irs employee lois lerner and a discussion about regulating global financial markets. the federal communications commission announced they will regulate internet providers much like phone companies. at the brookings institution today the head of the fcc tom wheeler discussed that decision and proposed network neutrality rules which would require these isps to treat all internet content the same. this is just over an hour.

[ inaudible ]. welcome to the forum on the future of broadband. broadband is a major driver of economic growth and civic engagement through the connectivity that it provides it makes it possible for consumers, businesses and governments to communicate with one another and engage in a wide variety of activities. every day we're seeing new applications in education, health care, energy communications and transportation among other things. the internet of things is enabling the growth of sensors, remote devices and machine-to-machine communications. in this situation it is final that we have fast universal and open broadband. last week the federal communications commission approved a plan to subsidize broadband internet access for underserved americans through the reform of the lifeline

program. there's hope we can close to digital divide and bring the benefits of technology to all people. today we are very pleased to welcome tom wheeler to brookings. tom, as you know, is the chairman of the federal communications commission. for over three decades he's been involved with telecommunications and technology. as a entrepreneur, he started a number of different companies offering innovative cable, wireless and video communications services. prior to joining the fcc chairman wheeler was a managing director of core capital partners investing in early stage ip-based companies. he's author of a new book we highly recommend on abraham lincoln and the tell graphic one of the norg nall technologies that helped power new areas of communication and commerce. mr. wheeler will differ a keynote speech that will be followed by a discussion moderated by blair levin. blair is a non-resident senior

fell lowe in the metropolitan policy program at brookings and currently serves as the executive of director of gig-you. that's a consortium of leading universities connecting through next generation networks. blair also served as an adviser to a variety of non-profit organizations. many of you know he was one of the major architects of the u.s. national broadband plan that has helped put america on the path to a digital economy. we will be archiving this event. anyone who wishes to view it after today will have an opportunity to do so through the brookings.edu website. we also have a twitter feed set up #fcclive. any of you that wish to post comments during the forum are welcome to do so. please join me in welcoming tom wheel tore the brookings institution.

>> thank you very much darrell and to you and rob for hosting this this. it's great to be here at brookings. i was saying to darrell and rob, one of the really significant functions this institution provides is to become a place where policy makers and the public can interact on important issues. and so i'm really grateful to you for hosting this today. maybe we ought to start out today with a little broadband scripture. in the beginning, there was blair levin and the national

broadband plan. the excellent work of the national broadband plan called our attention to the opportunities and challenges of broadband, the kind of work that is presently being carried on by the president's broadband opportunity council continues that kind of forward looking effort. and as blair told us in the first line of the national broadband plan, broadband is the defining network of the 21st century. broadband networks facilitate today's economy and today's social activity.

but even more important than what they're doing now, what broadband is doing now is what it is igniting in terms of new possibilities for the future. thanks to broadband, the often -- the unimaginable of today becomes the reality of tomorrow. we only have to look at a couple of facts that we now accept as common to see that. the largest taxi cab company has no cars. the largest overnight stay

company doesn't own any hotels. what they do have is easy access to broadband which enables them to assemble resources in new ways to present them to the public in new ways. and to do define an economic future that is task based as opposed to production based prebroadband activity. we should not overlook as well that broadband is also the igniter of more broadband.

as the success of broadband services increases, the demand for broadband, it also increases the incentive for competitive broadband. and it's because of this two pronged impact that our policy is to expand broadband and to assure that our broadband resources are fully utilized. that means that we want to expand geographically into areas where it doesn't exist and it means we want broadband to be affordable for and adopted by all of our citizens, and it means we want broadband to be open and free of any artificial inhibitions on its use. so here's the punch line.

it's pedal to the medal on broadband policy for consumers and competitors. expanding broadband requires better network technology. it requires more competition. it requires that companies continue to invest to satisfy consumer demands for bigger, better, and more broadband. it requires that broadband providers not be able to limit competition in broadband-dependent markets like apps and services and it requires the limitations on consumer demand whether on the basis of geography or economic circumstances or disability be removed. simply put, broadband should be available to everyone

everywhere. but my message today is simple. the job of the fcc is to exercise it's authority with both determination and discretion. so that technology, competition, investment and consumer empowerment are able to work together to reach our nation's broadband goals. as you probably know i think history matters a lot. so let's consider some history. networks have been a defining economic force throughout history. and the victory laurels have

