>> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> host: and this week on "the communicators," the discussion of the federal government's lifeline program which is administered by the federal communications commission. joining us are two guests to discuss this, amina fazlullah is

policy director at the benton foundation and daniel lyons is with american enterprise institute's center for internet communications and technology. he's a visiting scholar there from boston college. amina fazlullah, what is this lifeline program? how'd it come about? >> guest: so the lifeline program actually came about during the reagan administration in order to provide a subsidy to make sure that low income persons would have access to voice service, telephone service. and, you know, this comes from the notion that having everyone on the network, having access to public safety, having access to each other and commerce is incredibly important. and for low income be persons, making sure that they had additional support to do that seemed necessary, and so that's where the program began.

>> host: and how many people participate in this program? >> guest: as of this past year, about 13 million. >> host: and what's the cost? >> guest: well, so the cost of the program is, so it's a 925 subsidy per household. >> host: $9.25. >> guest: that's right. >> host: okay. >> guest: and so it's a relatively minimal subsidy, and the cost has gone down over the past few years in terms of the overall costs for the lifeline program within the total universal service fund. >> host: and is it specifically for wire phones, or is it now wireless as well? >> guest: so currently, so, as i said, president reagan during the reagan administration the telephone voice, wired service began, and then after the bush administration they introduced wireless. and so as it stands today, there's wired and wireless vice

available within the program. >> host: daniel lyons, has it been successful, in your view? >> guest: so it's not clear what the success rate of lifeline is, and i think that's part of one of the problems with the program as it exists now. so lifeline was born more or less as a political compromise between the carriers and the fcc when the government broke up the at&t monopoly. and part of the concern was, well, we're going to establish this amount that we're going to give to low income consumers with the goal of making sure that low income consumers can get access to telephone service. but no one's ever really done the study to figure out whether the amount that we're giving is actually going toward people who would otherwise not fall off the telecommunication grilled, right? so the gao issued a report just last year that criticized the fcc for this purpose. so i think there's a bipartisan support for the idea that low income households should have some assistance to make sure they're not falling off the grid

and make sure that they take advantage of the latest telecommunications systems. the concern is whether lifeline is actually achieving. that. when the gao asked the fcc for evidence that lifeline is successful, the fcc reported to an academic report that suggested maybe as much as 88% of lifeline dollars are flowing to households that would have telephone service even without the subsidy. >> host: how's it funded? >> guest: it's funded by the universal service charge, monthly tax on your wireless bill or our landline phone bill. the way it's calculated is that the fcc estimates how much it's going to need per year and then divides it over interstate telecommunications revenue, so long distance revenue largely. that then gets charged to the carrier and is passed along to

you and me, the consumers. >> host: amina, has the program been successful in your view? >> guest: i think the program has been successful. i agree that it would be better for the fcc to take steps, i think, to understand the population better and understand the impact of the program and not have to rely on third party reports. but i do think the program is successful, and i'd like to step back just for a moment for us to understand who we're talking about in terms of who the users are. so the lifeline program is reticketed to folks -- restricted to folks who are in about 135% of the poverty line or lower. so for a family of four in the contiguous 48, that's about $32,000 a year. and if you live in a city like des moines, so this isn't san francisco, it's not new york, it costs about $63,000 a year for you to meet your average expenses for a family of four.

so they are struggling. they are definitely well below, they've got well below what they need per year in terms of income. and so there are times where they're going to make decisions liking should i pay the phone bill or should i get food? should i get food or should i get medicine? so folks do fall on and off. i think everybody understands today low income or high income that broadband and telephone service is incredibly important. and so people try to make that work because it's a necessary tool for their lives. but when you're looking at the numbers, it's really, really difficult to even conceive of how these families are going to be able to meet their needs and stay on, you know, a high cost sub viber program -- subscriber program like broadband or telephone service without the support.

