FCC Commissioner talks about the Secure 5G and Beyond Act

Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr talks with Yahoo Finance's eidtor-in-chief Andy Serwer on a range of topics from coronavirus and the FCC's role to the recently passed Secure 5G and Beyond Act.

Video Transcript

ANDY SERWER: I'm here with Brendan Carr, who's a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. Brendan, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us.

BRENDAN CARR: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

ANDY SERWER: So first of all, I want to ask you about the Secure 5G and Beyond Act that the president just signed. Can you tell us what this new law does?

BRENDAN CARR: This really builds on a years' long effort in the administration, in Congress, and at the FCC to secure US leadership in 5G. And frankly, in 2015 to 2016, the US was at really serious risk of ceding leadership in 5G, the millions of jobs, the billions in investment that would have meant for the US economy to our overseas competitors, including China. And this bill reinforces the work we're doing and puts in place a plan to articulate again the strategy that we've been working on to secure US leadership. So I think it builds on what we're doing, and that's a good thing.

ANDY SERWER: It looks like you had bipartisan support for the bill. How did you manage to do that?

BRENDAN CARR: Well, Congress obviously led the way on this. I know Senator Cornyn and others took the laboring war on this. One piece of the bill that is important to me is this idea of nationalization of the 5G network.

You remember this is an idea that had been floated on and off for two years. Larry Kudlow at NEC has done a great job of speaking very clearly about this issue, that the private sector is going to lead the way on 5G. So this bill doubles down on that and includes a provision to make clear that we're not going to be nationalizing the 5G network.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, and speaking of that, what do companies like AT&T, Google, and my parent company, Verizon, think about this new legislation?

BRENDAN CARR: I think it has broad support because, again, it's just going to rearticulate the strategy that we've been putting in place. And the good news is the US now leads the world with the strongest 5G platform in the world. We were first to 5G on the wired side-- I'm sorry, on the fixed mobile side and also on the mobile wireless side. We've been extending that lead. And America's wireless providers, including the ones you mentioned, have been leading the way.

And T-Mobile recently announced as part of a commitment it made with its transaction in the Sprint-T-Mobile merger to build up 5G to 99% of the US population. So that's another really good win. I'm glad to see the private sector stepping up.

ANDY SERWER: Brendan, how does this pertain to our competition with China?

BRENDAN CARR: Look, there's no question that this is a competition of economic systems. There's a central-planning, command-and-control approach that China is undertaking, and they can basically snap their fingers and overnight put up lots of new cell sites. But that's not really successful. You have to match supply and demand, and there's no substitute for the free-market builds that we're seeing right now in this country.

And whether you look at big cities-- like I've been to some of the-- a portion of Houston, for instance, Houston's Second Ward that historically has been left behind in next-gen builds. And right now they're turning on live small cells that are bringing high-capacity services.

I've spent a lot time time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I think it's the 143rd-largest city in the country, and they have 5G right there. I think stories like that tell you that we're on the right approach here at the FCC in the US.

ANDY SERWER: Brendan, shifting gears a little bit, let me ask you about the FCC and the coronavirus. What role can the commission play in terms of fighting this disease?

BRENDAN CARR: We have a very significant role to play. As you know and as we're talking right now, Americans are relying on their internet connections right now more than ever before. We're talking about students that are out of the classroom and trying to engage in distance learning, parents who are trying to work from home, and then telehealth, people trying to access high-quality care remotely without necessarily having to go to a hospital and interact with people. So all of that are things that the internet can enable.

We've taken a number of unprecedented steps at the FCC to keep Americans connected. Our chairman, Ajit Pai, has led this work, and it's delivering results. We've boosted network capacity by putting more spectrum out there. We've expanded telehealth, including adding millions of dollars in additional funding to health-care providers that can use remote connectivity. We've assisted low-income providers-- low-income consumers, including enabling them to get free Wi-Fi hotspots and other connected devices. And we've worked with broadcasters and other stakeholders.

So the list of steps the FCC has taken-- and really, credit not just to Chairman Pai but to the career FCC staff, who are themselves working remotely and in sometimes difficult circumstances, to get so much done in the past few days and week.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, I was just about to ask you about that. Are you guys eating your own cooking? which is to say you guys working from home and using all sorts of telecommunication yourselves. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BRENDAN CARR: You know, look, the FCC and our chief of staff, Matthew Berry, has done a great job starting weeks ago providing clear and direct and actionable information to FCC staff. And right now we have essentially anybody working remotely, and almost nobody is inside the building right now. So a lot of remote work for those of us at the FCC.

I think a lot of it goes to show the work we've done over the last three years. The digital divide, the percentage of Americans that lack access to high-speed internet closed by about 30% over the first two or three years of this administration alone. More miles of high-speed fiber were built out last year-- over 4,000 route miles, more than ever before. So we have the strongest, most robust, most resilient networks in the world, and they're performing very well right now.

ANDY SERWER: And final question, Brendan, and this speaks to what you were just talking about, which is bandwidth. I mean, Americans have an insatiable demand for more bandwidth, and I think this crisis is bringing that home. How much more bandwidth can you provide in the short term and in the longer term for America?

BRENDAN CARR: Well, one thing we've done is we've pushed more high-capacity spectrum out to wireless providers, and they can turn down immediately. We've enabled sharing regimes where a wireless provider that has fabulous spectrum in one part of the country can open that up to another provider that wants to use it.

I think you may have seen in Europe some of the regulators there called on Netflix to dial back the bandwidth they're using with distributing video services. At this point, we haven't seen any issues like that at all in the US network, and I think that's because providers here have been investing so much-- in fact, twice as much per person-- per user as their counterparts in Europe.

And so right now we have a robust, strong network, and it's holding up very well. We're seeing peak usage that is extending over a longer period of time, and some of the traffic in shifting from business districts to suburban areas. But other than that, the networks are performing very well right now.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, just a quick follow-up question. So then you're not seeing any need to have services like Netflix in particular reduce the amount of usage for their customers at this point?

BRENDAN CARR: That's right. We're not seeing any issues along those lines in the US networks at all.

ANDY SERWER: Great. OK, thank you very much. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, thanks so much for joining us today.

BRENDAN CARR: I appreciate it. Thank you