rule of the ntia on a rise in

the president telecommunications and implementing telecommunications policy? >> we are not that well-known and agency but we think we are an important one even though we are tiny. we are the statutory the adviser to the president on communications and information issues. right now our focus is in three major areas. first, the spectrum. we handle all the spectrum assignments, the federal agencies, such as the department of defense, the department of justice and so we spend a lot of time focusing on spectrum. we also, by the recovery act, we are assigned the task of putting out $4 billion of grants to expand abroad and access and adoption across the country. and third, we are spending a lot of time on internet policy issues. this is an area that traditionally has not had an agency in the federal government to coordinate policy across the various agencies that have equities in the area of the

internet, but we are devoting a lot of time and resources to developing administration policy in that area. >> so how you work with the sec and cftc for instance? >> both of those are independent regulatory agencies, so they have their own agendas and they are independent of the administration but recording with them very closely, so in the ring of spectrum, the sec handles assignments of spectrum to commercial providers. we handle the assignments to federal users. but much of the spectrum is actually shared by both commercial and federal abusers. so we are always in very close working contact with the fcc on those sorts of issues. same applies with the federal trade commission in those areas that we work together, privacy being the most current one. >> mr. strickling, this week the ntia put out a spectrum report on spectrum availability. where is additional spectrum

coming from? where are you recommending that it come from? >> last june the president directed the ntia to work with the fcc and with all of the federal agencies to identify 500 megahertz upnews spectrum that could be allocated for commercial, broadband use. this is roughly double what is currently being used today or would double what is currently being used today in the industry. we've conducted what we call a fast track evaluation and then in addition with the president asked us to do is, with a plan for over the next five years to find that 500 megahertz and make it available. xu yesterday we released two reports. one is or ten your time table and plan for identifying and reallocating 500 megahertz, and we will do that working with the fcc because some of the spectrum will come from federal users, some will come from commercial users. in addition, the white house

asked last spring to see our their bands you can look at right now and make some preliminary decisions on reallocation. so we took a look to see if there were some bands where no federal relocation would be required. and what i mean by that is when we have federal users -- in some cases as i said before we can share the spectrum of commercial broadband in some cases the federal users have to clear out of the band so it can be made available exclusively for commercial services so we took a look at three bands where we could continue to operate the federal uses and sure that spectrum with commercial uses, and out of that we've identified 115 megahertz we are recommending for reallocation to commercial use which can be done within the next five years, as a downpayment on the 500 megahertz goal but it's a good start to what we need to accomplish in the next few years. >> year to helpless dive into some of those issues is lynn

stanton a telecommunications reports senior editor. >> the report identified 2200 megahertz to be looked at before i realized and considered. and i looked at that and a little fan after this federal spectrum, a little more than a third come on federal land another one-third or so is shared, already shared. does that indicate sort of what you'll end up with in terms of finding that 500? you think roughly one-third will come from federal and one-third from on federal and one-third from shared? >> i think it's too soon to predict on that. will we do know is there's a lot of industry interest in the very specific in 1755-1780 range. it is a ban that we try to evaluate as part of our fast tracked. it's a damn that industry would very much like because there's already equipment that will operate in that band. it's already harmonized internationally for commercial

mobile use. and so that is a day and we are going to be focusing on here as one of our first priorities as we go forward under the ten year plan. beyond that it's very hard to predict what we will end up with. each day and will be looked at. we will determine its characteristics and its suitability for commercial broadband use. the current federal use, the availability if we want to relocate those uses or if there's an opportunity to share. so each band will undergo very diligent review and scrutiny. out of that i am sure we will end up with a 500 megahertz but i couldn't predict where the sources of the spectrum will come from. >> their spending legislation in congress that we address some of the issues you brought up in the report, one of which is the ability to have incentive options with respect to broadcast television. >> right. >> -- stations. what happens to the ability to actually make that 500 megahertz

available for commercial broadbent use if that kind of legislation doesn't get passed. >> it will certainly slow things down. the fcc as it's looked at the commercial use has identified broadcasting dance is a good candidate for the reallocation to commercial broadband service. but they believe that they needed incentive auction in order to carry out that reallocation as robustly as they would like. so the administration supports the idea of incentive options. next year the administration will be putting forth legislation to deal with that issue as well as other issues we think will speed up the process of federal agencies making their spectrum available more quickly as well. one of the things we find with federal agencies is the would be greatly aided if the had resources to do up-front planning, some r&d if necessary to be able to play and more