gone to those who embraced the new networks. the exciting part about our time is while broadband and the internet may be the most important networks in history, their effects have not yet been the most significant in history. the simultaneous emergence of the mid 19th century railroad and telegraph networks reshaped the economy and society of that time more than the internet and all that it has produced has shaped ours, thus far. the key phrase in that sentence of course is thus far. my conviction is we are on the

cusp of when our broadband networks will prove even more transformative than the networks of the 19th century. and that belief is based upon this new fact. broadband networks are new in a new way. and that new way is the evolution from hardware based networks to ones that are software based. with a result that changes the nature of networks. the effectiveness is the circle where new applications are enabled by broadband which drives the next generation of applications which drives the next generation of broadband in

an ever continuing cycle. there are multiple benefits of the network's evolution from hardware to software. first, we're moving from networks with limited functions in a world in which software expands network capabilities and makes them available to non-traditional applications. as one person recently put it when describing this to me, networks are moving from a sip world to an api world. the result will unleash innovation in both networks and their applications. another impact of software replacing hardware is that the

cost of expanding network capabilities decreases. in the old days it was necessary to add a physical circuit if you wanted to increase capacity. today it's often just a matter of adding computing power. finally, the evolution to software-defined networks with virtualized components, means that network operating expenses decrease. verizon reports the replacement of central office physical switching systems with software reduces their real estate costs by up to 80%. what used to require floors and

floors of switches can now be done with a few racks of computers for a fraction of the space and the price. the same holds true of energy costs. powering a few computers can save up to 60% of costs as compared with powering endless switches. with all of these advantages of software defined networks, the expansion of network capabilities. the economies available in expanding capacity. and the reduction in operating costs. it's no wonder that at&t has said that by 2015, 75% of their network will be controlled by software. but this is not just about reducing costs and increasing

functionality for incumbents. the effects of software-based networks are also good for consumers and competitors because they enable the local exchange carriers to become more fulsome competitors to cable operator's dominant position in high speed broadband. thank you gordon moore. 50 years ago there was moore's law. that the power of microchips would double and thus computing costs decline about every two years. the compound doubling every couple of years has meant that the 60 transistors that were on

the microchip when moore propounded that law are now over a billion ha the cost has remained relatively stable. we tend to think of moore's law in terms of,000 smart phone in our pocket or purse now has as much computing power as a multimillion dollar mainframe, or super computer of a few decades ago. but moore's law is also what is driving the revolution in network economics. the computing power magnifies the capacity of network connections. for optical fibers, of course the result is optimal, but even for band width constrained copper networks low cost

computing power allows transmissions to be broken into parts and sent over different strands to be reassembled at the other end, increasing through put. the same concept called carrier aggregation is increasing the throughput of wireless networks through increased processing power. that the nature of the network is changing right under our noses is a significant data point for those of us in the oversight business. as the cost of delivering broadband goes down the opportunity for broadband expansion including competitive competitive broadband expansion and broadband innovations goes up. this means that we're not going to let imaginary concerns about investment incentives and the

omnipresent bogeyman of so-called utility regulation cause us to let up on policies that encourage fast fair and open broadband. since we come together today on the heels of the d.c. circuit's decision rejecting request to stay the open internet order let's begin by addressing the relationship between broadband network openness and investment.

fortunately there is a disconnect between what is said in washington advocacy and what happens in real life. while a few big dogs are threatening to starve investment, others are stepping up. many have publicly said that title ii regulation does not discourage investment. in recent transactions both announced and rumored point to the same conclusion. of course, the post open internet announcements by at&t, bright house, centurylink, cincinnati bell comcast cox cable, time warner cable about their plans to expand to expand broadband service certainly

speak for themselves. there are a group who feel that the move from analog to digital transmission should be their ticket to escape what i've called the network compact. those responsibilities that have always governed the relationship between those who build and operate networks and those who use them access connection, consumer protection, public safety, national security. here is a simple statement of fact. broadband is the most powerful and pervasive network on the planet, and giving credit where credit is due that's a line i first heard from blair levine. it's the most pervasive and

powerful platform on the planet. suggestions that that kind of flat form and pervasiveness and that kind of network, it exists without oversight, are unthinkable. but the kinds of oversight designed by the open internet order are a new regulatory model designed for these new network times. i keep describing this oversight as a referee on the field who can throw the flag. in our implementation, i plan to adhere to the wisdom that the best referees do not make themselves part of the game

