FCC Fully Committed on 5G, Infrastructure Reform, Pai Tells Cato

a 24 GHz auction (see 1802260047). “We intend to move very quickly on other bands as well,” he said. “Our goal at least is to set the table” for innovation, he said. “The last thing we want is for regulation to stand as bottleneck for consumer welfare.” Pai noted the importance to 5G of changing the infrastructure rules: “The biggest roadblocks that we face now are regulatory.” Barriers to deploying small cells at the levels that will be needed for 5G are “almost insurmountable” Pai said. “There are multiple levels of regulatory review -- federal, state, local, tribal,” he said. Smaller companies in particular are struggling, he said. A small carrier deploying a 5G network in a city like Washington might have to install “several hundred or a thousand small cells,” he said. “I don’t want the FCC’s policies on 5G to stand as an example of what went wrong.” Pai was at Cato to discuss The Political Spectrum, a book by Clemson University economist Thomas Hazlett on the history of spectrum policy. One of the book's takeaways is that too much communications regulation is based on “accepted wisdom -- it is this way because it has always been this way,” Pai said. “There is sometimes a hesitance to look at the facts and to reconsider first principles.” Hazlett said local objections to the deployment of base stations is a major problem in the U.S. “There is a significant role for Congress and the FCC to get involved,” Hazlett said. “Spectrum allocation, it’s a work in progress and there is momentum.” But it wasn’t hard for him to identify in the book “horror stories” on spectrum regulation, he said. Too much spectrum is still in the hands of federal agencies, Hazlett said. Opening bands for commercial use can take decades, he said.