fruitfully for possible relocation or relocation. that will be part of the administration's proposal next year as well to try to provide more incentives and more resources for the allegiance to help them participate in this reallocation, relocation process. >> i noticed of the sort of hundred megahertz of the 115 that you have looked at comes from the dod. what is the dod's reaction to losing some of the dedicated spectrum? >> well, first and foremost, the 100 megahertz you're talking about in recommending it for real location, we have done so, protecting the department of defense mission. so one of the large uses in that ban is for naval radar. we are talking of radar installed on ships. also some radar systems on land as well. but what we've done to protect the naval mission is to craft what we call exclusion zones. as the ships come close to shore

and enter the radar they will basically blowout in the cellular system that's operating close to shore. so in our report we have created exclusions so the radar can operate close to shore and there won't be services and the exclusion zone that would be interfered with by the naval system. so this is a case of where the band is going to be shared geographically so the department of defense will continue to operate as normal but we can find places where the operations don't have any impact in the pursuit of a geographic area and we commit the spectrum available commercially in those locations. >> has there been blood that were concerned by commercial carriers about that? >> we are talking about a band is in the 3500 to 3600 range. it in 353 coo 3560 for the true technocrats' the watching this. that's not prime why you're less realistic today.

it's the van is used in europe for the services but it is an area that we think industry and particularly manufacturers have to work to develop equipment that will work in that band. what we feel we've done the whiz by identifying it and putting in the bank so to speak, we now give industry the assurance that spectrum will be available for them. they can start planning they want to do to make the maximum use out of the ban on the road. i don't expect it would be auctioned in the next year or so. but negative what we're looking at is a long-term plan and the spectrum can become very important before the end of the ten years. >> lynn stanton. >> the 1755 period 1780 megahertz band of the wireless industry is really eyeballing with under is currently federal use, that's only 15 -- is that right? 25 of the total 500 you need and

they are saying this is the sweet spot. no matter what you do you can't create 500 where there's only 25. there's complaints about the propagation characteristics 3553 kofi 560 that you mentioned his it isn't prime real-estate. how much prime real estate can you realistically manage to find for the 500 megahertz? bixby but we are going to be looking at a lot of bands. as you mentioned we're going to look it over 22 megahertz of spectrum to find the 500 necessary to meet the president's challenge to us. i couldn't predict today where that will be found, but what we know is there is a tremendous amount of innovation in this business, tremendous amount of growth and we hope and expect the industry and the manufacturers are going to be able to respond as spectrum is identified to finding the kind of equipment and the kind of

service that will make maximum use of the spectrum that we can make available to an estimate mr. strickling, could go back for a second to the incentive options. have you put a price tag or estimated price tag on the incentive options? who will they benefit, how much will go to commercial carriers? how much will go to the taxpayer? >> guest: >> this all to be worked out. the fcc will have the primary responsibility and to actually carry out any options. will get to congress to make some of the policy judgments that you just expressed, and as of now we don't have an administration position as to what the right balance of to be between how much is needed for the incentive and how much should go back to the treasury. >> or broadcasters on board cord murguia with your current plan? >> this is a spectrum they manage over there and would be in a better position to answer that question. >> in terms of federal agencies which the spectrum for them

there is talk you mentioned in the legislation i believe it is the commercial spectrum enhancement needs to be updated to give them better incentives for the agencies to release their spectrum and my understanding is this involves money for things like buying new equipment and doing the real location and the sharing. disincentive to most people mean something a little bit above and beyond covering your cost and is their anything like that in mind clacks they are losing something beyond just needing to buy equant. they are using the exclusive use or the entire use of spectrum. are you thinking about something? >> first we should clarify what federal agencies get. they get an assignment of spectrum unlike the commercial world where people can bid for spectrum and auction and half what would appear to be a greater property interest in the spectrum that they've paid for. in the case of the federal

agencies it's very clear they receive an assignment. that assignment can be withdrawn at any point in time if once they no longer needed. so there's a property interest federal agencies have. what we hear from the agency's who very much want to assist the nation and the administration in realizing the goal everyone understands the importance of getting more spectrum out into the commercial sector and our agencies are by no means an exception to that. but the requests are fairly modest, which is give us a chance to plan for this, give the chance to use the most modern technology if we are going to move so that we can use the spectrum that we move to more efficiently than we otherwise would. these are not unreasonable requests. the problem has been under the act we had because the funding to pay the agencies comes out of auction proceeds until you conduct the auction you didn't have the money to pay the agencies. what we are looking for is to find a way to be able to provide

some money up front even before an auction takes place to allow the agencies to plan better and that's what we hear from them what they want. they are not looking for a payout or a way to make money off of this. they are looking for a way they can responsibly work with the rest of the administration to help meet this goal but in a way that assists them as well. >> , one of the things we've heard about this efficiency of the spectrum particularly when it comes to wireless carriers. is there a lot of efficiency uzi can be from using the spectrum more wisely? >> it's went the ongoing challenge in this industry for every one in both commercial users and government users. clearly we are going to need to find ways to use the spectrum we have better than we can. you refer to it as efficiency. but what we are talking about are things like perhaps having smaller and smaller cell sites,

