so what should the government do to give the incentive then for that to occur? or should they require the spectrum-efficient technology? >> guest: well, that's a superb comment because in the past this increase that i talk about, doubling every two-and-a-half years? it hasn't been uniform. it's happened in spurts.

and what has caused those spurts? well, the wig -- biggest reason is that people get starved. they need new spectrum, they have a new application. it's important, we've fought that battle in the land mobile industry in the 1950s and '60s, and so they become creative, innovative, and they create new techniques. the other process is the government says, if you get new spectrum, you have to use it efficiently or we won't give it to you. and that's what happened in the case of cellular technology. the whole process of cellular technology occurred because at&t said we, if you give us 30 megahertz -- 30, we have 250 today -- if you give us 30 megahertz, we'll never be back again. we have this new technology called cellular, we can keep making the cells smaller and smaller and smaller, and we will never be back for new spectrum

again. and here we are now 35 years later, perhaps p 40 years later, and the industry has 250 megahertz, and they're saying, we badly need new spectrum. now, the fact is that if the carriers are required to use more spectrally-efficient techniques to actually measure their spectral efficiency and report on it, i think we're going to find there's going to be a lot of innovation and a lot of new technology. >> host: are there, are there people who use the spectrum who aren't using it efficiently right now in your view? >> guest: well, i hate to pick on the broadcasters, but everybody else does, so i will too. but the, the broadcast industry in the 1950s used some 17 six megahertz channels, a huge amount of spectrum, for one

broadcast. and they did that because if you had a broadcast channel, the technology at that point required guard bands of various kind. well, within five years the receivers had gotten so much better and the transmitters that that wasn't with necessary anymore, but the broadcasters continued to occupy that huge amount of spectrum, and they did so until, as you know, last year. so if you could imagine going 60 years using many times more technology than was required, it's a perfect example of what we have done with our environment, made the spectrum so valuable that people hang on to it with all of their capability. >> host: now, how difficult as a practical matter? we're talking a lot about private spectrum users, wireless carriers and broadcasters. the government has a lot of spectrum. to find 500 megahertz, they're

going to have to go to the dwoft. how -- difficult. the department of defense could say we are spectrum efficient, in fact, they do say that, but we can't compromise our sensitive operations, so how difficult is it to go to the government and say that for their users? >> guest: well, it's very, very difficult, and you don't want to single out the government. it's difficult in any case. the fact is that there are many entities that are working very hard to use the spectrum efficiently, and there are many places where it's just impossible to get better. radar being an example. you use a certain amount of spectrum for radar, and we depend upon that not only for military applications, but in aircraft traffic control, and you don't want to cut these guys back, not if it affects our safety. so it would really deserve if we could put pressure on people to

become more efficient, and they will, they'll figure out ways to do it. but the thought that you can solve the problem by taking the spectrum away from somebody is naive. people that are using the spectrum now in general need that spectrum. yes, they can improve things, but taking it away from them is not going to solve the problem for other people. >> host: even taking it beat from the broadcasters as -- even taking it away from the broadcasters as has been suggested by chairman genachowski? >> guest: yeah, they've already done that but that's not the problem. the problem is not a 50 megahertz problem, it's not 100 megahertz, not a 250 megahertz problem, it's a gigahertz. it's a thousand megahertz kind of problem because that's what cisco says is going to happen in ten years. well, chairman genachowski --

and, by the way, i ought to tell you that there's nothing wrong with what the fcc, they've put a lot of work into this. the plan is a good plan. but they should not give the impression that it's going to solve the problem. the, if, in fact, we do require 40 times more spectrum for telecommunications in the next ten years, then that comes out to a thousand gigahertz. well, there are or only three gigahertz of spectrum that are useful for our kind of things, so a 30 times improvement. where are we going to find that? it just doesn't exist. new technology is the only way. >> host: why do you say that only three gigahertz is useful for cellular technology? >> guest: well, all it's useful for telecommunications in general. when you go up above three gigahertz or so, all of a sudden you run into a few problems like rain interference and the

antennas get to be tiny and small, and pretty soon it's very hard to get energy to go through the air. so we, the useful part of the radio spectrum just in my lifetime has increased considerably. and when i started work in 1954, we were using 150 megahertz as the highest frequency for voice communications. and little by little we learned how to do better, and by the time we got to cellular, we were up at 800 or 900 megahertz, and now we've got new systems coming on. clearwire is coming out with wimax systems at 2.5 gigahertz, and it works very well. you go beyond 3.5 gigahertz or so and the physics starts interfering. so there is a limit to the frequency range. >> host: for the sake of

clarification, we talked about broadcasters getting spectrum back, chairman genachowski said the plan would be a voluntary plan, so tv stations could voluntarily return the spectrum and then share in the proceeds of the auction of that spectrum. obviously, that would take legislation, but just to clarify that because there had been fears early on by the broadcasters that the fcc would, in fact, kind of involuntarily reclaim part of that spectrum. >> guest: no, thank you, paul, for claire tie being that. don't get me wrong, i don't think there's anything wrong with redistributing the spectrum, but to believe that that's going to solve this problem is naive. the benefits, notwithstanding peter cursed me a little bit at the beginning, the benefits of broadband, of the ability to send various kinds of data between us is going to be enormously -- we've only scratched the surface. there's so much that can be done, and i hope we get to talk about that later.

