Last Thursday, families gathered all over America for their Thanksgiving meals. As they sat around tables enjoying their turkeys, many families recounted the story of the Mayflower passengers who bid farewell forever to their loved ones and set sail across a forbidding ocean, of pilgrims and merchants who found a New World and found a way to talk with people of different cultures and backgrounds. It is the story of the conquering of distance and the barriers to communication.
It is a famous tale, but not a unique one in our country. Indeed — from the Erie Canal to the Pony Express, the transcontinental railroad to the interstate highway system, the telegraph to the Internet — the history of America is the history of stitching together a vast continent into one nation and one economy.
Writing the next chapter in that history is the task of today’s generation — and one of the surest ways to break free from our current economic doldrums. That is especially true when it comes to the 21st-century infrastructure of the invisible spectrum that allows us to talk on our phones and get information from the Internet wirelessly.
As of last month, there are more wireless devices in the U.S. than there are people, and this surge of new demand is creating a traffic jam in the available spectrum. Ordinary cell phones are being overtaken by smart phones. By 2014, telephone calls are projected to represent only 2 percent of total wireless traffic. Smart phones make up 30 percent of the market and their market share is growing rapidly. At the same time, the average amount of traffic per smart phone is growing exponentially as people stream video and play games and conduct business in new ways.
And that’s just phones. The number of tablets, like the iPad, more than tripled over the course of this year. But here is what we know: a smart phone consumes 24 times more data than a traditional cell phone, and a tablet uses 122 times more data than a smart phone.
This is severely taxing the available spectrum capacity in the United States. And demand for data is expected to increase 50-fold over the next four years.
We simply do not have the present capacity to accommodate this growth. We have too many devices and too little airwaves in use to support them. The result is that we’re on track to run out of network capacity sometime in the next two years.
That’s why this week CQ Roll Call, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and LightSquared are hosting a forum to discuss how wireless companies can keep up to meet the increasing spectrum demand, and what Congress can do to address the spectrum crunch.
Our nation’s clogged networks are leading to dropped calls and “no service” signals. In many of our large urban areas, completing a call during peak times often means having to wait your turn. But beyond this practical frustration, there are the larger challenges to economic growth, job creation and rural America.
Sufficient broadband spectrum will play a critical role in the future of our economy. Broadband access affects everything from business innovation to our ability to build a strong export economy to our ability to support growth sectors such as health care, renewable energies and information technologies. Broadband makes it possible for small businesses and large businesses alike to reach new markets, for workers to access new skills and advance their careers, and for our country and its communities to attract new companies and innovate and compete in a rapidly changing global marketplace. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband. This is a race for the future, and we cannot afford to fall further behind.
Solving the spectrum crunch also means new jobs for an America that needs them. Sixty-two percent of American workers rely on the Internet to perform their jobs and that number is growing rapidly. The jobs of the future will be jobs that require broadband capability — and America has to get back in the business of creating them. In fact, according to the Federal Communications Commission, expanding broadband Internet to areas that are currently out of reach will produce 500,000 jobs over the next six years.
And we have a special obligation to bridge the digital divide that separates urban and rural America. Most of the 26 million Americans without access to broadband services live outside urban areas. The lack of access to broadband has significant consequences, from inadequacy of safety and 911 services to fewer educational opportunities to limits on business development and job growth. According to former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, rural free delivery of mail in the 19th century was “in some ways the most important communications revolution in American history … From every farmer’s doorstep there now ran a highway to the world.” In the 20th century, the Rural Electrification Administration connected millions to a world of refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and televisions. Today, in the 21st century, spreading broadband to rural America is the great unfinished business of forging an economy where everyone has access to jobs and opportunity. In too many places around our country, Americans have been saddled with slow or no Internet. And as a recent report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration makes clear, even when there is access, the fixed and monthly costs of a connection often make it unaffordable.
Creating jobs and economic growth for urban and rural America alike involves breaking through our Information Age traffic jam. The time for action is now because our future is at stake.
Sanjiv Ahuja is the chairman and CEO of LightSquared.