unnecessarily. as a proud disciple of woody hayes and urban meyer, i believe the players should be allowed to play. referees make sure the game is played fairly and they don't call the plays. it will be up to the competitors, for instance, to advocate for themselves in negotiations with other competitors, and our job is not to substitute the fcc for what should be hard fought negotiation and tough competition. it's up to the players to compete hard against their opponents, but make no mistake about it, if they violate the rules, we'll blow the whistle. we're arbiters of the last

resort and not the first resort, and we will not micromanage like in the pre-broadband days, and this means no network unbundling and no tariffs, in short, none of this bogeyman of utility regulation. in that environment at a time when consumers are demanding better broadband, why would a rational broadband provider not make the investment to give it to them? the answer, of course, is only if competition is lacking, only if consumer demand is artificially limited. companies invest to win the race of competition if there is a

race. as we push onward into the broadband future, our challenge continues to be assuring but the preconditions for broadband ignition are as widespread as possible, and the best tools for accomplishing that are competition and consumer demand. so let's be clear. we're not going to let up on protecting and promoting broadband competition. as i made plain on innumerable occasions, opportunities for improvements in quality and reductions in costs will be pursued and that the benefits will be shared with consumers.

suffice it to say, continuing to encourage and protect a competitive marketplace is a foundational requirement of our responsibilities at the fcc. our skepticism about the competitive impact of the proposed sprint/t-mobile merger a year ago, and the recently abandoned comcast and time warner cable merger are eviden seriously our responsibility to protect competition, but protecting competition is only half of the equation. our job is to promote competition as well. we know broadband competition works. just look at cities like kansas city and austin and lafayette and atlanta and chattanooga. the arrival of even one

well-equipped broadband competitor causes significant competitive response from incumbent operators with qualitative improvements benefiting consumers of incumbent and insurgent companies alike. the commission will continue to look for ways to promote broadband competition. one way is to lower some of the costs of extending broadband facilities. we dealt with the inability to get access to conduits in the internet order, and we are taking a effort to better align the cost of using poles and conduits. perhaps the fcc's most tangible role in growing broadband is to allocate and make available both licensed and unlicensed spectrum necessary for competitive wireless broadband.

our use of auctions, a competitive device in their own right, for assigning license spectrum is well known and in most quarters well celebrated. making available spectrum for unlicensed use draws less public attention, but as the remarkable success of wi-fi demonstrates, it is literally an indispensable element in the provision of broadband today. and if more indispensable is a permissible concept, it will be more indispensable to the broadband of tomorrow. i recently spoke to chairman walden under whose leadership the incentive law was created. we are of one mind. there will be an incentive auction in the first quarter of

2016. when i came onboard at the agency, the question of whether the broadcasters would show up at the incentive auction was a matter of debate. i am quite encouraged from what we have been hearing from broadcasters. while we are talking about spectrum, we should not overlook the role it will play in determining who is the international leader in 5g broadband networks. this nation is the international leader in 4g lte, as a result of the availability of spectrum to become a home for lte. we do not intend for the united

states to lose the pole position in the international wireless broadband race. we will maintain that leadership in the same way we obtained the leadership in 4g. first through being out front in allocating appropriate spectrum and second, by allowing carriers to deploy 5g service in any frequency band they find suitable including the 600 megahertz in the upcoming auction. another way to stimulate broadband is to increase opportunities for additional competition in up stream markets. that's why we proposed a rule to give over-the-top video i don't vieders the ability to choose the same business model as cable and satellite provide wers the same program access rights. we expect to move that to a

report in order this fall. there is a new line of ott providers queuing up to expand video choice and increase consumer demand for broadband. demand for broadband is also affected by consumer's perceptions about the potential non-monetary costs of using it. we committed in the open internet order to address issues of privacy implicated by consumer's use of the internet. we will begin that process with a notice of proposed rule making in the autumn. finally, let me be clear, we should not and will not let up on our policies to make broadband more available. converting universal service programs from their narrow band origins to broadband is our most important admissions.

