UPDATED 11:48 EDT / FEBRUARY 28 2017

INFRA

FCC chair Ajit Pai insists agency will be politically independent

New FCC Chair Ajit Pai on Tuesday insisted on his agency would remain independent in the face of political pressure from President Donald Trump, saying that if he bowed to pressure from his boss, he would “just become another political player.”

The comments from Pai (pictured) came in response to a pointed question from CNBC anchor Karen Tso during a Mobile World Congress keynote panel on “Building the 5G Economy.” In his prepared remarks, Pai – in office for just five weeks after five years on the commission — defended what he called a “light-touch” regulatory approach that backed off his agency’s previous embrace of net neutrality.

In a Q&A, Tso asked Pai how he could guide his agency independently in view of Trump’s public statements, including the president’s anger at TimeWarner’s CNN unit during regulatory review of an AT&T/Time Warner merger.

These are political questions that are above my pay grade,” he said. Pai added that the FCC has a bureaucratic process that has to remain “independent.” The exchange highlighted a session in which Pai and his European Union counterpart Andrus Ansip, vice president of the European Commission’s Digital Single Market, called on carriers to become deeply involved in the regulatory issues that are being hashed out today regarding 5G.

Ansip has a particularly interesting problem, as his agency overlays the EU’s national regulatory bodies. Each of them has its own rules about spectrum and competition that can inhibit the sort of standardization that global telecom rollouts require.

“When 4G came along, Europe was slow adopting,” said Ansip, pointing to fragmentation in the European market resulting in comparatively low 4G usage. “We don’t want to make the same mistake with 5G.”

5G standards needed

Despite all the chatter about 5G in tech circles, Ansip pointed out that the first public trials of 5G won’t happen in Europe until 2018 – later this year in the U.S. – with commercial deployment coming in 2020. The time to make plans, he said, is today.

“The world does not yet have any 5G standards or specifications,” Ansip said, urging carriers and governments to get involved today in standards-setting. “We want to avoid segmentation and interoperability problems. What we need is a common understanding between countries and regions. What we need for 5G to become a reality is to make spectrum available as though it were in a single market.

The alternative, he said, is the potential for regions to get left behind in the fast connectivity age. “Nobody in Europe can afford for this to happen.”

Stephane Richard, chief executive of the Orange Group, a large wireless carrier, pointed to two barriers to 5G investment and deployment: spectrum management and regulatory attitudes toward consolidation in the wireless market.

“We need positive change in spectrum management, especially in Europe,” said Richard. “More licenses in 5G spectrum would be needed at affordable cost, and we need rights to keep the spectrum much longer — 25 years.”

Richard also addressed EU regulatory attitudes toward market consolidation in the European market. Where China has three carriers and the U.S. four, Richard pointed out that each country in Europe has its own set, limiting the economic power that could be wielded by fewer larger regional companies. Ansip – Europe’s top telecom regulator — begged off, saying the question was one for national governments.

“5G is not only a topic for telecom operators,” Richard said. “It’s really a something at stake for all of society, including the industrial world, which we would like to involve because these systems will involve them. It is difficult to make required investments when there is such fragmentation in the market.”

Pai said the current U.S. administration’s “light-touch” approach allowed carriers to invest in new networks more freely, without fear that the government would tell them how to run their networks. The counter-argument made by critics is that carriers could use their economic power to control the content flowing across their networks. Pai said that since the new approach was announced, all four U.S. carriers introduced or enhanced unlimited data plans.

The issue of fragmentation is what led to CNBC’s Tso to question the FCC’s independence. Although fragmentation is not a problem in the United States, Tso said, political uncertainty is. Pai attempted to assure carriers although there had been a philosophical change about telecom regulation, the regulatory apparatus was still in place.

Dan Rosenbaum, a veteran journalist and publisher of Wearable Tech Insider, is at Mobile World Congress this week, covering key developments at the show for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: FCC

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