internet and a lot of wonderful things to be said about telecommunications, but people are talking to each other less. they do not have to take responsibility for what they put on facebook or other social networks because it does not come back to haunt them. it is usually somebody else, except when it is them, and then there mortified, and it has an enormous effect. just hear me on that, and we will work together to see what can be done. you both have been absolutely wonderful. you have done yourself proud. you have done your family's crown. you make us proud. -- you have done your family's proud. you make us proud. as indicated, you should feel pretty good about your chances, and i thank you for your testimony. we stand adjourned. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]

>> every weekend on "american history tv," the people and events that make up american history. >> it was 10:00 in the morning before i stopped and said hey, we are at war. then i got scared. >> i helped into the boat, got him down in the boat. he died on the way to the island. he was my best friend. >> it is just as tough to go up there to the arizona memorial as it was then, on the day i saw it burning. >> this weekend, c-span-3 marks the 70th anniversary of the attack on pearl harbor, from oral history, eyewitness accounts of veterans and survivors. next weekend, more programs

about pearl harbor as historians join us to take your phone calls. sunday, december 11th, beginning at 5:00 a.m. eastern. >> this week on "the communicators," a discussion on broadband spectrum. >> this week on "the communicators," we are pleased to introduce you to dale hatfield. he is a member of the commerce department specter management committee. he is also a professor at the university of colorado, and he is considered to be one of the nation's foremost experts on spectrum and spectral policy. he joins us this week on "the communicators." if we could, a lot of talk here on washington -- in washington about spectrum shortage. what does that mean to you, and is there a spectrum shortage?

>> that is a really good and very fundamental question. the radio spectrum is the parts that we are most interested in. it is already allocated and mostly assigned to people for various uses. so, if i have a new use, maybe a use that has a lot of public interest, it may be very difficult for me to get access to spectrum. on the other hand, if i put a simple receiver out here on the roof of this building and i looked for spectrum, it would turn out that a lot of the spectrum is not being used all the time. in one sense, it is all given out, but that does not mean that there is not spectrum available that could be used. >> that said, how should spectrum policy reflect the availability of spectrum at this point, in your view? >> well, there are a lot of

dimensions to it. one, of course, we need to use spectrum more efficiently. just as we talk in energy terms of using gasoline more efficiently, making our car is more efficient, we need to be more efficient in our use of the resources. we need to have our transmitters, our receivers and our systems more efficient. aligned with that, we need to have the incentives for that to occur as well. so things do not happen without the right incentives. we need to be more efficient in our use of the resource, and then, that ties to what i said a moment ago about the fact that a lot of spectrum is not really used a lot of the time, even though it sort of belongs to somebody or is assigned to somebody. there are some new technologies out there that we can talk about that can help that, but here again there is a regulatory

process that we have to get through to be able to use spectrum in a more dynamic, less static fashion. >> we will get to those. i want to talk about how you think it can be more efficiently used and what incentives might be impossible. we want to introduce the senior editor with telecommunications report that includes a daily bulletin. he will also be asking you questions. >> you are a member of the commerce department's spectrum management advising committee. their call to look at how to help the government free of 500 megahertz of spectrum. give us a sense of what you hope you can accomplish in the next two years in advising the commerce department. >> well, there are two parts of that.

one is to advise them on what bands would be the most useful for commercial purposes. that is one thing so we can keep this economic engine that is being provided by the use of spectrum with all these new devices, keep that moving. we want to help in that regard. and then help in terms of what i just said a moment ago, and that is to try to get the incentives right to provide mechanisms and ways of ameliorating or reducing interference issue so that our critical national defense and our critical government needs can go forward. and still meet our need for this vast amount of new spectrum to support commercial applications and public safety. >> we talk about getting

incentives right. one thing that could work is specter fees for licensees to use the spectrum. give us a sense of why you think that could work. >> it works in both the commercial uses of spectrum and the governmental. one of the problems we have in spectrum is that a lot of people have the spectrum and they do not -- they have not had to pay for it. they do not pay for it. like anything else you get for free, there is not incentive for them to free up the spectrum and make it available for others. economic incentives, of course, are what drives a lot of our free enterprise system, our capital system. having to pay for the spectrum

we consume, as it gets more and more valuable, seems like something we should be looking at. i'm generally favorable to having government agencies pay for the spectrum that they use, but to be more sensitive as to whether they're using efficiently or not. if you're paying for something, you will be more efficient. if i do not pay for gas, i do not care where i drive or what size of car i drive. but if i am paying for gas, i might be more careful in what vehicle live by. -- vehicle i buy. >> we talked about a way of figuring out ways for federal government agencies to use spectrum more efficiently. one of the things your committee has looked at is trying to

incentivize agencies to be more efficient by looking at what the cost would be. can you give us a sense of what that is about and why that might be effective? >> the omb has the power to look at systems and recommend or not recommend their approval based upon the budgetary impact. initially, that budgetary impact has just been the cost of buildings and operating equipment. it does not take into account explicitly the value of the spectrum that may be used in meeting the mission of that equipment. this would basically be design engineers sitting down and doing a design to meet certain specifications. they may not be as conscious as they would be of the value of this resource, as perhaps they

should be. perhaps the idea is for them to do some calculations to show what the valium -- value is of the spectrum they're going to use. and then maybe make some trade- offs. is it worth this extra bit of performance if it is going to cost an awful lot in terms of the amount of spectrum consumed, spectrum that could be used in some other high-value application as well? >> is this feasible? is that something that could happen where agencies are essentially charged for their spectrum used? >> i believe so. the united kingdom has had some experience with that. there are obviously some issues, of course, but i believe that by charging a fee or having a process that design people have to go through that takes implicit account of the value of the spectrum, i believe both of those are indeed feasible.

