Tablets and TVs; gadgets and tech-integrated vehicles; tech-enhanced musical instruments and heavily promoted headphones; innovative toys, energy efficient designs and wireless enabled products of all sorts. Sunday concluded a busy span of stunning technology pageantry in Las Vegas. Thousands of booths were set up and over 100,00 interested device enthusiasts arrived from all over the world for the Consumer Electronics Show , known more commonly as CES (or in this ever expanding, 140-character world, #CES).

Chairman Genachowski, all four Commissioners, and a retinue of FCC staff converged on the convention floor. They got a look at technology – from a wide range of companies – on the horizon and a sense of what’s upcoming in the innovation space. Many of the exhibits in sight shouted wireless and they shouted mobile.

On Friday, day two, the Chairman gave a speech on the need for expanded spectrum offerings and then sat down to chat with the host of the event, CEA CEO Gary Shapiro. This is what the Chairman said:

"As evidenced by the trade show floor, the consumer electronics industry is going wireless, and the future success of this industry and our innovation future depends on whether our government acts quickly to unleash more spectrum -- the oxygen that sustains our mobile devices. 

We’re in the early stages of a mobile revolution that is sparking an explosion in wireless traffic.  Without action, demand for spectrum will soon outstrip supply. 

To seize the opportunities of our mobile future, we need to tackle the threats to our invisible infrastructure.  We need to free up more spectrum."

Read the Chairman’s full speech.

As our team makes their way back to Washington, we’ll bring you their takes and some collected insights. For now, enjoy this video from the Washington Post, showing the Chairman touring the CES floor, speaking to the unbounded potential for job growth on display, and managing to get in a quick game of ping-pong using Microsoft’s Kinect.

(Cross posted on the Official FCC Blog.)

This morning Chairman Genachowski, Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett and a collection of FCC staff visited a state-of-the-art response facility at the Arlington County Emergency Communications Center in Arlington, Virginia. Following the vision laid out in the National Broadband Plan, the event marks the announcement of steps to revolutionize America’s 9-1-1 system by harnessing the potential of text, photo, and video in emergencies.



Our communications needs are increasingly reliant on mobile devices. In fact, 70% of 9-1-1 calls originate from mobile phones and users rely regularly on texts and multimedia messages. While a subsequent evolution of our 9-1-1 system seems a natural -- and obvious -- step for digitally aware citizen, our current 9-1-1 system doesn’t utilize the superb, possibly life-saving potential within our existing mobile devices. With videos, pictures, texts -- and other untold mobile innovations surely on the horrizon -- next-generation 9-1-1 will position public safety officials a step ahead with critical real-time, on-the-ground information.

After a tour of the high-tech operations room, Chairman Genachowski and Admiral Barnett spoke to the promise of next-generation 9-1-1. Here's an excerpt from Chairman Genachowski's speech.

"Even though mobile phones are the device of choice for most 9-1-1 callers, and we primarily use our phones to text, right now, you can’t text 9-1-1. Let me reiterate that point. If you find yourself in an emergency situation and want to send a text for help, you can pretty much text anyone EXCEPT a 9-1-1 call center.

"...It’s time to bring 9-1-1 into the digital age."

Read the rest of the Chairmans’s speech, view more photos and see the benefits of Next Generation 9-1-1 after the jump.

(This is cross-posted on The FCC Official Blog.)

As Chairman Genachowski noted in an earlier post, "the future is being built on our invisible infrastructure" - the electromagnetic spectrum that has enabled innovations like the smartphone and Wi-Fi. Recently, senior leadership at the FCC provided their thoughts on the National Broadband Plan's efforts to unleash this invisible infrastructure to audiences at a Law Seminars International event in Washington, DC and 4G World in Chicago, Illinois. Their remarks, after the jump.

Read their remarks here.

Elizabeth Lyle delivered these remarks to the Tenth Annual Coleman Institute Conference in Westminister, Colorado.

I recently had the chance to work on the accessibility recommendations in the National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission released in March of this year.

Last year in the Recovery Act, Congress and the President charged the Commission with writing a plan to bring high-speed Internet and its benefits to all Americans.

As FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski would say, broadband is our generation’s major infrastructure challenge. It’s like roads, canals, railroads and telephones for previous generations.

Historically, it has taken years – even decades – for people with disabilities to have anything close to equal access to communications. Designers of equipment, services, and networks have often failed to consider accessibility issues in the design and development stage – and retrofit solutions are expensive.

Read More

 Senior Advisor to the Chairman on Broadband Phoebe Yang delivered these remarks to the 1st Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Smart Grid Communications in Gathersburg, MD earlier today.

Senior Advisor to the Chairman on Broadband Phoebe Yang delivered these remarks to county commissioners and staff from rural California counties last week in Napa, CA.

Like each of you, I understand that the health of America as a nation is inextricably dependent on the health of rural America. My hometown was an agricultural, railroad town in the rural plains of Arkansas, where farmers made their living raising cotton, rice, and soybeans. Just as my hometown farmers realized in the 1920s and 1930s that electricity was essential for them to compete, Americans today realize that broadband is no longer a luxury but a necessity to participate in the modern economy.

Phoebe Yang, Senior Advisor to the Chairman on Broadband, gave this speech about the intersection between communications technology and health care at a conference sponsored by the American Telemedicine Association on Monday, Sept. 27.

Over a century ago, Alexander Graham Bell met with the President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, to demonstrate a new invention: the telephone. After Bell finished his demonstration, the President turned to him and said, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”

As it turned out, the answer to the President’s question was simple: doctors.

