Licensed spectrum is a $500B resource
WASHINGTON – A senior telecommunications lobbyist, talking about the need for public policy opening up more broadband spectrum, boiled the situation down: “We have to keep feeding the beast.”
That’s from Tom Power, general counsel and SVP of the Cellular Telephone Industries Association.
A new CTIA report prepared by the Brattle Group pegged the economic value of the 645.5 MHz of spectrum licensed by the U.S. government to be a staggering $500 billion.
In terms of economic impact, the report found that in 2013 consumers and businesses spent $172 billion on wireless services.
“In turn, as wireless service employees, wireless companies, their suppliers and suppliers’ employees spent their paychecks and funds, this generated more than $400 billion in total U.S. spending,” according to the report.
Broken down, that equates to every dollar spent on wireless service creating $2.32 of total spending.
The Federal Communications Commission recently completed a spectrum auction that yielded more than $40 billion in revenue driven by a competitive bidding process.
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There’s currently a plan to auction more spectrum in early 2016.
Power was concerned that the current and future availability of spectrum won’t keep up with the explosive growth in consumer and enterprise demand.
“We just completed what was the largest auction in terms of revenue and we have another big auction potentially coming up next year,” he said, adding the caveat, “but nothing really on the horizon after that while demand for mobile broadband continues to escalate.”
A recent report from networking-gear company Cisco found the average U.S. consumer used 1.3 gigabytes of data each in 2014.
CTIA President and CEO Meredith Attwell Baker called licensed spectrum “the industry’s backbone for network operators to boost speeds and capacity, device manufacturers to develop new products, and apps and content developers to create new offerings.”
On the report findings, she said, “Policymakers need to continue to look for hundreds of MHz of additional licensed spectrum so this economic growth is sustained and America remains the global leader in this rapidly changing sector.”