affirmative action steps toward denuclearization. ischemic the foreign minister of japan as it was to meet cicatrix went to -- the foreign minister of japan as opposed to meet secretary clinton march 29 by believe. >> i don't have anything to announce at this point. thank you. ..

what specifically attracted you to it? >> guest: well, i think there's for areas where the commission truly has done a superb job. the commission members and their staffs have evaluated thousands of comments, sent to the commission by interested members of the public. it may have charted a true long-range vision for ways that we can deploy broadband more

lively and encourage people to adopt it. there are four areas where i think they've done a particularly good job. first, just as we are proposing in legislation that's now pending in our subcommittee, the commission is proposing the transition of the traditional universal service fund that enables telephone service to be affordable and high-cost rural areas. from just the support of basic telephone service to the support of broad and as well, realizing that telephone companies should be offering broadband in these very rural areas. the commission, very similar to what we're proposing in our legislation is recommending that the fund be used in the future to support increasingly broadband deployment. and i think that the superb recommendation. we are seeking, by the way, to place a provision into law in

legislation that authority been subjected to a legislative hearing on our subcommittee in which we hope our subcommittee and the full committee on commerce will be approving in the very near future. secondly, the commission is targeting very clear need to have more spectrum made available for commercial wireless services. in the wireless space, we find more and more users as people are going to wireless mean for the tanning all of their communication. and also in the wireless phase, the applications are becoming more data intensive. applications that involve some video component, including now full motion video are becoming far more current and users are wanting to move to the next level, which is high-definition slow-motion video. and in order to accommodate that, it is going to be necessary to identify additional spectrum that can be made available for commercial wireless services.

legislation that we are now moving through the house of representatives, that was approved last week in our committee on commerce would implement this part of the commission's recommendation. we are direct to the fcc along with the u.s. department of commerce to identify that those parts of the wireless spectrum that could be repurposed for commercial uses. we are giving both agencies ample time to conduct a thorough inventory of all uses of the wireless spectrum at the present time. identifying those areas in which spectrum is underutilized and therefore potentially could be repurposed for commercial wireless options. we hope to have that bill to the house of representatives within the course of this month. as a third matter, i have recommended to the fcc some time ago that the broadband plan sets a high goal, that we target

broadband speed to the home into the business that are very similar to what we see in places like south korea today. and those are broadband speeds of as much as 100 megabits per second. i was pleased to note that the commission's recommendation targets that level of achievement in terms of data rate. i think that's very important for this network to accommodate the needs that will be prevalent in the future, those high data rates are going to be important. and that will enable things like advanced medical energy to be sent instantaneously across the internet and for people to be able to obtain high-definition slow-motion video as a routine complement to their ordinary internet applications. and then as a fourth matter, the commission i think very appropriately has addressed the need that we have with regard to ensuring that public safety agencies across the united states fire, police and rescue

departments are located in communities all across harnisch and how fully interoperable means of communicating one with the other. we learned in hurricane katrina. we learned to 9/11 that when first responders from a variety of different places can being on a central location to provide services, day date in many cases cannot talk to each other. and that isn't over that needs to be correct than from the standpoint of promoting public safety nationwide. it's going to take money to do that in the commission has recommended a comprehensive approach, which i think is very appropriate for achieving that test. it would involve auctioning what we call the d block. this is a portion of the 700 megahertz spectrum that broadcasters vacated recently in the transition to digital broadcasting. this was a spectrum over which they were broadcasting analog television signals. most of that was purchased by

the wireless carrier or who are launching their fourth generation of wireless technology this year and next year using most of that spectrum. a portion of the 700 megahertz spectrum, which we call the d block still is in the hands of the federal government. it has not been auctioned and the commission is proposing to auction it without condition for purchase at auction and the proceeds from that would then be devoted to helping to build out the equipment necessary for first responders nationwide to have fully interoperable communications capability. it will take some additional funding with the d block revenues by themselves will not be enough to achieve that goal. so some additional revenues are going to be necessary in the commission has recommended general appropriations for that. i support that recommendation. i think as difficult as it is to obtain appropriations for these

projects, this is an area where we can attain bipartisan operation in a bipartisan commitment to provide the critical funding that is necessary in order to assure that public safety is advanced enough first responders have these vital communications capabilities. >> host: well, chairman boucher in reading the 350 plus page national broadband plan proposal, some specific proposals would like to get your comments on relating back to some of the issues that you talked about. number one, what are the proposals when it comes to spectrum? the fcc, within the next ten years should free up a new contiguous nationwide band and my sin use. do you support that? >> guest: this is with respect to public safety. is that your question? >> host: no condos is not in connection with public safety. this is to allow what the commission says is more innovation and allowing more companies and to an unlicensed area of the spec to.

