The FCC's Spectrum Pipeline with Arpan Sura

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

Hello, and welcome to the three hundred and tenth episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Entner. How are doing, Roger?

Roger Entner 0m23s

I'm great.

Don Kellogg 0m24s

So, Roger, this week, have a great guest. Arpin Sura is senior counsel to FCC chairman Brendan Carr, and he's here to

Guest Speaker 0m31s

talk to us about Spectrum. Arpin, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here.

Roger Entner 0m36s

Hey, Arpin. Good to have you on the podcast. You know, we met, oh, a couple months ago at at a great dinner. We sat next to each other at ConnectX, and we decided we would do this. And I think it's a terrific time that you came because you guys are doing a terrific job getting Spectrum up to auction and then into the hands of the people who bring it to the best use for the American people.

Roger Entner 1m5s

Can you tell us a little bit more about that? You guys are doing this much better, faster than anybody else has done this before.

Guest Speaker 1m12s

Absolutely. This summer we finished our auction in AWS three, which is the first in several years, and we're on track to conduct an auction in Upper C Band by July 2027, with the goal of conducting several more auctions by the end of twenty twenty eight. And when Chairman Carr came in, he looked at spectrum policy as any other major infrastructure project. You gotta do it on time, on budget, and with no surprises. And that sounds simple, but the history of spectrum policy shows that it's not.

Guest Speaker 1m44s

Too often government identifies a promising ban, studies it, studies it again, misses its own milestones, maybe discovers problems after the auction, or after companies have paid billions of dollars for licenses. And that's just not the way spectrum policy should work. Delay is not free. Every year spectrum sits in a study or a transition or a licensing queue. That's another year that America goes without capacity, competition, investment, and innovation.

Guest Speaker 2m13s

And the upper c band, which we're on track to do in record time, offers an opportunity to demonstrate a different model. Set the schedule early, you identify the costs early, you resolve the technical issues early, and then you execute on aggressive transition milestones. The ultimate goal here is to light up the band for the benefit of Americans. And as six g is coming into fruition in the early 2030s, it's critical to keep schedule.

Roger Entner 2m40s

Yeah. No. And you and chairman Carr learned from some of the lessons in the past. Just, you know, today, a journalist from Com Daily reached out and said, like, you know, upper c band, there's altimeters, you know, will we have the same problems we had the first time around? And I was like, no, if there is a will and a way, and when you're prepared, these issues should not crop up again.

Roger Entner 3m3s

Right?

Guest Speaker 3m4s

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, what happened in the last C band auction was a telling example of surprises that occurred after the fact, but in fact, there are many such examples. I'll give you a couple. We have 1,300 to thirteen fifty, which the government approved and funded for the censor study back in 2017. A few years ago, we blew through the statutory deadline and still haven't auctioned or identified the spectrum.

Guest Speaker 3m29s

You have other bands where the transition timelines took thirty nine months. This was a 600 megahertz incentive auction. Thirty nine months for the transition in about four and a half years from NPRM to auction. In the 700 megahertz band, we had to wait as much as seven years for the DTV transition to complete before that band could light up. And all of those examples are the product of a lack of discipline, a lack of accountability, but also a lack of coordination within the federal government both on a top down and from a horizontal perspective.

Guest Speaker 4m8s

And one of the things we've done really well working with NTIA is to set the alignment early in the process to establish the pipeline, to make it clear that the goal is not to just finish studies, the goal is not to just finish auctions, the goal is to light up for the benefit of Americans, and you're starting to see that pay dividends. Time has value. I think we saw that in the first C band auction where we set an early clearing deadline and a later clearing deadline, and you saw a premium of 10 to 15% that was reflected in the auction bids between those two deadlines. So we have empirical evidence that this spectrum is worth more to carriers if they can light up early, and it's worth more to them because they can light that spectrum up for Americans earlier as well.

Roger Entner 4m54s

Yeah. And then Ariel Roth, have a great partner at the NTIA. Also, I think contrary to some other administrations before, the White House is on board and wants to light up more spectrum. I read with great amusement that article in The Guardian where they, I think, did a FOIA request for German Karr's emails and were surprised that German Karr is very polite and businesslike in his communications. I didn't know what they expected.

Roger Entner 5m24s

And now and then he meets with the White House. We don't know about what. Well, I can tell you about what, just from the outside, how can we bring more spectrum to the American people? So what can we expect next?

