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My name is Tom Peters and I am the Chief Engineer in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau,Spectrum
is the collection of radio waves, up to visible light, there is a whole range of spectrum
that is available for transmitting information over. And so that spectrum is broken up into
what we call “bands” and ones you might be familiar with is the FM radio tuner in
your car. That band as the numbers on the dial will indicate, goes from 88 megahertz
to 108 megahertz – and that is a slice of this large range of spectrum that’s available
for transmitting information. You might be wondering what is a megahertz –what do we
mean by that? Radio waves all travel at the speed of light, so they’re all going the
same speed, and they’re waves. The time it takes for the crest of each wave to pass
by, that’s the frequency. So the unites of hertz - A hertz is one basically over seconds
(1/seconds). When you are listening to a station at 88 megahertz – mega means million –
you’re getting 88 million crests of these waves coming at you every second. So FM radio
is one use, we all use it, most of us use it. AM radio is another use, and your cell
phone is another use. The federal government has lots of uses. All these different uses
have different needs and different technical criteria they need to meet. And for that reason
the spectrum needs to be chopped up. What the FCC does is manage all the commerical
uses of spectrum. And waht NTIA does is manage all the federal uses of spectrum. For mobile
telephony, where devices are limited in size, there is a sweet spot of spectrum, in which
the propagation is very good, meaning it travels far, and it travels in buildings, through
walls very well, so you get very good coverage. That particular spectrum we call the UHF band
the Ultra High Frequency band is commonly refered to in the press as "beachfront" spectrum.
The UHF spectrum is right in that sweet spot where you can build a device that is of a
reasonable size and of reasonable power, that will have reasonable battery life, and you
get the benefit of having great propagation characteristics, which means that , as I said,
the signal travels farther, to cover a given area you need fewer base stations, fewer towers.
And that means cost savings. There's a cost advantage and a benefit to consumers to having
more spectrum available for broadband use, given the projected demand that we are expecting
to see in the next five to ten years.