AT&T’s Stephenson says broadcast auctions are necessary to ease ‘spectrum crisis’
Oct 24, 2011 11:09 AM, By Michael Grotticelli
AT&T Chairman Randall Stephenson said recently that in many markets “we are basically running out of capacity.”
AT&T Chairman Randall Stephenson said his wireless signal carrier company would run out of spectrum — sooner than many had predicted — even with the FCC’s efforts to free up airwaves from television broadcasters.
“The problem at AT&T is that we are now in many markets approaching exhaust in our spectrum position,” he told the Media Institute last week in Washington, DC. “We are basically running out of capacity. We’re out of spectrum.”
As chaotic as the previous four years has been in wireless technologies, Stephenson said, the next five years will trump that — “the smart phone revolution has just begun.” High-definition video conferencing on mobile devices and medical imaging will be commonplace, he said, while access to content will be seamless “across all networks and across all devices” on mobile broadband networks.
Like FCC chairman Julius Genachowski before him, Stephenson made a pitch for mobile broadband as the great democratizer of Internet access.
“The people in rural America and small towns and inner cities are not going to be excluded,” he said.
He appeared to endorse the FCC’s request for a mobility fund — money the commission is planning to set aside to subsidize wireless broadband in its Universal Service Fund reforms.
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