but we're going to need much more than you can get by just picking up 50 or 100 or 500 megahertz by transferring it from broadcasters no matter how you do that. >> host: not to get into too many of the technical details because not all the viewers are engineers, but can you give us ideas, what are some of the technologies that can make better use of the spectrum rather than just seeking more spectrum? >> guest: sure. well, we haven't talked about smart -- [inaudible] for just a second. what is the principle? well, think about all these cells that we talked about earlier that you asked about, peter. each one of these cells is a radio station. it transmits and receives. there's an antenna. you've seen these all over washington. they transmit in all directions. to reach out to the, to their subscribers. and they receive everything in if all directions.

when they transmit, most of the energy that is transmitted is wasted. all that's useful is what comes to the antenna of your cell phone. and when this station listens, it listens in all directions, and it hears all these other things and all it wants to hear is your cell phone. and what the smart antennas do is use an array of antennas and a lot of processing, and when they listen to you, they focus in on you and listen only to you and reject other people. and when they talk back, they talk back directly to you. what does that do? it lets you talk to a lot more people in the same amount of spectrum with the same equipment. so you use the spectrum more effectively, and you save tons of money. that's one way. another example of the kind of technology we're talking about, think of the fact that back to all these cell sites around washington? where are they? they're all outside on buildings

and towers. where do we hold our cell phone conversations? 70 % of cell phone doesn't makef sense, does it? so clever engineers have come up with devices called microcells, and these cells are located in buildings. and all of a sudden you have tiny cells and small cells mean more spectral efficiency. so that technology is happening. another thing the carriers are doing today is they're using wi-fi which is in the unlicensed stance, and they're offloading some of the data. so they'll make a cell phone that when you're walking on the streets or you're not in the area where there's a wi-fi network, you use the cellular network. when you're in a building or next to a wi-fi hot spot, you'll start using that hot spot

and not use the rest of the system. so big with improvement now. we have now offloaded the system. there are techniques for compression. we're sending a lot of information over the airwaves, and we're learning how to compress that information and send the same amount of information with a lot fewer bits. so these are just a few examples, but there are a lot more. >> host: mr. cooper, do you, do you think that those new technologies are being adopted in the national broadband plan that's due out from congress shortly? >> guest: well -- >> host: or due out from the fcc? >> guest: well, the technologies, they are being adopted, and my view is not fast enough. and the reason is the government, the national policy does not put appropriate pressure on people to do that. you'll find that the new systems that are being introduced, wimax and lte, they will

embrace smart antennas, they will embrace some of these other technologies, they will certainly use more compression. the carriers already announce plans to use cells, but as long as there is the hope that they can get new spectrum, they don't really have enough pressure to introduce new technologies, and that's the only point that i -- >> host: this is c-span's communicators program. our guest is marty cooper who is the inventer of the cell phone. paul kirby of "telecommunications reports," senior editor, is also here. next question. >> host: another big debate is how to treat public safety. the plan is going to recommend that the fcc reauction 10 megahertz of other spectrum and leave public safety with the 10 it already has nationwide. the public safety community, a lot of them, say we need 20 megahertz, we need twice as much spectrum as we're going to get

for broadband purposes. we talk about spectral efficiency and how spectrum's being used, public safety people historically will say we may not always be using the spectrum we have, but when we need it, it's got to be there are for us. how do you view the public safety spectrum? can those same techniques apply? or is there another way of looking at it, kind of like radars, for instance, for the government? >> guest: well, first, i ought to mention that the public safety section of our industry has always adopted the newest technologies. and there's no question in any of our minds that they ought to have the highest priority. the solution to that problem, in my view, what they try to do with this d block and the 700 megahertz range, and you would think that would have been ideal. and the principle there is what if we take a segment of spectrum and we have, share it between

public safety and a commercial network? with the understanding that when there's an emergency or a need in the public safety area, they could accommodate more and more of the spectrum, but under normal circumstances the commercial area would use it. and in exchange for having this money-making capability, the commercial people could pay for the whole network, and the public safety people would get the benefits of the network. i thought that was ideal. somehow that didn't work out. i suspect it was for several reasons, one is the fcc established a price level that was too high to attract people who had to build out this system, and that was unfortunate because i think they should have given it away. if somebody would actually build that system, think of how we would all pen fit.

benefit. the second is there's a question in some people's mind about whether you could commercialize a network where when there's emergency, you lost the service. well, i don't think there's any question about that at all. somehow there is a view, which i do not subscribe to, that all systems have to be the same, they all have to have the same level of reliability. i have a vision of the world where there are lots of different kinds of systems, and if you cut the price down low enough for service and say, well, you're going to have this service 95 or 98% of the time, but if there's an emergency, you're going to be out of business, but, boy, is it low cost, i think you'll find a lot of customers. so i hope that this concept of a shared system between public safety and commercial is brought back to life. >> host: marty cooper, what's your thoughts about some of the brain cancer warnings that have

been given about cell phones? >> guest: well, first of all, let me tell you, peter, i am not a doctor. i am a very heavy cell phone user. i've been using portable two-way radios for 50 years. i hate to talk about those long times, you might even figure out how old i am if i keep doing that. there have been lots and lots of studies. as far as i know, there has never been a conclusive, demonstrated study that has shown that there is an effect on the human body. there are some people that theorize that, but we don't know of any specific effect. right now the only effect that we're really aware of about rf energy is the way you cook food in your microwave oven. so it is true, if you hold your cell phone up to your