we have built on that by deploying $10 billion over six years to ten rural price cap carriers to provide broadband service to their customers and we have begun a program to test nontraditional means of delivering broadband in rural areas. i have told senator thune it's my goal to similarly reform the broadband support program for small rate of return carriers. commissioner o'reilly has played a significant role in this effort, including putting forth a set of principles. we are working with the affected carriers to explore the best approach. we had been in search of a consensus proposal from the rate of return carriers that would help us meet the policy

objectives that the commission unanimously adopted in april of 2014. unfortunately, while i appreciate the carriers' willingness to engage, if we are to keep on schedule, time is not our friend. absent a consensus from the parties involved, we will put forth our own proposal. just as we need to make sure that all parts of our country have broadband, we need to make sure all our citizens are able to use it. last year we modernized and expanded our efforts to address the need of the schools and libraries. learning isn't confined to the classroom. as the commissioner pointed out even those students can now connect at school, too many

experience a homework gap when they cannot get online at home. a recent pew research study found that 5 million students -- that's nearly 20% of all students between 6 and 17 -- do not have high speed internet service at home. it is simply unacceptable in an era where learning opportunities have never been richer or more available that these students have to go to mcdonald's or some other wi-fi equipped location to do their assignments. our obligations and opportunities to extract more value from broadband do not end with our children. another pew study found half of americans that rely on smart phones for broadband access have

had to cancel their mobile subscriptions because of financial hardship. commissioner clyburn has been championing a program, and she wants to rid the components to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse and abuse, but to refocus to broadband. we will learn from that and then move on to reform and revitalize. broadband service -- broadband access is also very important to another group of americans, those who live with physical and intellectual challenges. although our efforts do not receive headlines as much as some of our other activities,

the application of information technology to attack the needs of americans with disabilities will be a priority as long as i am chairman. we are, for instance, the first federal agency to harness broadband to allow those who use american sign language to communicate directly with the fcc using online video, a broadband effect. several months ago we began urging all federal agencies to have an online video asl capability. to aid in this, the fcc is building a web-based api platform that will allow any company or agency to plug in and utilize the power of broadband to do a simple thing, help hearing impaired americans communicate.

the 25th anniversary of the americans with disabilities act is coming up next month. this is a great opportunity for all federal agencies to take the simple but significant step of harnessing online video for those that speak with their hands and hear with their eyes. as i noted at the beginning of this presentation, we are closer to the beginning of the broadband network's promise than the end. the broadband-related agenda i described is key to assuring that the technology's remarkable promise will be realized. if we succeed in accomplishing this agenda, and i am determined that we will, new generations of american innovators will be able to combine their technical

abilities and entrepreneurial instincts with broadband's capabilities to produce great things, things that today we can't even begin to imagine. thank you very much. [ applause ] i will speak loudly while we are getting the microphone up. i have to say i always thought of re-writing genisis. you have to have a better biblical sense.

>> that's sort of the first half of the story. >> i want to talk about your speech, but before i do that, i want to talk about your book. >> hold it higher, will you? >> yeah, available on amazon, and you can never go bad. but i do want to point out that you have been an opponent of prioritization, but in this book where you say lincoln was our most technologically sophisticated president, the only one to get a patten, you reveal he gave the associated press a priority in getting to the telegraph in order to get their stories out because they were generally favorable to lincoln, so my question to you, sir, is if prioritization was good enough for lincoln, why is it not good enough for chairman wheeler?

>> well, there you go again. >> i should note -- i covered the reading -- >> are you only this far through? >> no, it's a reference point. >> it's a really good point, but here is what you have missed, however. the telegraph was the original open network. there was no prioritization in it. a telegram was handled in the order in which it was received and what you are referencing is what amounted to a form of censorship that the lincoln administration engaged in during the course of the war, and i would say that the realities of a wartime experience versus the kind of situation that would exist today is a little different, number one, but

number two, always remember, the telegraph, the first electronic network was an open network. >> so to be clear, you are opposed to prioritization but you are in favor of censorship? yours words not mine. >> always fun to sit down with you, blair, and we can talk more about his use of the ap but we won't. >> we won't. we'll move on. if you quote me on that, you have to put a smiley face. i want to tie together the speech you gave in 1987. one of the things we are trying to address on the broadband plan is how do we move from having isp business models based on the models of scarce bandwidth, and an interesting by the way, paid

prioritization, there is no business model for it. you talked about it a bit, but when i hear you say competition, what i hear is deployment, we need without some new deployment of abundant networks, there won't be competition. am i understanding that right? >> yes. >> and i think you said government has an obligation to lower the costs of the inputs. i want to talk about wireless and on the wireless side, spectrum is the key. i would say this administration and you have done a great job,

you know, when we arrive with the broadband plan there was no spectrum and you ran the least expensive in terms of money, but applying spectrum it was not there before the aws 3 spectrum, and larry strickland has played a role in that. are there other things you can do in your time to create new spectrum? i just might note, ctia released a study this week that pointed out that we got our demand site estimates rights, which astonishes me -- i thought we were making them up, but turns out the guys that did the actual study were good, and still with all that you have done we are still behind. are there other things that can be done? >> first of all, it's an

