Access to Spectrum, Not Subsidies, Will Close Digital Divide, WISPA Execs Say
Wireless ISPs need more and better spectrum to succeed, WISP Association officials said in a briefing for Capitol Hill staffers Wednesday. WISPA officials are especially hopeful about the 2.5 GHz band, a likely target of the FCC at its July 10 meeting.
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“We need to make sure we're leveling the playing field between our urban … and rural school systems," said House Rural Broadband Caucus co-Chairman Rob Wittman, R-Va. "Having access to broadband is absolutely the key.”
The traditional view is one can only get rural broadband by subsidizing it, said Mark Radabaugh, president of Amplex Internet. “That’s not true,” he said. “We found a good market in rural areas where you can make money.”
There’s a lot of spectrum “that will get you more broadband if you make it available to small businesses … somebody who is actually going to build it,” Radabaugh said. WISPs have an incentive to use spectrum efficiently, he said. “I would like to see smarter, better spectrum policy,” he said: “When we make a bad decision, we go out of business.”
“There’s a big market of entrepreneurs trying to solve this big public policy problem with our own money,” said Jimmy Carr, CEO of All Points Broadband. Carr said the biggest problem is that the license sizes offered by the FCC in most spectrum auctions are too large. The spectrum available to WISPs right now won’t penetrate trees, which limits the areas they can serve, he said.
No one-size-fits-all solution will work across the U.S., Carr said. “If there was something that Washington could just dictate, it would work everywhere and solve this problem, we wouldn’t be in this room today,” he said: Every solution will be “community, geography specific.”
Large license sizes keep WISPs out of most auctions, Carr said. If license sizes are small, no one will pay more for them than WISPs, he said: “I have trucks, towers, equipment, long-term leases, fiber optic backbone. … I would pay a lot of money for the spectrum in these particular areas.” Problem is “I need the kiosk and the auction size is the mall,” Carr said. ,
“We’re the ones out there scrapping and getting it done,” said Wisper ISP CEO Nathan Stooke, “A good spectrum policy would definitely help us.”
The executives said they're closely watching the 2.5 GHz proceeding, which could soon be teed up for a vote at the FCC (see 1906120043). “All of us are very interested in the 2.5 spectrum,” Radabaugh said. “It will depend on how the rules come out and who can participate in those auctions.” Depending on the regulations, “a lot of us will be very interested in purchasing it.” The 2.5 GHz spectrum “helps us burn through trees, it’s very clean spectrum,” Stooke said: “It’s a shame that the vast majority of the 2.5 spectrum goes unused and fallow in the rural markets.”