In the past, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has managed now and then to wrestle away the spotlight (albeit temporarily) on major telecom-tech issues of the day from the Federal Communications Commission. NTIA, a Commerce Department unit that serves as the principal adviser to the president on telecom-tech matters and manages spectrum used by federal agencies, has conducted its share of thoughtful reports in the past.
Its visibility was huge during the Clinton administration when Congress was debating a landmark telecom bill it ultimately passed in 1996. In President Bush’s first term, NTIA’s role was pivotal as an arbiter in complex and controversial efforts to identify 1700 MHz federal government spectrum eventually freed up for 3G mobile operations via last year’s advanced wireless services auction. NTIA also brokered a deal that resulted in a technological solution to enable gobs more 5 GHz spectrum to become available for Wi-Fi without disrupting military radar.
There have been more charismatic and popular NTIA directors than the current one, but none has had to shoulder more high-profile, high-stakes operational responsibility under relentless brow-beating congressional scrutiny than John Kneuer. In the end, Kneuer faces the paradoxical prospect of accomplishing more than any of his predecessors and being appreciated the least. The fog of controversy has obfuscated the real picture of the heavy lifting assigned to Kneuer and the progress his agency is making on major fronts.
Major initiatives
In addition to its traditional duties, Kneuer’s NTIA is managing a $1.5 billion digital TV converter subsidy program; a $1 billion grant program to improve public-safety communications interoperability around the country; the relocation of federal users from 1700 MHz frequencies reallocated to advanced wireless services; and the implementation of President Bush’s spectrum policy initiative.
All the while, Kneuer faces the sometimes hostile oversight of a Democratic-led Congress angry about lackluster public-safety interoperability six years after 9/11, nervous about a massive meltdown of TV-watching Americans when analog broadcast signals go dark in early 2009, and perturbed about the United States lagging other countries in broadband penetration. Indeed, Kneuer has often been on the political hot seat since becoming NTIA administrator last December, a few months after Democrats captured the House and Senate from Republicans. Being the point man for telecom and high-tech policy in a Republican administration has become exponentially more difficult as a result.
Yet the hard-nosed Kneuer appears to be weathering congressional criticism and keeping major programs on track. Kneuer has a no-nonsense, lawyerly style that some might regard as abrasive. But given the circumstances of the heavy burden he carries, one could argue that Kneuer’s mode of management is precisely what is needed to take care of business.
“It’s been challenging. It’s been rewarding. It’s been fun. It’s been sometimes not so fun,” said Kneuer in an interview. “Generally I tend to agree. I think NTIA has been saddled with more operational responsibility in the past few years than has historically been the case. That being said, we’ve got a really good, dedicated team. I’ve had huge support from the leadership in the building, from partners across the administration.”
Team effort
Late year, Kneuer got an earful from lawmakers about getting public-safety interoperability grants into the hands of states. Kneuer and Department of Homeland Security officials huddled and decided to leverage each agency’s expertise and strengths in carrying out the program. NTIA and DHS wanted to be smart about it and not just mindlessly throw money at the problem. By mid-July, Commerce Secretary Carolos Gutierrez and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced nearly $1 billion in public-safety interoperability grants.
“We’ve really turned the tide in the way we relate to this as far as the federal government funding states and local [communities], and that has changed the way things have gone on this,” said Kneuer. “This has been an identified problem for a very long time, but it wasn’t a very well measured problem. And by requiring these plans and doing these studies, for the first time we’ve identified gaps.”
The same goes for the Bush spectrum reform effort.
“You look at things like the president’s spectrum initiative. That is an administration-wide initiative. That isn’t an NTIA project,” Kneuer said. Kneuer points out that large federal government users-such as DHS, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Justice and NASA-are all pulling in the same direction to fundamentally change the way in which agencies view an increasingly scarce national resource: radio spectrum.
“It is now a requirement-OMB [Office of Management and Budget] circulars say if you are proposing a spectrum dependent system in your budget, you need to certify that you considered less spectrum-intensive uses. It’s a totally different way of thinking about things and it’s an analysis that was never done before. That in and of itself is a huge change in the way we do things,” Kneuer stated.
Indeed, institutionalizing the new spectrum mindset throughout government is perhaps one of the most under-appreciated outcomes of the Bush spectrum policy plan. This is so in part because it is far more difficult to quantify the new policy’s value and package it for mass consumption than announcing that you raised back nearly $14 billion for the U.S. Treasury from the auction of wireless licenses. And yet, ironically, the newfound government-wide focus on spectrum efficiency could give rise in the future to the kind of federal-to-private-sector spectrum transfers that contributed to the big money in last year’s AWS auction.
“I think you’re going to enable many more of those sorts of things [spectrum reallocations] in the future by, for the first time, getting the federal government to treat this resource as a scarce resource with value that you need to account for,” Kneuer said.
Spectrum possibilities and plans
Concerns have been raised about whether big AWS winners-No. 4 T-Mobile USA Inc. in particular–will face delays in gaining access to 1700 MHz spectrum still held by federal users.
Kneuer said the wireless industry was put on notice early on about all the federal 1700 MHz users that needed to be relocated, but concedes dealing with government mobile-surveillance operations in the band-unlike moving fixed links to other frequencies-is less than a straight-forward process.
“We didn’t have a lot of experience coordinating with these mobile devices, and the coordination of those mobile devices has been more challenging maybe than people had anticipated,” Kneuer stated. “That being said, we still want to get these guys [relocated] . Everybody knows that they’re going to move. .The longer it takes for us to move and we can’t coordinate, the longer the spectrum lies fallow-that’s not good from a macro-economic standpoint. So we want the licensees to be able to get access to the spectrum as quickly as possible. We don’t want don’t want to compromise the government missions.”
Though additional federal-to-commercial spectrum transfers may be forthcoming as NTIA and FCC officials pursue greater technological efficiencies, examine their respective spectrum inventories and project future requirements of users, the big breakthrough is likely to manifest itself in spectrum sharing.
“That is the future of more spectrum access,” said Kneuer. He added: “You shouldn’t be looking to lawyers and regulators to help you get more out the spectrum you have. It’s the engineers and technologists that are going to do that. It will be everywhere. It will be much more integrated into everything that we do.”
Even though technological advances are outpacing policy, Kneuer said policymaking has not necessary become more difficult than it was in the days of regulated telephone monopolies,
“With market forces replacing monopoly-based regulation in broader and broader chunks of this industry, policy is different than it once was,” explained Kneuer. “It’s not so much dictating outcomes as it is taking a view of this competitive marketplace, trying to identify market failures to the extent there are and tweaking on the margins. But it’s much more. In the face of this competitive landscape, we’re can we start responsibly rolling back regulations that are standing in the way of technologies that will just bring more competition, more innovation and more investment. So it is not an exercise of blindly eliminating all regulation, but it does take some ability to have confidence in the market, to have confidence in the technology, to look a these things and say, ‘You know what, maybe this regulation isn’t necessary anymore and we should ratchet it back in a responsible way, see what the reaction is. But if market forces are keeping prices down, are bringing us service to new communities, are bring us new innovation and the rest of it, it’s a better job than we as policymakers could do.”
Kneuer takes exception to the criticism heaped on the Bush administration regarding U.S. broadband deployment.
“There’s some disconnect to those who say were falling behind the rest of the world when it’s clear that this country and this economy is the absolute epicenter of the broadband universe if measured by innovation, by investment, by the amount of economic activity that goes on online-all of these things,” Kneuer stated. “All of that is to say we need to continue to pursue policies that drive more investment, more innovation so we don’t get bogged down. But I think we do pretty well.”