>> how much of the spectrum does the federal government currently control for its own use? >> that number is hard to get. let me tell you the difficulty. a lot of the spectrum is already shared. then, the government tends to use an awful lot of spectrum that is very high in frequency for things like radar and satellite communications and stuff like that. the spectrum that is the most useful or potentially most useful for commercial purposes is lower in frequency. i cannot quote you the exact percentage, but it is a significant amount if you include the higher frequencies as well. >> the fcc wants to voluntarily

reallocate 120 megahertz of spectrum. that would be part of the 500 mhz they want to free up. from a political standpoint, how difficult will that be? how do you convince television channels to give up spectrum, and how do you get it to the wireless carriers? >> part of the problem as i indicated earlier is that spectrum is not used uniformly. it tends to be used the most and the most valuable in urban areas. in the case of television, it is in the northeast corridor where people are packed closely together and television stations have to be closely packed together. creating enough spectrum in those critical areas for reallocation is where it is really tough. are veryical analysies

challenging. my own sense, and i have not done a detailed studies myself, but my own sense is that it is going to be a challenge to come up with significant amounts of spectrum in the urban areas where it is needed the most for the cellular phone type applications. where it is clearly very useful is in rural areas of the country where we can free up, with the new technology and repackaging, we can free up some pretty significant amounts there. the question is whether you can make the market attractive enough to drive the price of the devices down to have enough spectrum use in rural areas where it is so difficult to get fibrin and so forth. >> back to the ingestion issue,

are we almost to the crisis point when it comes to spectrum availability in the urban areas, much like traffic? is it a standstill in many urban areas? >> there sure are some challenges. i will caution your choice of words. clearly, in major urban areas the rapid growth of devices like ipad and so forth has used a lot, especially video. your voice conversation, of course, does not use much resources, but when we start talking about a lot of video and that sort of activity, it really increases the band with. the more of these devices that come on line, it really puts upward pressure in the urban areas. in the studies that i have done, they suggest that while there are certain efficiency

measurements we can take, that is not going to be the long-term answer. we have to do is you specter more intensely in the geographic sense. -- use specter more intensely in the geographic sense. when i mean by that is -- what i mean by that is, as the market has grown, cellular carriers have continued to shrink the size of cell phones down smaller so that they can use the same spectrum over and over again in the same market. when i see beginning to happen in the short to medium term is that we're going to have to use spectrum more efficiently by going to smaller and smaller cells. devices like that, including wife eye, only use a small amount of geographic -- wi-fi,

only use a small amount of geographic spectrum. it does not solve the problem for all types of systems, but that seems to become a going forward, the nature of the area that we're going to have to focus on. >> you are watching "the communicators." our guest, dale hatfield, is a professor at the university of colorado, and a member of the commerce spectrum advisory committee. he is also a former technology chief at the federal communications commission. he is about 50 years of experience in telecommunications policy, particularly spectrum issues. he is considered one of the leading experts on spectrum in the nation.

>> we are talking about spectrum efficiency. one of the things he made reference to earlier is the dynamic of spectrum access technology. that is technology that started with the defense department as they tried to make -- basically, reuse the spectrum and improve its efficiency by 10 times. give us a sense of what this could do and how this could help going forward. >> i think it could help enormously, because as i indicated, if i did a conceptual experiment, went up to the top of the building in the denver area, had a good receiver and could pick up a large swath of spectrum, it would turn out that large amounts of spectrum would not be used, while at the same time, there are people who may need spectrum. the idea is that when spectrum is temporarily not being used by

somebody, somebody else could use it. we call that dynamic spectrum assignment. rather than making an assignment that runs four years but is only used a few minutes a day, it would mean that -- or perhaps only a few hours a day -- it would mean that while they are not on the air, someone else could use it. if we did that, we could raise the average use from 5% or something like that, up significantly higher so that everybody has more opportunity to use the resources. that requires then arrangements for the spectrum to be shared, and that is the rub. people who have spectrum -- it may not be used very heavily -- are often reluctant to allow their spectrum to be shared by somebody else on a short-term basis for a number of reasons. >> that is the rub. the fcc has put out an item looking at spectrum access and

seeking comments. years ago, as you are aware, the fcc looked at allowing folks to use spectrum that was not used. that did not work. it did not go anywhere. it is politically difficult and from a business standpoint, companies do not like anything that sounds like forced sharing. how realistic is it for her -- for licensed spectrum to be implemented? >> it comes down to, again, incentives. as spectrum grows more valuable, hopefully the marketplace will work. somebody will say dale, i see that you are using your spectrum heavily during the week but not on nights and weekends. i want to do some electronic news gathering on the weekends.

