FCC Commissioner on how telecommunications are staying strong amid coronavirus

Yahoo Finance’s Editor in Chief Andy Serwer sat down with FCC Commissioner, Brendan Carr to discuss 5G and the strength of the telecommunications industry in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: But right now as we go to break and we take a look at what's happening with these markets, pay attention to Andy Serwer. He sat down with the chair from the FCC.

ANDY SERWER: 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 that they're using when distributing streaming-video service. At this point, we haven't seen any issues like at all in the US network. / 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.