John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Mobile Device Makers to Congress: We Want the Airwaves, Baby

celltowerA coalition of tech companies — Apple, Samsung and Nokia among them — is urging Congress to make additional wireless spectrum available for mobile data.

In a letter to key lawmakers this week, the High Tech Spectrum Coalition (HTSC) — which includes Apple, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM and Samsung — asked that Congress consider expanding an upcoming spectrum auction to include bands used by federal agencies.

“Now is the time to ensure the incentive auctions are as robust and successful as possible at liberating spectrum,” the HTSC wrote. “We should also turn our collective attention on ways to reap the economic benefits of underutilized federal spectrum assets.”

The HTSC’s point: Demand for mobile data is growing far too quickly for anyone to be sitting on under-utilized or unused spectrum. And while new spectrum-efficient technologies might temper that demand a bit, they’re really not a long-term solution.

“As technology companies, we joined this debate because policymakers need to know that we cannot simply engineer our way out of this problem,” the HTSC wrote, adding that federal agencies need to be incentivized to “become more efficient, to share with one another, to vacate, or to lease their spectrum.”

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