CTIA Marks Anniversary With Call for Renewal of FCC Auction Authority

CTIA Thursday marked the 30th anniversary of the FCC’s first spectrum auction by calling on Congress to restore the agency’s lapsed general auction authority. “For the past three decades, this Nobel-prize winning innovation has become increasingly key to America’s economic competitiveness and innovation leadership,” CTIA President Meredith Baker said. The anniversary is “an important reminder of the critical role that auctions play, and we call on policymakers to restore auction authority with a spectrum pipeline so that we can secure the benefits of wireless leadership for all Americans,” she said. CTIA also released the opening video of what it said will be a series of remembrances about auctions and the early days of the wireless industry. “The essential asset of wireless communications is spectrum,” former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler said in the first video. Wheeler noted that he became involved in wireless as part of a group of investors that won spectrum licenses in one of the lotteries that predated auctions, “the FCC’s dumbest way of allocating spectrum.” His group’s pingpong balls were picked “and suddenly I was in the wireless industry.” Licenses were also assigned through “beauty contests,” where companies made the case at the FCC on why they needed spectrum in a given area, he said. “That may have solved the instant problem, but it certainly didn’t facilitate how do you then have a concerted effort to deliver the important services,” Wheeler said: “It was widely understood that the … system was flawed.” Tom Sugrue, former head of the D.C. office for T-Mobile, said licenses' value increased rapidly “as people began to appreciate what mobile technology was worth.” But the “tools the FCC had to assign those licenses were becoming increasingly, obviously deficient.”