so i think that, you know, understanding the struggles that these families are facing, lifeline has done a really great job of stepping in and providing a support that's going to be there for them continuously. >> host: well, the fcc in their march meeting will be talking about the lifeline program, and to get some more perspective, let's bring brendan sasso of the national journal into this conversation as well. >> thanks, peter. just to provide the context and the latest update, the fcc is scheduled to vote on some big changes, the biggest being that they're going to include broadband internet service so that people can use that subsidy not just for their cell phone or their landline, but internet access either at home or a data package for their cell phone. my question is whether you both think that the $9.25 is enough. i mean, i know that most people it costs a lot more than that to

get home broadband connection or a data plan for a family. is that enough to encourage people to adopt broadband if they weren't otherwise? >> guest: i mean, i think that it's a good first step. and i think that the fcc is going to be making a lot of changes to this program and moving in a deliberate fashion makes sense. the, there are programs that are out currently that are not part of the usf that are available to low income families that are coming in right around that $10 mark. there are a lot of other costs that are required to be able to access the internet, so you're going to have to have a device, potentially access to training and support. and there are programs out there to support low income families so that they have access to all those pieces. so $9.25 i think is a good place to start, but it's yet to be

seen whether that's going to be enough going forward. >> guest: my concern is path dependency. we seem to be getting to telephones, why not extend that out? i think there's a sense that the fcc's putting the cart before the horse because they haven't done a real study to suggest these are the drivers that are keeping people from adopting broadband service. we don't know if we need $9 a month for ten million people or $45 a month for two million people. the fcc hasn't done that level of analysis. we had a series of broadband trials that the fcc adopted in 2012, and the goal was to try to provide some data. but unfortunately, they were not conclusive. they were not designed in a way that had measurable output results, and the sample sizes were too small. the one thing i think we did learn was the higher the sub

subsidy, the greater -- it's not clear that giving a $9 discount is going to be enough to incentivize people who can't afford broadband to suddenly make that room in their budget. >> one thing that i think is interesting about the fcc's proposal is that it would phase out support for mobile, voice-only. so i'm wondering maybe there's some people, maybe elderly especially who maybe just don't want to get broadband, and maybe they like the fact that they're able to get free cell phone service right now. is it a concern that those people won't be potentially supported under the program anymore? >> guest: there is a, i think as of right now it looks hike a three-year -- like a three-year phaseout, and there's definitely concern how this consumer population is going to shift from having a product that was focused on voice and now a product that they're used to using to a product that might have some component of voice as well as some component of data

or a different device completely. so from a feature phone to a smartphone. so it's going to take, i think, a careful approach by the fcc to transition those folks. but i think we all understand the benefits of making sure that everyone has access to broadband. so it's a difficult, i think it's a difficult role for the fcc to play, you know? they want to encourage if modernization -- the modernization of the program, and they definitely don't want anybody to be left behind because they've not quite ready for that step. >> go ahead. >> host: in a sense, is this a back door reform of the universal service fund? >> guest: well, it's one step among many that the fcc's taken over the years to try to transition the universal service fund from a telephone-based program to a broadband-based program. there's additional support that the fcc provides for rural areas in what we call the high cost fund to help cover carriers that

provide service in places where there's not a lot of people. and the fcc's transitioned that slowly to broadband as well. but i think part of the problem of taking the old telephone system and simply moving it to broadband is we replicate some of the errors and some of the difficulties we had in the old system. i think what makes more sense is for the fcc to rethink this from ground zero rather than this revolutionary change. to think from the ground up. if i was starting atsore and designing a service today, how would i do it? >> host: and how would you do it? >> guest: with regard to highline in particular, i think what makes -- lifeline in particular, i think what makes sense is a voucher system, something direct and portable which is language president obama used in his recent connect all initiative. i think it makes a lot of sense for the fcc to figure out, first of all, what are the drivers of low broadband adoption. unlike telephone service, right, it's not just the monthly fee that is a problem. you can have free broadband, but

if you don't have a computer, for example, that's problematic, right? so i think a holistic approach would involve not just a subsidy for monthly service, but also some type of equipment subsidy to get computers in the hands of eligible recipients. and also some sort of digital outreach so when we do surveys about why people who are not on broadband have chosen not,, there's going to be some big chunkings of the elderly population that never adopt for any price. but for those who don't appreciated everything you can get, a digital literacy outreach program, i think, is a critical component. those are things i would group together and fund in different ways as well. >> host: and you would fund it how? >> guest: so rather than use the universal fund mechanism which is problematic, a, because until recently there wasn't a cap on it, there wasn't a budget on the program and, b, it's growing

exponentially. so the usf surcharge was 3% in 1998, it's now 18% which is pretty close to that tax they put on hotels for suckers who are coming in from out of town, right? rather than fund it that way, i think it should be a line item in the federal budget just like any other subsidy program, something that's subject to congressional oversight, that has a hard cap that forces the program to figure out how you use these dollars most efficiently to get people on the grid. and maybe even, dare i say, move it out of the fck and over to something -- fcc and over to something like hhs that has a better understanding of poverty issues. one of the critiques over the past 20 years is it's focused much more on the needs of carriers than on the needs of the consumers it's serving. finish the -- >> host: amina fazlullah, has the usf worked, in your view?