activity that is always underway to say where can you find new spectrum? but the reality, as mark twain said about real estate, they aren't making it anymore. so there is a new paradigm that has to develop in the marketplace and the regulatory environment about spectrum that i think is based on two realities. first is that everything in the word is economic, okay? people who say i'll never part with my spectrum, if you can help them see the economic value in parting with that or having a different approach to their use of the spectrum it often can let the scales fall from their eyes. that's what auctions do and

that's what the incentive auction is doing. the second paradigm shift is the concept of sharing. spectrum used to be allocated on the basis that this is the sign of the analog wave form. so we have to have a block of spectrum that will allow that to operate and we have to have guard bands on the side to make sure no other wave form gets -- interferes with that, and in a digital world that goes by the way side and sharing becomes much more possible. and one of the things i believe that will come out of the spectrum auction is increased channel sharing, where broadcasters will say i am going to take this 6 megahertz block, which is the size historically there for analog purposes but which can have five or six different digital channels in it and we'll share those.

i think we are moving from a concept of its mine to i've got to share it, and that's going to require some transformation in thinking. also we are moving to an environment where the economic issues can be -- or the economic forces can help decide these kinds of issues. >> with the multi-pronged approach, some sharing and some licensed and some unlicensed and all of those things, and one of the things that i will find in policy debates in washington, people see things in black and white, and you will say we need a lot more sharing and a lot more for unlicensed. >> the fact is you will have to be sharing inside licensed and inside unlicensed as well. the procedures pn that we put

out on the auction yesterday, the day before, laid out how in some instances it is ridiculous to say that in this big licensed area, because we have got some interference over in this corner that everything else should not be available. that's a geographic sharing concept. then we have got sharing, as i said, inside the same band. i think sharing is both a licensed and an unlicensed kind of activity and opens up opportunities in both. >> they are talking about the wired world and you talked about it and indeed in the last 12 months there have been a number of promising announcements, and one of the things we talked about was to lower the costs of key inputs like you were talking about with poles and remove

barriers at the state and federal and local level, and a lot of cities are changing the way they do business, and you at the commission have taken away one of the key state barriers which is laws preempting municipalities and that's obviously in court. i want to talk about the federal level and what the fcc might be doing and you mentioned at the council, the department of agriculture and department of commerce are cochairing for kind of an ongoing multi-agency task force to make sure there are not barriers. how do you look at that process and what are your hopes for that and what are you planning to do during your time? >> i think the broadband opportunity council is a structure that can only be done at the highest levels of government where everybody has to look at what are the things in my policies that have an impact on broadband.

there is obvious things. can we have a dig-once policy with highways? can we lay fiber when roads are opened up for epa sewer grants, and multi-al other kinds of things. so the fact that the president has convened this kind of a group to say okay, we're going to get introspective in our agencies and say what is it that not because of malice after forethoughtof /* of forethought but we never thought about it impact is really important. i went through the list. there are, you know, we're dealing with poles and we are expanding lifeline. the privacy issue, which i think probably we just had a sentence or two in there about it, it's integral to the growth of broadband.

if consumers worry that they don't have sufficient privacy online, why are they going to use online? so we need to deal with that. there is a generic issue from an analog tm-based environment to an ip environment. we want that to happen. so many of the things that we are going to be dealing with is how do you encourage that transition, but at the same point in time how do you make sure that you don't decouple it with the societal protections that always existed in terms of our relationship with networks? so that becomes a huge component of where we are going. >> yeah. i want to switch topics from the

networks to the adoption side and start by just noting an interesting announcement by the markle foundation by the way of upgrading skills of american workers as well as helping them find jobs by using linkedin, and we talked about it in chapter 13. what you said about education doesn't just remain in the classroom. part of it is to make sure we get broadband -- that everybody gets access to broadband where they live. and this, of course, brings up the lifeline proceeding that you are now looking at. one of the things that was curious to me was the press focused on the political disagreements, but as i read beneath them, there did seem to be three core principles that i think there was actually a consensus about. number one, broadband is the core communications product service, and when they talk about universal service, it's

