The group’s president, Gordon Smith, cites a press account of the cable operator’s acquisition of spectrum that it has no plans to sell or use and urges Congress to get a “full and accurate accounting of spectrum users and spectrum warehousers.”
NAB Criticizes TWC Spectrum ‘Hoarding’
NAB President Gordon Smith has written to four members of Congress expressing his concern over an article that appeared in Friday’s Communications Daily that said Time Warner Cable is warehousing spectrum that, Smith said, “could be deployed to help build out wireless Internet service to unserved markets.”
TWC COO Rob Marcus, according to the publication said it “has no plans to sell, lease or use its AWS spectrum licenses.” The publication added that “the recent AT&T acquisition of Qualcomm’s MediaFLO spectrum bodes well for the value of the cable operator’s spectrum holdings.”
Smith, in his letter to Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Kay Bailey Hutchinson of the Senate Commerce Committee and Reps. Fred Upton and Henry Waxman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, said: “This surprising admission … comes at a time when other press reports have indicated that wireless carriers are sitting on as much as $15 billion in spectrum that has yet to be deployed.
“In finding real solutions to real problems,” Smith continued, “we hope you would agree that ‘spectrum speculation’ suggested by the Time Warner Cable COO in the Communications Daily article is the wrong approach. If there truly is a ‘spectrum crisis,’ then allowing companies the size of Time Warner to hoard airwaves should not be permitted.”
Comments (1)
Ellen Samrock says:
January 31, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Finally, the spectrum elephant in the room gets acknowledged. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a discussion on this issue and not the end.