As the eminent sociologist Dr. Paul Starr notes, the first recorded telephone exchange connected 21 Connecticut doctors with the Capital Avenue Drugstore in Hartford. The first phone line in Rochester, Minnesota, connected a doctor by the name of Mayo with his local drugstore. By 1923, use of the telephone was so widespread in the medical profession that a Philadelphia doctor’s manual on medical practice remarked that it had become as necessary to the physician as the stethoscope.

Our era is perhaps an even more transformative time for medicine. As all of you know firsthand, we’ve seen tremendous innovation and investment in telemedicine over the last decade.

Read More

Senior Advisor to the Chairman on Broadband Phoebe Yang delivered this speech to an array of community groups last week at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

It’s very fitting that we should come together today at the Japanese American National Museum to talk about how Asian Americans must be empowered to benefit from the communications network of the 21st century – broadband.

Today, being back in California, I am reminded of the immense sacrifices early Asian Americans made for this country – in the pursuit of the vital goal of connecting people across this vast land to one another.

Today, America has 306 million people to connect – and like in previous centuries with the railroads, telephones, and highways – including voices like those in this room is critical to our nation’s economy, security, and future.

When I shared with some individuals that I was planning on coming here today, their response was that Asian Americans represent such a small minority of the American population – why not focus on other groups? My reply was simple – while all Americans should benefit from all that broadband has to offer, and other groups are also critical to our goals of inclusion, you can’t ignore the role of Asian Americans in building the technology and communications networks of the past, and we would be foolish to underestimate the innovative creativity and spirit of Asian Americans in shaping the communications networks of the future.

Over 20 years ago, when I was a student at the University of Virginia, I founded the Asian Student Union and the Asian Leaders’ Council, to bring together the diverse interests and experiences of different Asian American communities. Due to the limitations of technology at the time – think photocopiers and 25 cents/minute long-distance phone service – it was a struggle for our voice to carry far beyond Charlottesville, Virginia. But within a few years, when I was studying in Singapore, the start of mass Internet communications – e-mail – allowed me to stay in touch with friends and family back in the U.S. and elsewhere.

[Read the full speech here.]

I was honored to give the keynote at yesterday's Broadband breakfast, and took the opportunity to talk about how broadband plays an important role in smarter electric grids and smarter homes.  The keynote speech was followed by a panel discussion where we discussed how IT and advanced communications has the potential to improve the grid for utilities and consumers alike.

Chapter 12 of the National Broadband Plan outlines our specific recommendations, which include two major themes on the Smart Grid:

• Unleash energy innovation in homes by making energy data readily accessible to consumers.
• Modernize the electric grid with broadband, making it more reliable and efficient.

Below is a video of the event:
 

As I travel throughout the country to talk about the National Broadband Plan, I am proud to highlight the Plan’s recommendations to connect consumers in rural America to broadband.  The Plan’s proposals for connecting unserved parts of rural America are at once concrete and specific as well as bold and visionary. I talked about them at length in recent speeches, but I’m going to hit some of the key points in this blog.

The Plan made clear that broadband communications is critical to jobs, health, education, news, information and more in the 21st Century.  In the last century, the federal Universal Service Fund was key to connecting sparsely populated rural communities to the communications technology of that century: telephone service.  Now, we must reconfigure the fund to support broadband.  Doing nothing, and leaving many communities without access to broadband, is not an option.

The Plan sets forth a vision to accomplish that goal.  In particular, the Plan outlines ways to transform the primary fund for supporting voice service in rural America – the High Cost Fund – into a “Connect America Fund” that explicitly and efficiently supports broadband networks capable of providing high-quality voice services.  The Plan proposes to target support more effectively to bring broadband to consumers in unserved areas and sustain service in areas that need ongoing universal service subsidies.

Implementing the Plan calls for tough choices and careful balancing of costs and benefits.  It is critical to the preservation and continued success of universal service that we find the right balance between funding the program adequately and not unduly burdening consumers

Consumers now pay the highest USF fees ever on their landline, cell phone and cable voice bills to support the fund, and the growth in fees must stop. To minimize the burden on consumers, the Commission is looking at ways to limit growth in the fund.  One way to contain growth is to make sure that consumers who fund the program get the most “bang for the buck” with support under the new Connect America Fund provided in a way that encourages efficiency. 

The growth of broadband and competition has fundamentally changed the business model for many communications companies.  The majority of states have moved from rate-of-return regulation, which compensates carriers for their actual costs regardless of whether there is a cheaper way to serve the customer, to incentive regulation, which encourages efficiency and enables providers to reap the rewards of an efficient network.  Isn’t it time at the federal level to think about how we need to adapt how we regulate those smaller companies? 

The Plan also analyzed consumer usage of broadband speeds to set an initial target of 4 Mbps of actual download speed and 1 Mbps of actual upload speed.  The 4 Mbps is comparable to the median speed received by residential consumers today, and what many consumers are likely to use in the near term, given past growth rates. To ensure that consumers in rural areas receive broadband speeds comparable to urban areas, the Plan also recommends reevaluating this 4 Mbps funding target every four years and adjusting it as appropriate to reflect changing consumer use and demand.  Doing so will ensure that there is no digital divide in this country.

There’s plenty of work ahead to flesh out the details.  The Plan presents an opportunity not only for rural consumers, but also for companies operating in a rural America to chart a new course for the future.  To complete the task, we need more information from the industry and look forward to a collaborative process with providers.  Our goal is to bring broadband to all rural Americans without breaking the bank.  Help us figure out the best way to get there.

Read the prepared text of Carrol's speeches:

• FCC’s National Broadband Plan:  Impacts on Oregon Telecommunications Policy
• WTA Conference