so more and more people can use the spectrum in a given area because you've got more sell sights. so that's something that can help. there's a lot of interest in sharing technologies, the ability to have two different types of uses, two different types of service providers in the same geographic area, each providing a service where the services can recognize each other and kind of get out of the way of each other. really important ideas. they still haven't been proven out in practice, but the fees are there and these are all things we are going to need to be looking at over the next few years to evaluate the ability to bring these into the commercial system and take better use of them. >> this is c-span's "the communicators" program. our guest this because the administrator of the national telecommunications and information administration larry strickling. also an assistant commerce secretary for communications and information.

lynn stanton with telecommunications reports, senior editor, is our guest reporter. mr. strickling, frequently what is your background to get you to this position? >> well, i have worked and number of positions, both in government and industry in the sector. i worked at the fcc ten years ago and was chief of the common bureau but i've also worked at large bell company, ameritech and have worked for a number of small carriers in this space as well including a broad wink communications allegiance, telecom, koren express, companies for the most part are no longer with us, but it was a bit of background in terms of seeing both small companies trying to build a business and as well as working for large companies like ameritech. >> and mr. strickling has his law degree from harvard. next topic. , lynn stanton. >> the first initial recommendation in the reports you just released hour for the shared use of 150 megahertz that are currently used for weather

balloons and military. should the recommendation of the shared use be an indication the industry didn't expect that is what much of the 500 megahertz allocationwill be that they won't have exclusive use of it? >> i would say not. keep in mind that when we selected these bands for the fast track analysis, the assumption we need is there wouldn't have to be any federal relocation and other words we look at the band's specifically because they could be shared between the commercial service and several users, so all 150 megahertz that categorization as well as the 4200 megahertz band that we continue to look at and possibly make a recommendation on down the road but no, there's nothing to be drawn from that in terms of what the rest of the 500 megahertz will look like because we started only with bands that could be shared.

>> kind of low hanging fruit. do you have a body in from the current federal abusers of the 150 megahertz or because the president said we need to do this you just kind of point to the spectrum initiative from last summer and say go do it picks before the fast track report that led to the 150 megahertz is a product of a very detailed process so in the case of the 15 megahertz we worked very closely with noah to understand their issues and constraints before we made that recommendation. the entire band that no law uses is a large van that we've identified 15 megahertz where we felt there could be a reallocation without great prejudice to noah's existing operations. it's still going to require them to do the redesign of a new with a satellite in terms of the

retial systems that go in it, but for the most part we are leaving the operations undisturbed we saw in fact we don't actually touch the weather balloons. the are the lower end of the ban but we do have some issues for some new satellites. and again, there are satellites working in the top 15 megahertz, but what we have done is as i mentioned the exclusion zones for the naval vessels and we also provide exclusion zones around the stations that control those with their satellites to prevent interference with for the no operations and to any commercial operations that might be nearby. >> for the viewers, know what is the national oceanic and atmospheric administration. >> right. >> when we talk about spectrum come increasingly to talk about it on a global basis, do we not? i mean, how much global cooperation is there when it comes to allocating spectrum to managing spectrum? >> will, there is the effort to harmonize spectrum internationally, but it's not 100%. what we have is the world radio conference that's held every

four, five years, we're able of these international allocation decisions are discussed and made to read when you deal with international aviation you have a whole nother set of international regulations to deal with, so it's very important in the overall plan of things and it's one we have to pay attention to. so i mentioned at one of the other fast-track bands we looked at is one that involves radar altimeters. well, that's a than the disease internationally by both domestic aircraft, commercial and military, and international aircraft. so before we could possibly make a decision about doing any reallocation in that than we have to understand the international implications of that because of course we constantly are having aircraft from foreign nations landing in the united states and we can't make a real vacation that might possibly affect the system stoddard used in a foreign aircraft. >> you mentioned that the top of the show that ntia is also responsible for the allocating

broadband stimulus for grants. what is the status of the money that you were given by congress earlier this year or last year and what is the status of that? >> i'm very pleased to say that we've met our deadline of allocating and awarding all of the broadband grant dollars by the end of the past september. >> about 4 billion? >> it was over $4 billion the was the deadline created by the recovery act, and we did it by building a program that didn't exist, staffing it up, going out and getting applications, reviewing applications, doing the due diligence we needed to do on it and making the award, so it is a real test of the team at ntia that they were able to stand up that program and complete all of the awards by the september 30th deadline. >> the annual congressional budget situation is given a little bit of problem you're supposed to oversee the actual use of the funds and you don't