as a funding mechanism and -- >> guest: i think the usf program has worked for many years now. i think it's at a crossroads where we're going to have to consider, you know, how i we contribute to that program as more consumers migrate from traditional telephone service which is in voice service the traditional base of where the usf dollars come from and -- >> we are going to leave our scheduled communicators program now, you can see it later in its entirety. going to go live now to the annual policy conference, among the speakers today, democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton, house majority leader kevin mccar and minority whip steny hoyer. this is just getting underway. >> think they're actually going to reinvent the wheel and go about doing it. please join me in welcoming daniel burrell and -- [inaudible] of shot wheel. >> hello.

>> morning. >> gentlemen, welcome to the policy conference. where did this idea of reinventing the wheel come from? >> it's actually the result of a mistake. i wish i could take credit, but it just happened as a mistake. it all happened a few years ago, in 2011, when a good friend of mine, a farmer from the south of israel, broke his pelvis. and he was confined to a wheelchair for about six months, and he found that the ride on the wheelchair both off and on road is excruciating. so being the creative farmer that he is, he tried to trick that. he thought how can it be better. >> so you have been confined to a wheelchair for how long? >> well, i'm going to be 48 at the end of the month, so 24 years. another life, 24 years in a wheelchair. >> you've been in a wheelchair half your life. and how did you come to be confined to a wheelchair?

>> well, at that time i was a pilot in the air force, in the israeli air force. i flew -- [cheers and applause] i flew f-16s, and i was an instructive in the cadet school. i had to go fly air flight another base. so they came and took me and some other pilots and, unfortunately, we slept in the car, and the driver also fell asleep, and the car rolled over. i was thrown out on my back, broke it, and you see the result actually. >> so i assume as a former israeli air force fighter pilot, you're a pretty active guy even in a wheelchair. what are the limitations? what is a conventional wheelchair like when you're active in it? >> i encounter many difficulties sometimes x along the way i'm

trying to figure out how to make my life better for myself, riding it and for other people. so, like, if i'm going down curbs, steps, some gravel, i hurt my back. at the end of the day, that's how i got the soft wheel, to try to solve the problem. >> okay. let's get back to the farmer who's confined only for six months, and he wants to make it a better thing. what happened? >> so he's a farmer, so he took the air cushion from a john deere tractor and tried to put it inside of the frame of the wheelchair. it didn't really work, but it did caught the eye of one of israel's most famous incubator. it's a governmental program where you get government funds for innovation. so soon after we were set on with a government grant to develop suspension for a wheelchair. and so we did for about a year. >> how'd it go? >> not that well, actually. >> okay. [laughter] >> you know, suspension in its core is very limited.

it hasn't evolved in the past 90 years, so no matter what we tried to do, how we tried to innovate, it simply didn't do well enough. it didn't work. so one day the guys came in, and we got to talk. >> the talk. >> yeah, the talk. >> basically, we make a breakthrough or they close down the company. so we set up in a room, we took a wheelchair, and we just stared at him. and, you know, brian, a wheelchair. it's a wheel and chair. wheel and chair. >> even i understand that. >> yeah. you know? [laughter] so we couldn't put it in the chair, so we said, okay, nowhere else, let's put it in the wheel. and so we were so excited putting it in the wheel, we made a small mistake, a great small mistake. we forgot to do our homework. we were so excited we didn't research that in-wheel suspension.

and if you were to do that, we would have found out people have been trying to do this for about 200 years and failing time over time. >> you guys never heard of google? >> who? sorry. [laughter] so 12 months later we had the first-ever in-wheel suspension for wheelchairs. we didn't know, you know? so we just -- >> no one told you it was impossible, so you went ahead and did it. >> yeah. we don't believe in impossible. >> all right. [applause] >> so here we, this is a soft wheel wheel. let's hold this up so we can see this. >> this is a softwheel wheel. as you can see, it's round, and it's a wheel. it doesn't have spokes. and all the magic happens inside. every vehicle is connected through the hub. >> okay. >> any kind of vehicle. what happens is that this hub as opposed to other meals moves. it can move freely within the diameter of the wheel. >> the center moves within it? >> exactly. >> okay.