>> guest: well, we already have set forth a number of new areas where people could provide both licensed and unlicensed uses. i'm thinking particularly of the white spaces, which are the intervals between the broadcast channels that are unused at the present time and in some places rural areas that are particular, and other whitespace is constitute large places those doctrines that are available for wireless internet access and in some communities actually runs in my district are they whitespace experiment where wi-fi is in place at the present time using unlicensed pieces of the white spaces for that purpose. so we have that ahead of us and that test is proving successful. i think with the nationwide rollout in the not-too-distant future. i have not had an opportunity to review a link to commissions of the recommendations with regard to unlicensed uses as a practical matter i certainly

support adding to our inventory of unlicensed internet access potential and possibilities and i think the recommendations certainly is worthy of consideration. we'll have to review it. >> host: chairman boucher, read was quoted saying rugby and should and would eat the new national common media. and with spec to the uss universal fund, do you see more funds going towards broadband am currently going towards land lines? >> guest: inevitably that has to happen. at the present time, the federal universal service fund can be used only to support traditional telephone service. by law it is limited just to that use. now the high cost fund is $4.5 billion every year and it is fully subscribed at the present time and is being used

by a local exchange carriers in order to support their telephone service offerings. candidly, they are also using it in order to deploy fiber optics and two communities over which they do carry local telephone service, but they're also carrying over that i've are type one citizens solved high-speed internet access and it becomes for their dsl services. so without question, they are today even beginning to make broadband more available to the utilization of universal service funding although it's generally under the guise of enhancing the capability to offer traditional local television service. our legislation would take two steps in this critical direction. first, we would enable the guys to be removed. we would say that immediately to the extent that a carrier wants to do so, it can use its federal universal service fund in order to deploy broadband capabilities aired secondly and very importantly, within a five-year

period up to our bill becomes law the carrier would be required as a condition of continuing to receive universal service funding to deploy broadband throughout it service territory so within a five-year period. we would see effectively a complete transition from just supporting local telephone service to supporting broad and peered at the appointed time, virtually all of these carriers are going to be transition to the internet protocol or the means of carrying all of their traffic telephone service included. so it does not wear to the disadvantage of offering basic phone service to have this transition to base. i've been coordinating with the fcc for the past year and extensive conversations with larry levin who at the staff level has had a broad and planned effort and also with chairman genachowski and sharing some recommendations about key components of the plan. the items that i have discussed to date on this program are

items that i've recommended to the commission and i'm very pleased to see that the commission has adopted those as a key part of the plan and that includes the item that we just discussed. >> host: congressman, two final questions. another recommendation by the sec. he sec should consider free or very low-cost wireless broad and as a means to address the affordability are your two adoption and they talk about advertising supported service on this section of the spectrum. do you agree with that? >> guest: just go i think it has a place. i'm not sure the extent to which the federal government would even be involved in making those decisions if a commercial provider wanted to offer free services across the network in which they delayed investments and then support those services with advertising that would certainly be within the ambit of what we'd expect a private companies to do as part of a

successful business model. so i think it's a good idea. it will have its place. i'm not sure the federal government has any role in either mandating or supervising that. >> host: and finally, congressman, should network management or network neutrality be addressed in the land player and is that? >> guest: no, it is not an frankly i think it should not be. that's not to say it should not be addressed. we are on a separate track looking at ways that we can assure that the internet remains open. i'm committed to that. a free and open internet is essential to the success that the internet has enjoyed as the biggest platform for commercial innovation and business success that this country has ever seen. we want to keep the openness, the unfettered character of it, the ability of any application provider to access it on equal terms with another provider, the ability of any user to select any content on the internet that he wants to access and be free

to do it. that has to be preserved. we are talking to the broadband providers. were talking to the companies that rely upon the internet as a means of transporting their product to their customers and were working toward a set of understandings that hopefully we can embody an statute in the not-too-distant future and that will help us achieve that goal. >> host: who will be testifying at the march 25. >> guest: the march 25 hearing, that's next week is being held with the five commissioners of the federal communications commission as witnesses their purpose will be to talk about the national broadband plan and into answer some of the questions that you post here this morning, which i'm sure members of our committee will pose as well as other questions. >> host: congressman rich bowers chairman of the congress subcommittee on technology. thank you for being on "the communicators." up next, the top republican on the commerce who is the ranking member on the commerce subcommittee on technology. congressman stearns, after the