have any money in the continuing resolution to this money propose in the fiscal year 2011 budget but you didn't get any in the resolution before operating on into december 3rd. >> december 3rd. >> so what do you do under those circumstances and how difficult is it to address that issue? >> fortunately we've been able to operate normally during this period of time through arrangements we've worked with the office of management and budget but you're correct, we don't actually have the dollars and we are going to need those dollars to avoid any delay or disruption in the program. so we have been working very closely with congress and the white house here since the beginning of october to first to really educate people on what our needs are and what the impacts hour of our situation and to really make the case that the need to fix the congress needs to fix this year in the session the are currently in. so hopefully we will get a resolution of this by the end of the session on december 3rd.

but it's been a challenging month as we tried to deal with that because as you pointed out, getting the money out was freely very difficult, very complicated, but it was only the beginning. what we need to do now is make sure the projects get built on schedule, on budget and to leverage the benefits to the american people that we are expecting. the benefits are not just getting broadband service expanded. this is a job creation program, we want jobs created, economic growth in the communities that are receiving these dollars and these are all things we have to work very closely with these guarantees to help them realize the benefits. many do not have experience. we had a two day conference last week that we brought in all of our grantees, about 300 people in, and to sit there and listen to all of the rules and regulations that are required to be followed by the grant recipients, it's quite a daunting task, and as a result, our small staff is on the phone

with folks constantly answering basic questions for these folks with the current procedures, but in addition we are going to need to providing technical assistance to help them keep these projects built. so providing oversight, it's not just a matter of preventing waste, fraud and abuse although that is clearly a high priority for us but it's also just hoping these guarantees to do with the need to do to get these projects built. and as i say we want in on budget and on schedule. >> go ahead, lynn. >> ntia, unlike the rural utilities service which also was a minister in some broadband on this from the recovery act -- doesn't really have in place a staff that is in to administer and oversee. they don't do much of that the way the u.s. does. so, are you just repressing the existing staff? are you borrowing money from other programs during this period you don't have the money yet for oversight? >> we have been able to keep the staff we had intended to keep

for this period. we had a larger staff during the past year when we were receiving all the applications because you will remember we awarded the round of one set of applications and then we went through round two. so free perk of time this summer we actually were on a dual track in the sense we were overseeing the around one grant helping them get started at the same time we were reviewing applications for round two. so we were able to come up with a proper size and staff as of october 1st. those folks were all on the job all doing their work. what we are waiting for is to get the budget approved by congress either through a cr or omnibus budget in the next few weeks. >> mr. strickling, was the conference treacly related to the critical ig report on the overseeing of the broadband grants? >> nope. we were going to do the conference. the principal finding of the report was that we need funding to carry out our mission.

there were a couple of other findings made in the report that i don't want to minimize them, but the ig has been very helpful to us in the sense they forced us to bring our a game to everything. but in large part to go through the types of recommendations they were making, for example, one was to people slain in when they receive training. there is no question whether or not people receive training the need to have, but how well we've documented it. and again, we need to document those things. we need to take all those requirements very, very seriously to show that we are absolutely on top of our game here. but the fact the matter is the program is operating very, very well. the ig i think acknowledges that in several places in the report, but there's some of these things we can do better in terms of our documentation and in some of our contract and that we will do. but fundamentally, it is a sound program. and it's working very, very

well. >> last question from you, lynn stanton. >> okay. you co-chair the broadband committee, the science technology committee. and i was wondering how that into the interacts with the agency effort to implement non-fcc part of the fcc's national broadband plan. is there overlap -- >> there is one interagency group that took the national broadband plan where we are looking to see what aspects of it or pertinent individual agency missions, in addition where there is interagency work that could be done we have set up two working groups, one to focus on longline safety, the second to focus on digital literacy. and so that group is working hand both in terms of monitoring what individual agencies are doing such as energy with smart grid and health and human

services but also finding places agencies can work together and the two we have done so for our digital literacy and only a safety. >> finally, where b. strickling, the white house has had rumblings that the a working for a privacy azar when it comes to internet privacy. will the ntia have a role in finding that person appointing a person? >> well, i'm not sure your assumption is entirely correct. if you are referring to a department of commerce green paper that is currently going through the interagency review. i want to emphasize that that is a set of recommendations in the interim recommendations that the department is working on within the department of congress. in no way has been adopted by the administration. indeed it hasn't yet been adopted by the department of commerce. but we do intend to put a report out that asks a number of questions, suggests some recommendations and seeks additional comment to continue a dialogue of the privacy. t