Today, the Federal Communications Commission’s Chairman Wheeler confirmed in a letter to Senators Upton and Walden a delay of the order establishing procedures for the next spectrum incentive auction as well as the order on mobile spectrum holdings. Both orders are now scheduled for the FCC’s August 6 Open Meeting.
The following can be attributed to Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge:
“The Chairman made the right decision to defer a vote on these items until August 6. Our experience talking with the Auction Team in the last few days has been that they are very open to suggestions on how to meet the twin goals of making sure the auction both frees enough clean spectrum to promote competition and provides enough capacity for unlicensed to stimulate investment and deployment of next generation Wi-Fi. What is needed is a bit more time to evaluate the stakeholder proposals and confirm that any proposed solution will work, without creating unintended consequences.
“Additionally, the Chairman’s decision to delay a vote on the spectrum holdings item will allow the Commission to consider what changes will best serve the goal of promoting competition. We remain hopeful that the Commission will take the necessary steps to use this unique opportunity to promote wireless competition.
”In the end, we should remember that these are genuinely hard problems, and that solving them requires real choices among competing goals. We look forward to continuing to work with the FCC to address these issues.”
Members of the media may contact Communications Director Shiva Stella with inquiries, interview requests, or to join the Public Knowledge press list at shiva@publicknowledge.org or 405-249-9435.