federal fcc broadband plan proposal was released, you sent out a press release and this is what she said. we'd like to get you to expand on this if you would. i am concerned that the plan may contain stalking horses for investment killing ideas such as so-called net neutrality mandates or return to outdated monopoly-era regulation. >> guest: well, peter, this plan as you can see here, i thought i'd bring up live among so everybody can see it. it's a pretty significant document. and peter, it's got a lot of worthwhile things in it. i think a lot of the people who believe that the way to get on the present rock band in america through is too the free-market and not through government regulation. i was just going ahead and say no wait a second here, be careful that you have a lot of mandates in this plan which would cause, shall we say, the people who are putting down the fiber optics to hold off and not

expend the capital. and so i was listening to things that concern me. one was changing the jurisdiction of the fcc on the internet from title i, which is really getting them into just the wires in connection. but if they put in the title ii, then they would have to jurisdiction on content, which worries me. i was one of my concerns. in the other was a term called net neutrality, which i call net regulation, which is if you are going to to peer and downloading a lot of information, right now the information can be analyzed. under net neutrality the government stepped in and said no, you can't do that. and so just like a traffic jam with no alternative but just two of the government saying you can't be involved at all. it went away, it's disrupting the internet. so what i did, peter, spring for the couple ideas that i had come up that amount there. i have to be honest with you, there is not in this national broadband plan that provided a

lot of talking about that, which is good news. so i'm sort of release. >> host: we just spoke with chairman boucher and one of the issues he raised was the universal service fund. and he says that it will probably be necessary that uss funds go toward broadband deployment rather than landline telephones. you agree that? >> guest: i do. in fact the plane here talks about reform in the universal service fund. analysts know that when we started with telephones the rural parts of the united states couldn't get phones. there was a tax to help everyone provide the extent of the government to give back money to provide telephones for the rural part of this country. for now the question is do we need to change that? and i think we do. we need to really, shall we say freeze the cost for universal funds for telephones and concentrate on broadband. not to get broadband omnipresence, i'm not sure that the way we are going is the best

way. now peter, the report, this plan that came out shows that 95% of the households in america have access to broadband and two thirds of those have high-speed. one third decided not to have access. so were down to about 7 million people in this country that don't have it. so the question is how do we get those people? i don't think we have to spend a lot of government penny money to go across to the people that don't have it. go to the people that are underserved. as another stimulus has $7.2 billion to spend to get people broadband. would you think about it, that's a lot of money to help the 7 million people who don't have it. it turns out they're starting to get contracts out to underserved areas rather than people that are underserved. and there is a distinction there. i think the compilation is $2.2 billion the goals within here at the boucher, chairman

boucher mentioned and i agree with we need reform of the universal service fund. >> host: congressman stearns, one of the issues that has been talked about when it comes to broadband is competition. in your view, does this plan lend itself to competition? >> guest: i think it does in the sense that it gives schools. you know, the plants as they want across america they want to have 100 megabytes for downloading and 50 megabytes for uploading. sabbatical i think can be achieved in some countries are going to do it. then further on in the plan to talk about one gigabyte broadband. now that's a quantum step upward. but i think that the goal that's good. but the question is, can you get that through government funding, through government mandate, through government participation? or can you get to the natural market? the market of course wants to sell broadband higher-speed. i saw the local cable companies are not advertising -- most cable companies only have

five megabytes. i think the market is going to move there. i'm not sure that government needs to regulate so much to do it. but i think the goals of the plan are good. >> host: one of the recommendations of the national broadband plan proposal, the fcc should consider free or very low-cost wireless broadband as a means to address the affordability barrier to adoption. do you agree with that? >> guest: well again, we're moving back to the government stepping in and guaranteed for all americans broadband and have it subsidized by taxpayers. now, you didn't see the government stepped in to subsidize the iphone. we have a new ipad is coming out. now the ipod everyone has an ipod today and the reason is the price keeps coming down. so i think the government has to figure out a way to do this so that the price of these for broadband comes down in the government comes in and subsidizes and taxes it is not necessarily going to bring it down. so i would say it sort of mixed reaction to what your statement

is, peter. to them and if we allow the market toward the cost of broadband will come down to cite the cost of computers, the amount of memory on the his computers has gone up exponentially in the cost of come down almost exponentially. so this can happen in broadband and you just have to be careful the government doesn't step in with mandates. >> host: another recommendation to accelerate broadband deployment, cover should consider providing optional public funding to the connect america fund, such as a few billion dollars per year over two or three-year three year period. >> guest: well, i think some of these programs are talking about having a mixed reaction about. you know, i think when they talk about taking in providing more spike term for wireless, that's a good idea. sell enough the d block, allow people to have more and more spectrum and get this off of the government could auction it off which will create the

allowability of more speed for fourth-generation wireless ear to what they're doing here, remember if they allocate any money it's got to come from somewhere, particularly with this huge deficit we have and the president talking about a freeze in discretionary spending although small shows the problem is that we've got to be careful if we allocate more money for things that the taxpayers going to have to pay for. >> host: while the commission was developing the plan, were you in pretty close touch with them? >> guest: well, not really. it went down a little bit of partisan lines. i think the two republican commissioners were told about it, but they were not involved with the actual development. a lot of people came from outside congress, outside the fcc were hired and asked how much money did they send into the people were. there's no transparency that i know of that is pointed out these are the people that were hired to develop displayed, how much money did you spend?

