CTIA’s Top Priority Is and Always Will Be Spectrum, Baker Says
CTIA’s top priority is spectrum “and it always will be,” new President Meredith Baker told reporters Tuesday. A former FCC commissioner and acting NTIA administrator, Baker noted that Tuesday was only her 12th day on the job since she took over from Steve Largent. CTIA will devote all the resources necessary to “successfully shift spectrum to mobile broadband use in the years to come,” she said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The AWS-3 and TV incentive auctions are the first major auctions in six years, which is “an eternity in the mobile industry,” Baker said. “Our core objective over the next year is to keep our eye on the ball and to make sure these auctions are a huge success."
Baker predicted that carriers will be active in both auctions. “We're going to be there with big checkbooks,” she said. But CTIA is also looking down the road for more auctions and other opportunities to convert additional spectrum to commercial use, she said. Industry needs “to start these conversations now,” she said. Baker noted that the FCC now has congressional permission to authorize other incentive auctions, beyond the one expected to get underway next year. (See related report in this issue.) “We want to do it again,” she said.
Baker said her second priority is a “technology reboot” of CTIA to make the group the “educational and engineering home” for the wireless industry. “Finding and clearing” big chunks of additional spectrum “will not be easy,” she said. “We need to keep getting smarter and more innovative.” Baker noted that no one at CTIA has the necessary clearances to review government spectrum data under the Department of Defense’s Trusted Agent program and the association would address that shortfall. “I want us to be in the forefront of sharing,” she said. Her time at NTIA made her realize “how many agencies have spectrum holdings for so many diverse things,” she said. A third priority is highlighting for Americans the benefits of wireless, Baker said. For most people, their wireless device is now also their camera, a stereo, a newspaper and sometimes a health monitor, she said. “We hope to showcase that."
Baker downplayed divisions within CTIA among carrier members. Industry officials have told us that John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, didn’t participate in the vote that eventually led to Baker’s selection as president (CD April 24 p1). On the “big priorities,” the carriers “are all in agreement,” Baker said. “The carriers are all in agreement that the connected life is important to bring to consumers and to do that we need to have more spectrum.” But she conceded “associations are difficult in general.”
She said CTIA will make no major changes in leadership “if there will be any” until after its annual show in Las Vegas in September (http://bit.ly/1pFXsFO).
Baker said CTIA plans to participate in E-rate discussions, headed into what is expected to be a vote on E-rate reforms at the FCC July 11 meeting (CD June 12 p1). “It was exciting that when the president started talking about ConnectED, that so many wireless companies stepped up to contribute,” she said. “We're finally recognizing that mobility” is part of the “broadband ecostructure in the USF,” said Baker.
CTIA also released results from its annual survey, which found U.S. carriers handled more than 3.2 trillion megabytes of data in 2013, a 120 percent increase from the previous year. Wireless carriers invested a record $33.1 billion in capital expenditures last year, or approximately $101 per subscriber, CTIA said (http://bit.ly/T4fUKd).