going to be broadband. secondly, the problems of waste, fraud and abuse really come from the fact that we have carriers do the certification, and i am not blaming carriers but that process leads to that, and there are many ways -- we need to take that certification responsibility away from the carriers. the third is we need to use market forces more effectively to increase the value that the participants get. am i seeing that wrong? there was a lot of focus on the partisan disagreement, but on those three principles i thought there was actually kind of an agreement. >> i think that's correct. it's a matter of degree, but i think you have outlined the three corners, if you will, the three legs of the stool. >> i might note ron klain, who i know you know and has many jobs in government, and i am going to

ask one more question and then we will open it up for questions from the answers and we are going to run about five minutes late or over our original time. i want to start by saying, you are the first non-lawyer chairman in quite a while at the fcc so in particular i want to congratulate you on two major victories in the courts the other day on both -- >> i wrote them all personally. >> yeah, i know. i was very impressed. you were ready to argue the case -- >> exactly, uh-huh. >> also on the auctions. but i want you -- i always tell you while you are in the job, you can't play the historian but you have to be a decision-maker and it's a different thing. when i think back on my first stint at the fcc, there were a couple decisions that got no controversy and they were largely ignored but in the

fullness of time we saw them as being far more important. one was speeding up the digital television transition, and by virtue of getting that spectrum out in 12 years rather than 30 years which was the original plan, that created the foundation for 4g, and then terminating data, and that's a longer story, but those things turned out to be incredibly important. in some ways i think you have done an interesting job of creating -- eliminating and terminating barriers for over the top video that i think is now fully appreciated. as a historian, if you go forward ten years and look back at your time what do you think willñxuó be the mostunder

appreciated decisions today or ones that we're not looking at that ten years from now, again, in the fullness of time, will say they were really important? >> i don't know if under -- most under appreciated, but the ones -- attention that is not being paid to right now, as i indicated in the -- in my remarks, i feel -- we feel very strongly about the incredible opportunity that technology offers to help americans with disabilities solve the challenges that they have, and we have -- the first meeting i had at the commission with any outside group, i asked all the disabled groups to come in and sit down and said let's talk about how we apply technology, solving the challenges of americans with disabilities, and we will keep doing that. the idea -- we've been through closed captioning and we have

been through text to 911, and we have been a program that puts equipment out for people that cannot hear or see but can still use broadband. i talked about this open platform that we are going to have so that people can communicate, and we will keep pressing that agenda because i just basically think it comes down to this, if we are fortunate to exist in a time when technology can be applied to historical barriers that people have never been able to overcome before and we don't seize that and chase that as hard as possible, then shame on us. i think that's the thing -- i hope that's the thing we are doing that nobody is really paying attention to but will have a lasting effect. >> thank you, certainly, for

that. with that, let me open it up to questions from the audience. >> i wanted to ask, how do you envision the overbuilding playing out and how do you envision -- how do you see promoting that given the fact that it's not really cost effective at this point? >> i think what i was saying is that economics are changing, which i think is encouraging for those that believe in multifacility-based competitors. i think there is competition that will increase, and that's one of the reasons why spectrum and 5g and everything is so important. i think we just cannot accept the reality that, well, there is only going to be one provider and we have to do everything possible to make sure that we are creating an environment for multiple providers.

>> the woman in back. not that far back, sorry. >> not that far back. >> sharon boyce. i have been trying to understand this issue for average people because there has been such lobbying about censorship issues and all the different issues, i guess it's propaganda by certain lobbyist, but if you could explain it in one paragraph or a sentence that maybe your mother or an 8-year-old grandchild that would know more about tech than i do actually, but if you could explain it quickly to the average people what we are fighting for with the broadband issue, thank you. >> i think it's a simple question that because broadband is the definitive network of the 21st century we want to make sure it's thoroughly available, that it's fast and growing in terms of its continual increase and that it's open, and open

means not only open to those that want to pass through it, but open to those that want to get access to it so that they can have the benefit of what passes through it. >> right there. >> thank you for coming -- >> can you speak into the mic so people can hear you. >> you talked about how licensed and unlicensed are peanut butter and jelly and not oil and vinegar. >> let me remember that line. >> i believe that is your line. >> i thought it was chocolate and peanut butter. >> the licensed spectrum holders

need to understand they have to accept more tolerance on interference. you have been chairman for about 20 months and you mentioned the oil and vinegar tolerance when you were chairman of the tac. can you outline some or mention some of the success stories you have had of convincing licensed users of sharing that spectrum, and do you have new initiatives on the existing spectrum out there now? >> thank you, and good question. it goes back in part to the question that blair asked a moment ago. there is a process of how you think about spectrum that is necessarily evolving