>> and that small movement is so efficient that it can absorb all the impact, all that energy from the road and not transfer it to the rider's body or the shocks. it is a breakthrough in terms of how you look at suspension because it is selective. when you don't need it, it does not work. it is like any other rigid wheel. only when needed will it spring into action and make those movements. >> so if there's a dump, if you hit, you know, a curb or something. >> exactly. if you see any obstacle. even today when we try and be more and more accessible towards wheelchairs, it is still a challenge to go out and about in a wheelchair. and that actually provides wheelchair rider with so much more freedom to go wherever they want. >> so, dror, tell me -- [applause] how has softwheel changed your life? this is a wheel equipped with softwheels. can we get a look at this? these are the actual wheels on

the wheelchair. >> yep. you see they have suspension inside them and, actually, for me it's all about freedom, you know? my name, dror, that means a sparrow, so manes i'm, like -- means i'm like a free bird. so for me, going wherever i want is really important. [applause] that's why i like to see a road and i have a big ramp, i don't want to go 30 meters, i want to go wherever i want, i want to have the freedom to do it. once i encounter gravel, big breaks, everything, for me to come back and sleep with a good back, with a good back and not aching is important. and i want to share it with all the people that do use wheelchairs. and i'm happy to do it. >> so can you demonstrate for us. >> yeah, you know what? there's maybe some steps -- >> stairs? >> you think so? >> have you seen the movie naked

gun? >> no, but i saw top gun. >> you lived top gun. [laughter] >> right. >> any final words? anyone in israel you want me to call? >> wow, you sure? all right. i'll give it a try, i don't know. [applause] all right. first one is difficult. i made it. [applause] that's all right. [cheers and applause] thank you. >> ladies and gentlemen, dror! [applause] >> isn't he amazing? >> unbelievable. >> amazing. >> so are these actually available on the market? >> actually, yes. we've been selling them worldwide or actually here in the u.s. we've seen tremendous demand

beyond our wildest dreams. and, you know, brian, we come from israel. and at softwheel we are all veterans. and veterans are dear to us. [applause] thank you. so the first thing we have done entering the american market is that i'm proud to say that today for the past six months we were able to bring those wheelchairs to over a hundred veterans in the u.s. alone. [applause] >> so your products being used, is it used beyond wheelchairs? >> actually, that's a good question and a cool story behind it. i remember one day we were so focused on the wheelchair, you know, for start-up, focus is everything, and we can't doesn't think about everything -- we didn't think about anything else. i had a thought, i came back from jogging, so i went to the guys and said will our technology work on another

wheel? they said, yeah. and i said, no, no, any wheel? yeah, of course. why didn't you say that before? [laughter] you never asked. so we started developing different things. for example, we are now developing this for bicycles. and we actually have one to show you. >> you have -- okay. >> exactly. >> wow. >> do you want to go for a ride? >> i'm good. show it to me though. tell me briefly about this. these are softwheel wheels. >> and this is our clearest vision as to the future of urban transportation. you know, in the future there will be no more cars inside the city, so how do you bridge this last mile gap. and this is the perfect solution. these are systems which are electric. >> so you can -- there's no air in the tire, essentially, because the cushioning is inside the wheel. no more flat tires. >> no more flat tires.

>> that's going to revolutionize bicycles. >> exactly. >> wow. anything else besides bicycles? >> other than bicycles, well, there's something, but it's a little bit hush-hush. >> it'll just be between us and our close friends. we're all signing ndas on the way out. tell us about it. >> so we started, we decided, you know, the west way to revolutionize the world is by revolutionizing transportation. so we started from a wheelchair, went to bicycles, and now we want to, you know, reveal it here for the first time at aipac, our clearest vision as to the future of automotive. >> was that the picture you brought this morning? >> we put it on? >> lauren, can we tut -- put the picture up? >> it's a brand new be era. >> so you're going to put this into cars. >> yes, sir. >> and that means no more flat tires? >> no more flat tires, 20% more

energy efficiency, lighter -- >> ladies and gentlemen, daniel from softwheel! >> thank you so much. [applause] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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