Cantwell Highlights Need for Collaborative Approach to National Spectrum Policy, New Sharing Innovation to Secure National Security

Hearing

Good morning, the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will
come to order. This morning, we’re having a hearing on spectrum and national security. I
appreciate the witnesses being here today.
Today’s hearing will focus on the interrelationship of these two critical factors—spectrum auction
authority and national security—and getting a plan to move forward.
Foreign adversary access to Americans’ data is a real and growing concern. We must act to
shut the back door to protect Americans.
We are seeing this conversation around applications on our devices. And we need to consider
the national security of communication networks themselves.
That network relies on spectrum. Whether it is cell phones in our pockets, connected devices in
our homes, critical defense systems in our military, radar and satellites for aviation, weather
infrastructure—spectrum—[is an] essential component of a modern communications system.
Spectrum is a finite resource, which means policymakers must ensure and manage it effectively
to benefit all Americans. Last year—after 30 years of consensus that auctions were a key part of
spectrum management—the FCC’s spectrum auction authority expired for the first time.
We want to renew that. We want to look at that today and discuss the outer bands—the 12 GHz
and 37 GHz spectrum bands and AWS spectrum—and what we can do to make sure spectrum
is made available now to continue to increase capacity, expand the opportunities for new
technology in IOT, and leverage the opportunities for areas that aren’t covered today to grow
our economy of the future.
We must also ensure that spectrum is managed—and our national security colleagues have
been in a very active debate with us over these issues – that we are expanding this capacity for
innovation. The private sector and the defense sector both need to advance. They need to
advance successfully and the United States must be the leader in spectrum management
technology and security.
We have seen first-hand the threats our foreign adversaries pose to our domestic
telecommunications networks. For example, the presence of unsecure equipment from Huawei
and ZTE, and [how that impacts] our key domestic military installations [and] impacted our
communities.
Rural providers across the nation, including in my home state, are having to replace unsecure
equipment costing billions of dollars.
As development begins on next generation wireless networks, it is critical that the United States
takes a unified approach and continue to have the best spectrum policies in the world.
It is clear that spectrum policy has often been the subject of interagency disputes, and that too,
with the report that was published by NTIA and DOD on dynamic spectrum sharing moved the
discussion to a new level, but more needs to be done.
The domestic approach to spectrum management, built on collaboration, will allow the United
States to continue to lead on the international front. The FCC, NTIA, NASA, DOD and others
must work together to ensure that we continue to work openly and collectively.
Spectrum management must also embrace innovation—like Open RAN, which we will hear
more about today—which will allow telecom providers to use secure, competitive networks.
And innovation must expand spectrum access…with technologies like dynamic spectrum
[sharing] to harness opportunities.
Only [through] collaborative spectrum management and technological innovation, I believe, can
we create a true pipeline. That’s what we really want to do. We want to get what we can get
now, and get it in place, and continue to grow the opportunities. A sustainable, responsible
vision will allow us to move forward on both our private sector and our DOD missions.
For this to happen we must restore the FCC’s spectrum auction authority, and our strategy
should include all approaches on unlicensed and licensed spectrum.
Today’s hearing is about national security element of that. Clearly, once we address that,
hopefully we can get our colleagues to focus on how to make these priorities a reality and
create that kind of pipeline that will allow us to deal with some of our necessary issues for us to
grow this security for the future.

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Thank you very much to all the witnesses. You did a great job setting the stage
for the need, the urgent need, for the United States to lead in what will be the communications
technology of the future and certainly laid out some of our immediate challenges as it relates to
China.
I wanted to start with you, Dr. Ghosh. You mentioned this... well everybody is on one note, very
crisply solved the Rip and Replace problem, so thank you for that. And we are trying. We
definitely want to try to further our efforts there aggressively. I think it’s you, Ms. Ronaldo.
I'm definitely in support of a, what I would call, a technology NATO. The countries that you
mentioned, Australia, Japan, India, the United States working collectively on setting the
standard for technology.
You can't have government backdoors. You can't have these kinds of violations. And then we
say to the rest of the world community, these are the standards by which you buy technology. I
think that would be very helpful today, so definitely supportive.
But this notion of continued R&D. Listen, we all wish we could have moved forward a year ago,
but not all our colleagues were on board with that, and they were successful at convincing some
not to move forward.
But your notion of continued R&D investment, how do we achieve that? How do we achieve
what you're talking about as it relates to really catapulting the U.S. into a continued leadership
position here?

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And what do you do, because I want to ask Mr. Johnson a question. So, quickly,
what do you do about the national security element? Do we figure out how to get more
collaborative dialogue with people who have national security clearances? How do we solve that
problem?

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Mr. Johnson, your artery analogy is so apt. So, what is it that you think that we
need to do now that would help unleash that, even though we've had this, you know, report on
dynamic spectrum sharing? Is there some artery unclogging that we could do today?

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And how important is that to get started now?

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Thank you.

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Did you have a comment on that on this legacy network?
My concern here is that, we're talking about these big issues. I loved the optimization
repositioning by Mr. Johnson because that is truly what we're talking about.
We're talking about how do we optimize. And sure, you can be a top down government like
China and dictate things, it doesn't mean it's the right thing.
Clearly, interoperability is the key in us figuring that out and then leading on it in an articulation
internationally is also the key. It is challenging to go to various places and explain to them why
they might have bought something that is not going to be the standard of the future because no
one is going to let a government backdoor be the standard of the future. It's unfortunate that has
been someone's international policy to try to go and deploy that.
But nonetheless, I do think that collaboration is the key because that's what we have to do to
get the implementation of the next generation technology. We have to collaborate. And as you
can see, this is a subject where not everybody has wanted to collaborate. So, I'm glad we're
getting some collaboration this morning.
But did you want to say anything about this legacy network?
From a geographic perspective of what that does to put people behind? Because I think that's
really what my two colleagues from the central West were describing. I think of them as two
powerhouses. We have some investors from our state that are trying to build next generation
Modular Reactors in Wyoming. And obviously, Boulder is already an epicenter of next
generation energy technology.
What does that do to put a region behind if they're sitting there with a legacy technology
squarely not dealt with?

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But how far does it put a region behind if it still is one of these regions that has a
legacy problem? I mean, are people just going to say, I'm going to go somewhere else? And
here we are trying to expand more development and more places. There is a lot of innovation to
take place in the United States of America and I personally believe you got to have a few things
like airports, but you certainly also have to have networks that are free of any kind of
government backdoors.

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So, do you think people are looking at those regions now and raising questions?

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I think that concludes our hearing for today at least for members who are
planning on making it over. So, I want to thank again our witnesses for this illumination about
really how much you actually agree on moving forward on some policies and how much these
efforts to optimize and integrate and collaborate mean something for our future. So, hopefully
we can demonstrate that and do that.

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