i'm making this up entirely. i would like to lease some spectrum from you and use it on an dynamic basis. that would be an economic incentive, and it could be on an even shorter basis. more fundamentally, spectrum is the resources -- is a resource that has some trouble some characteristics with the way we manage it now. for example, if i agree to allow somebody to use my spectrum and what they use it for turns out to be wildly successful, then the person leasing in the go to the fcc and say look, this is obviously a better use of the spectrum, so reallocated to us. rights sort of look like

property rights are not very strong. it may be that i have to give up spectrum if i allow somebody to share. these are the negatives about sharing that are pretty strong. we need to create more positives to get people into sharing agreements. >> we have not talked about something that is near and dear to your heart, and that is receiver standards. right now, the fcc will regulate transmitters, but there are not detailed standards on receivers. can you give us a sense of why you think receiver standards makes sense and why you think we're likely to see that coming down the road? >> let me just say that there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind

that we have to tighten up on receivers. having said that, let me back up a little bit and give a little bit of background. most people, if they have a receiver in their house and they get interference from another source, they assume it is the other source that is causing the interference. but that other device may be operating completely legally in its band. but because the receiver i have is receiving outside the band i am assigned or supposed to be using, i receive interference. one of the hardest things i have had over the years is getting people, especially non-technical people, to understand that you have to have transmitters that do not squander spectrum, but equally, you have to have receivers that are not so wide

it, that do not pick up so much extraneous stuff, that you affect channels on either side from using that spectrum. in other words, the receiver is not selective enough and therefore cannot prevent us from using very, very valuable spectrum. as a nation, we cannot continue, in my mind, without doing something, continue our growth based upon this electronic revolution unless we do something about the receiver or receivers that make it out there in large numbers using spectrum more efficiently. >> is the technology available to make those receivers more efficient? >> certainly. again, i do not mean to make light of this, but there are cross-trade off issues. in other words, the tighter i

make my receiver, the less susceptible is to interference, there is a cost impact. in some cases, the additional cost is so small to be diminutive. therefore, it would be a huge benefit. manufacturers of consumer devices are in an extremely competitive environment. they may not want to spend a dime more on a $100 product. that is the reason i think we need some government action so that everybody is under some pressure to design their receivers and take into account the value of the spectrum, that you cannot have people that sort of ignore it and put out low- quality receivers that get out in such large numbers that we are effectively keeping people

from using the adjacent band with. >> we just spoke with the chairman and ceo of light squared a few weeks ago. they discuss the interference issue. what is your opinion of the light squared model? >> i have not been intimately involved in that. that is an area of such highly intense political debate right now that i am a little hesitant to go too far in reaching conclusions regarding their specific proposal and their specific technology, but my belief is it really does illustrate the importance of getting the receivers designed properly and not allowing them to proliferate. having long years of experience, i feel that the problem can be solved through the improvement

in technology, either by retrofitting some existing devices, or by improvement in devices as the turnover in the marketplace. >> as a technologist, is it frustrating to you when you have both sides kind of like expert witnesses in a trial. we have a guy that says this. well, we have a guy that says this. and then you cannot decide the key issue, which is harmful interference. is it frustrating that some people will take their engineers to make their political cases. does that give the engineering professor and -- profession a bad name, do you think? >> what bothers me particularly is when these issues escalate into a political debate before the engineers have had a chance

to sit down and fully worked out the technical issues. because once it reaches that -- because almost all of the services we are talking about, not even light squared specifically, but if people make the claim that interference is going to harm my ability to do something in the public interest, once you're debate is going on at that level -- my service is so critical it cannot be interfered with at all -- your beyond what engineers can do. engineers can contribute so much if you keep them as much out of the political environment for as long as possible. often, you get engineers in a room together and the engineer will say, if you would just week this over here i will tweak this over here and we can solve this problem. once it gets into the political domain, with so much money involved and so forth, then it

is very difficult to work out some of those types of solutions. >> so if you locked the engineers in the room with each other, they would be ok, but when you get internees of all -- attorneys involved, then you have a problem. >> what i am saying is that you want to try to narrow -- congress has an obviously important role in assessing how much risk we want to take in certain areas. but what you want to do is get the engineers to narrow the issues that congress has to address. narrow them and then get them expressed in a way that the trade-offs are clear. that is what engineers working

together can sometimes do. but i am not arguing at all that there is not an important role for congress. ultimately, it comes down to important decisions that should be in the hands of congress, but on the other hand, we ought to try to do everything we can to narrow the issues before they escalate into where we get these terrible, terrible battles going on between different stakeholder groups. >> should net neutrality guidelines apply to the wireless industry as it is being applied to the wireline industry? >> neutrality -- i was just sitting here thinking of spectrum. net neutrality is an interesting issue. the argument the wireless the argument the wireless providers