Radio Spectrum Inventory Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. INSLEE. I want to congratulate those who have been working on this, the Chair, ranking member, to get this bill through.

I want to make two points. This effort is one that reaches in to improve certain areas that we may not think of when we think about spectrum. I note the little town of Republic in Washington, in eastern Washington, where my grandmother grew up--and it's a great town--but right now you essentially have to shut down the entire city's access to the Internet to send one X-ray from a physician in Republic to a reader, an expert in Seattle to read the X-ray. You have to sort of shut down the whole town because we don't have enough access in spectrum. This making access to spectrum more available helps health care in many, many places across the country.

The second point I want to make, I met with my law enforcement community last week who are still thirsting after an interoperable standard so that we can in fact have interoperability for emergency services radio communications. We still don't have this at this late date. Freeing up spectrum, allowing a financing system to really build that out is necessary.

So this is good for economic growth. It is good for health care. It is good for emergency services. There are multiple reasons this is heading in the right direction.

I do want to point out--and I'm happy to have co-sponsored this bill. We have another bill we hope to have on the floor in a while, the Spectrum Relocation Improvement Act, to improve the availability to do auctions to get this out into commerce. We look forward to working with the chair and ranking member to get this bill to the floor so we can build on this success.

Congratulations.

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