I also believe there are a lot of different ideas out there, and it’s easy to go off on tangents. I used to work for Senator (Fritz) Hollings (D-SC) who was fond of saying, "As you go through life, make this your role. Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole." I don't believe that we always do that.

We'll be talking about universal service and somebody will say, "Reverse auctions." So we go off six months and we talk about reverse auctions. And somebody will say, ”no, no, no—we need a wireless cap.“ So we go off for six months and talk about wireless caps. We're kind of all over the place, and we have referrals that are sitting there from 2002 and 2005 that are not being acted upon.

Now, in the good news department, I think the Joint Board right now is focused more substantively on getting some positive recommendations. I think they understand that maybe decisions without them will be decisions against them, and maybe we'll go ahead around here without even waiting for them.

Wave: Some have suggested a specific USF mobility component.

Copps: I think that's an option that we should be talking about. Frankly, I think it's an option that has some interest in the universal service Joint Board. One possibility would be to set up some kind of a subset of the Universal Service Fund that would be a mobility fund. I'm not necessarily endorsing that at this point in time, but I think it's something that merits discussion.

We just have to bring this fund into the 21st century and make sure that it works for wireless and broadband as well as it worked for wireline back in the previous era.

Wave: In this issue of Wireless Wave is an article that has a number of interesting statistics regarding wireless in the United States versus other countries, notably in Europe. U.S. consumers pay a third of the price per minute of the next cheapest European country and use wireless more than 500 minutes per month on average than the next closest European country. There’s also the latest HHI data that shows the U.S. has one of the lowest percentages of combined market share for the two largest carriers. The statistics appear to collectively paint an objective picture that wireless in the U.S. is comparatively a great deal for consumers.

Copps: Well, I think as you say, there are a lot of statistics out there. There are some folks that would cite other ones, I suppose. I cited others earlier in this interview. I think that the FCC has not done a very good job of compiling statistics. It's the same thing as in broadband. Who is using it, for what purposes, how much, what price?

"I think there's enough spectrum out there that we should be a little bit innovative and try a new model that hasn't been tried elsewhere. We should see if some of the competitive policies that have been tried in other countries have a role to play in our own spectrum dealings. So I think there are a number of good reasons for the open access requirements."


Michael Copps
FCC Commissioner 

 

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