WRC-19 Challenge Will Be Balancing Satellite, Terrestrial Spectrum Needs, NTIA's Redl Says

NTIA head David Redl said at a U.S. ITU Association meeting Friday. While that also was a fight at WRC-15, the world is now further along in development and deployment, meaning there's more relevant data guiding the discussions, he said. Also a big challenge is agenda item 1.13, regarding spectrum between 24.25 GHz and 86 GHz for mobile broadband, he said. Some issues that might have been particularly contentious at the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications have died down. "Six years, in internet time, is an eternity," he said. Other topics, like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, will continue to be ITU hot buttons for the foreseeable future, he said. He said a big reason the U.S. wanted American Doreen Bogdan-Martin elected head of the ITU Telecom Development Bureau (see 1811010052) is its perception a leadership change was needed to help push along connectivity globally. He said the U.S. wants to see the ITU's focus not just on connectivity "but connecting them in a way that makes them equals … connects them to the global economy.” Redl said he didn’t know when the U.S. would appoint its WRC-19 delegation leadership, as that's in the purview of the State Department and he was not privy to those discussions. But NTIA, FCC and State Department staffs will have a lot of preliminary work done when the delegation leadership is decided, he said.