Guest Speaker 5m38s

Well, on that article, I was surprised to see my name, and I suppose it was a scandal that he and I met with the FAA to talk about spectrum issues. I suppose the alternative should have been that we didn't. I suppose the alternative would have been better. And look, I mean, the thing that you said at the top, Roger, is correct, that there's a alignment from the very top of this administration that spectrum is important for national security, it's important for economic growth, And that wasn't a political commitment. That's always been there across administrations.

Guest Speaker 6m10s

In the previous administration, for example, it took four years to develop a national spectrum strategy. And when it came out, there was zero commitment to release a single megahertz of spectrum for commercial use. There were no deadlines. There were no clearing targets. There was no accountability that was baked into that study.

Guest Speaker 6m30s

And what Congress did when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 is it put that accountability, hardwired that accountability into the law. It set an aggressive timeline for clearing. It set a quota of 800 megahertz to clear, and then it identified targeted bands, including the upper C band. So we have the playbook that's set now, and now the goal is for us to execute.

Roger Entner 6m57s

So how are you executing next after upper C band?

Guest Speaker 7m0s

Well, NTIA has a number of studies that are in queue. They're making excellent progress. Lower seven gigahertz appears to be the first where they are rounding the corner, and then we are looking at one dot six gigahertz and two dot seven gigahertz. And the goal is to auction all three by the end of this administration.

Roger Entner 7m19s

Great. And you are also creating, you know, what's traditionally called intermodal competition by strengthening satellite providers.

Guest Speaker 7m30s

That's absolutely right. So one thing that we've seen in recent years is that there's been an incredible amount of investment and innovation in direct to device. And when we released our supplemental coverage from space rules in 2024, just a few years ago, that technology was nascent. And now we've seen a maturation beyond our wildest imaginations. You're seeing lots of money flow into this technology.

Guest Speaker 7m54s

You're seeing satellite providers ask for their own dedicated spectrum, and there's a lot of interest and enthusiasm in this technology. You know, the history of these emerging technologies is they're first dismissed, and then they're taken seriously, and then they're feared. I think fixed wireless is a really good example of this, by the way, where now it's commonplace, but if you go back to 2017, 2018, it was derided, it was ridiculed, was considered an inferior product, and consumers have shown that that's not true anymore. We don't know where directed device is gonna go. We don't know if it's ultimately gonna be a substitute or a compliment.

Guest Speaker 8m31s

Right now it's clearly a compliment. It's not on the same level as a terrestrial network, but we don't know. And our approach here at the FCC is just to allow that market experimentation to occur, and we'll see where it goes.

Roger Entner 8m44s

Yeah. And, you know, what we're seeing is that Starlink in our studies, what consumers report back to us, Starlink for home Internet has, like, fiber like reliability now from the perspective of did the Internet connection go down? And it's available everywhere. I I am testing a Starlink 200 megabit connection every fifteen minutes. And so I see how well it's performing.

Roger Entner 9m13s

For people in rural America, this is a truly a heaven sent. Right?

Guest Speaker 9m19s

Mhmm.

Roger Entner 9m19s

And in the data that we see, is like 25% of Starlink customers. The only thing that holds them back from converging is that Starlink doesn't offer wireless service. And everything is going to convergence. So you enabling here the satellite providers with additional spectrum is certainly heating up the market, where Americans are the least connected. You know, I always say, like, if there is a digital divide in America, it's between rural America and urban America.

Roger Entner 9m52s

It is not drawn by skin color or or anything else. It's basically of where you live. And satellite to beat is certainly closing that gap, and, you know, we wanna have everybody have a great connectivity wherever they are.

Guest Speaker 10m9s

Yeah. It's so interesting how far we've come. The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund that was conducted several years ago, the FCC awarded Starlink several $100,000,000, and that award was later taken away on the idea that they were not gonna be able to meet their performance requirements. This is before a single customer had even been served. The FCC yanked that award away on the grounds that satellite connectivity suffers from inherent capacity constraints, and they could never be as good as wireline broadband to the home.

Guest Speaker 10m44s

Now fast forward several years later and the speeds have multiplied, and we've learned that a lot of those constraints on capacity were indeed artificial, the number of satellites that could serve a given location, the amount of spectrum that could be used. Those are regulatory problems, not inherent technical problems, and if we adopt a mindset of abundance and try to create competition by eliminating those technical restrictions that degrade performance, then you do start to see the competition unlock. That mentality of abundance is animating everything we're doing in space.