and i don't think the two republican commissioners know that. so i've actually written a letter to genachowski, the chairman asking the same questions because here in congress about the times there's an agenda. unless you know the participants were and what they are paid, you really don't know perhaps they could be a conflict of interest. so my concern is i like to see lots of transparency when you develop a plan, a national broadband plan for the country should have transparency. >> host: in effect, that letter was sent on march 12, great letter. and you also ask, why was it necessary to delay the plan to march 17 from february 17? have you gotten an answer from chairman genachowski on that? >> guest: no end in all fairness he needs some time to answer this letter. i think we told them arch 22. but i think he's going to be before the telecommunications and internet subcommittee very soon. and so i'll be able to ask him directly if he intends to answer

my letter and perhaps i can ask them to also answer some of the questions that were in the letter, namely why did he delay? how much did it cost? and who were the people that developed as planned and tell the american taxpayers who they are. >> host: commerce ministers, throughout several interviews on "the communicators" we've heard about the spectrum and chairman genachowski has told us that there's a coming shortage of spectrum and we talked with marty cooper, the founder of the cell phone who said that there's not a shortage of spec or, but it needs to be used more efficiently. where do you stand on the issue of spectrum and how to develop more or find more space? >> guest: well, i think marty is absolutely correct. there is enough spectrum. obviously, the d block, some of the spec term we can start auctioning off. is there some talk about the fact that given to the broadcasters as you know what the analog to digital.

when they were too digital they picked up a whole lot of new channels they can use if the fcc wants to do that they should reimburse them. but they're ours others ways to do this, but i think if we use the spectrum more efficiently i think that's one of the first steps that all of us agree upon. >> host: congressman cliff stearns is the ranking member on the commerce committee on to allergy. he's joining us this week on "the communicators." we spoke with rick boucher a few minutes ago. if you'd like to the national broadband plan is under 50 plus pages. you can go to c-span.org/two indicators. aside from the fcc has been hyperlinked at that space. what else did you disagree with that we haven't discussed? >> guest: well, i think we covered it. there's one area i'm concerned about which is sort of a business model.

if you go out and lay down the fiber optics and you make the investment and you own it, there some talk about unbundling. and what this would mean is that companies that own the fiber optics invest in the fiber optics and sell the fiber optics to the customers, they might have to be separated into three separate companies. this unbundling would create i think a lot of thanks to the market and i think we've got to be careful if these people are willing to go out with a capital to do it, i think the fcc has got to be careful with this idea of unbundling which would mean that a corporation after they spent all the money, made the investment and without limit and successful time it has to rip up out the corporation into three segments because of the government. so that's one area i'm a little concerned about. and as i mentioned some of the others, i think these are things that we have to be cautious about more than anything. i think the goals of this

broadband plan are excellent and as for interesting reading. i hope a lot of the citizens of this country will take time because the productivity america is going to come from this type of deployment, broadband fourth-generation wireless, high definition television, these three together are going to increase productivity in america and we have other proprietary information here in this country so that will be on the vanguard of this development and there was nothing but good news for this country. we just got to make sure that the government doesn't get in the way and stop its deployment. >> host: what would be the purpose of that unbundling that you spoke of? >> guest: well, what happens if they feel from the blood too much power and they control the costs that could be a monopoly. and so, as you know, microsoft was under the justice department purview because they felt that they should be unbundled. there's other corporations that are like that. sometimes these corporations who make these investments are doing it very efficiently and other corporations can do the same

thing. so the question would be when you unbundled, are you breaking that out for monopoly reasons or you breaking it up because the company is too competitive and is getting something that at low price? so in some cases you don't want to take a corporation is doing a good job in keeping the price low enough to them to rate themselves that because then they become more inefficient and the medium that consumers will lack the damage is. so it's a very, shall we say, has to be well-balanced i guess you'd say. >> host: congressman stearns, does does this putting perfume on itself to innovation and entry into the telecommunications market by smaller companies? >> guest: well, have to tell you. i haven't read the whole plan, but the portions i've read i think is i stimulated in america the idea that we can get one gigahertz speeds on broadband.