Roger Entner 11m20s

And to a certain extent, we live in the world of science fiction. Partially, live beyond of science fiction twenty years ago. And so it's very hard to imagine what's actually possible. And I'm a big proponent of, like, functional regulation, not technical regulations. We should not hobble one technology over the other or favor one technology over the other.

Roger Entner 11m44s

Let them compete on an even basis. And you're doing that. You also have, I think, an NPRM out on unlicensed use of spectrum for satellite. Right?

Guest Speaker 11m57s

Yes. We just adopted an NPRM that seeks comment on using unlicensed spectrum two bands, 2.4 gigahertz and 5.8 gigahertz, for direct to device. This is a first of its kind proceeding. I'm not aware of any other regulator in the world that has even thought about this. And so it's a mind bending proceeding, and we'll see where it goes.

Guest Speaker 12m18s

I'm very excited about it.

Roger Entner 12m19s

Yeah. Me too. Because The US is truly, truly leading in this holistic and comprehensive use of all different kind of technologies that marries the right technology to the right location and the right usage application. Yeah. I love satellite for the right locations.

Roger Entner 12m40s

Fiber, I love for other applications. And there's for all technologies, there is a place and a time and a usage. And it's great that this commission is recognizing that in a true form.

Guest Speaker 12m56s

You know, we talk about the players in this market through the idiom of silos, cable companies, wireless companies, satellite companies. But if you actually look at their networks, they're all multimodal. Wireless companies are buying fiber. They're rolling up fiber companies. The cable companies use their existing plant and then write off CBRS and other spectrum resources.

Guest Speaker 13m19s

Starlink is talking about potentially getting in the terrestrial game. And so the idea that there's providers that operate off one technology is just factually incorrect, and we need to get away from that as regulators.

Roger Entner 13m33s

Yeah, and you're the Federal Communications Commission, and it's all about Americans communicating regardless of technology. Right? It has become truly intermodal. Terrific. So before we close, what are you most excited about when you look over the next, you know, you can predict pretty well the next two years.

Roger Entner 13m56s

We can't predict much more than that. But what are you most excited about for the next two years?

Guest Speaker 14m3s

So stepping back, there's, in my mind, at least three ways of bringing more capacity to Americans. The first is doing auctions on time, on budget, and with no surprises. And so far we've been doing well, but that's a game of execution and focus, and we're still in the middle of the game. There's a lot to go. So we've got to continue to execute on that.

Guest Speaker 14m24s

The second is infrastructure reform. Spectrum is only a product of the infrastructure deployment, and so we have to redouble our efforts that we've done in 2017 and 2018 to speed up permitting, to make it easier to deploy radios, and we have some exciting developments down the line on that front. So I'm very thrilled about that. And then finally, secondary market transactions. One thing chairman Carr has realized and talked a lot about is that moving spectrum from underutilized companies to more productive operators can unlock a tremendous amount of value, and you saw that with some of the transactions that have happened recently where EchoStar sold its spectrum to SpaceX and to AT&T.

Guest Speaker 15m12s

AT&T lit that three four five spectrum up overnight from millions of Americans.

Roger Entner 15m17s

And I would expect more to come from EchoStar. They're still sitting on some spectrum.

Guest Speaker 15m22s

Yes. They haven't sold their entire portfolio. We saw this in the Grain transaction where we incentivized Grain to run a private process to see if they could light up the band for D to D. This is the 800 megahertz spectrum that had been lying fallow for many, many years. 14 megahertz of contiguous nationwide low band spectrum.

Guest Speaker 15m41s

If that spectrum can be lit up soon, that will be a huge game changer. And one of the ways we're doing that is through our emphasis on build out. We are demanding that companies that have the privilege of using federally licensed spectrum put it to use for the American people faster. Speculation has imposed an enormous cost on this industry, and chairman Carr has really pivoted and and made those expectations clear that we are going to expect that valuable asset be put to use.

Roger Entner 16m11s

Yeah. I'm a big fan of short build out requirements Because otherwise, people sit on this and speculate on it. You know, you get the spectrum, build it out. This is spectrum for the American people, not for speculators. Right?

Roger Entner 16m25s

Who can sit on this forever. Arvind, this was terrific. Thank you very much for giving us a great overview of what the FCC is doing and what we can expect over the next two years. Thank you.

Guest Speaker 16m39s

My pleasure. It was great to talk to you.

Don Kellogg 16m41s

Alright. Thanks, gentlemen. Roger, we'll talk to you next week.