Larry Page on Capitol Hill - Broadband for the future

We are extremely, extremely excited today to have the cofounder of Google, Larry Page, with us, who came to Washington yet again to tell us all how important and how critical white spaces are and why we need to get the rules of the road out in the marketplace as soon as possible. Larry, thanks for being here today. [applause] [pause] [adjusting microphone] >>PAGE: Thank you for that introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here and to have all of you here. This is an issue I'm very passionate about, and I hope to explain a little bit of that. But it's really wonderful to see all of you here and see the interest in such an important issue. Now, you guys may have heard also that yesterday we made an interesting announcement about a little phone, so I thought I'd just show that and get it out of the way. It's actually kind of germane to some of the issues that we have, which is that this phone actually has Wi-Fi in it. It's actually an amazing thing. We sort of forget that Wi-Fi didn't used to exist, but Wi-Fi is the combination of a really junky piece of spectrum that was thought to be useful only for garage door openers because of interference concerns with microwave ovens. And somehow, that's what we use every day to connect to the Internet. I use Wi-Fi every day all day with my laptop, and that's how I connect to the Internet. We just read a statistic that was amazing to me. The projection is that there will be over one billion Wi-Fi devices produced this year. Like this phone, like your laptop, all sorts of devices that need to connect to the Internet are using Wi-Fi. And that combination of junk spectrum that was going to be worried that you couldn't possibly use it for anything because microwave ovens used the same frequency, which should cause a lot of interference, suddenly is in one billion devices. Chips cost about $5 in the device, and that's why there's a billion of those things. And so this notion that we're hearing from the broadcasters and people like that: "Oh, there's going to be interference," they're broadcasting with 100,000 watts on a lot of these stations. The notion that a small device like this is going to significantly interfere with that is just garbage. It's not true. I'll talk more about that. But I just wanted to start with sort of that little story. You know, the thing that's amazing to me is that we're sort of in this debate. We have this tiny, tiny slice of spectrum that's used for unlicensed, open things. There is 2.4 gigahertz and there's a few other things, and everybody in the world uses those things all the time. We're somehow, in the public debate, wondering if we should take that tiny, tiny little sliver that everybody uses all the time and make it a tiny bit bigger so everybody can use it all the time even more and actually get higher data rates and get things to work better. That's such a no-brainer for me. I'm amazed that we're in the state of the debate that we are. We've made tremendous progress, and I'll talk a little bit about that. That's why I'm here, because I wanted to tell that story. Let me just take a step back and say that this tiny slice of spectrum that you're using to access the Internet is the worst piece of spectrum you could possibly use--the Wi-Fi spectrum. So you've got the microwave ovens, which most of the time you don't use microwaves so it's not that big a deal. But if you do turn it on, you might lose your Wi-Fi, right? It's not the best possible thing. By the way, if you're losing your Wi-Fi when your microwave turns on, you probably should run out of the kitchen because it's also radiating you. [laughter] So you should get that fixed. But in any case, it doesn't go through walls. The reason why you use it in your microwave is because it heats water and it actually interacts with a lot of stuff. It doesn't go through walls very well at all. It basically goes through two walls and then it stops. And so if you've tried to cover your house with a Wi-Fi router, you'll discover once it goes through two walls it basically stops, and it's very difficult to get coverage. And if you're like me, I don't have coverage on many parts of my house because I go through two walls and it stops, and I haven't bothered to put in multiple hubs and so on, which is a hassle. With white spaces you'd be able to put in the same hub you have now. It would probably cost the same amount it does now or no different because it's going to be produced in mass quantity like the billion devices that we have, and it'll go much further. It'll go through your walls. You'll be able to get higher data rates. You'll be able to move video around your house, which is very difficult now. Even when you're getting your Wi-Fi signal at the edge of your house, which is probably where your TV is, relative to your computer, it doesn't go very fast. It probably only goes at one megabit, which isn't really enough for an HDTV signal if you wanted to, say, play a file on your computer on your TV. It won't work for that, and that's why you don't see those things happening. With white spaces you could do that, and it would work perfectly. There's no Wi-Fi signal in this room that works. I tried. There's one that seems to be provided by the broadcasters, ironically, but it doesn't work. If you're sitting here with a laptop, it would be really nice to have a Wi-Fi signal, and the cost of providing that is almost zero, but we're not doing that because the range is difficult. You need to put one in each room and so on. Actually, in the back there I noticed they've got a whole bunch of fiber optic cables they're about to connect to improve the communications, but that takes time and money and so on. Having a greater radius of signal that you can provide easily is a huge economic advantage to the country and to the world. Now, I probably don't have to tell you all this, but the U.S. has gone from about 3rd to 16th in broadband penetration. You measure it against other countries. The U.S. is a big place. It's difficult to provide broadband. But there are many countries where it's just as difficult that are ahead of us. There's a variety of reasons for that. I think that providing coverage in rural areas is a really hard thing, and that has been talked about already. We've done a lot of Wi-Fi projects. We covered Mountain View, our hometown, with Wi-Fi. We use a transmitter every mile or something like that to cover, or even less than that to cover Mountain View. With white spaces you could do the same thing but you go a couple miles or you go a much wider area. That means that you can do it for one-tenth the cost, probably, or even less. And so those things become much, much more practical. In rural areas where you don't have many transmitters at all-- almost no transmitters of any type, which is why they're rural and why they don't have access to anything-- you can have these kind of transmitters that work over a wide, wide radius. That will be very, very valuable to those people. You combine that like you have with the Wi-Fi, a billion devices getting produced per year for $5. Is that going to benefit people? I think that will benefit people a lot--not I don't know if you guys remember back to the days when you were watching analog TV, but I do, and pretty much you wouldn't change the channel and get a TV station on every channel, right? That would be wonderful, but that's not what happened. There's a lot of unused channels, and that space can be used. All of that static that you see on your television, that's just wasted resource. There's no benefiting anybody to have that static being on the airwaves. By not using the airwaves it doesn't benefit anybody. It's not a natural resource we should try to save. It's a natural resource that we have to use, and we should use it efficiently, and we're not doing that now. It's mostly static. If we were to analyze the spectrum in this room, 95% of it would be static. There's absolutely no reason for that. There's no good reason for that at all. The reason is that we're using 1900s technologies instead of technologies from this day and age where we have computers, we have low-cost radios, and those things can cooperate to use that spectrum a lot more efficiently than we are now. Talking about interference and those kinds of concerns, we run a conference with our salespeople, and we get about 2,000 of them in one room in a hotel, and they all have laptops. We give them all laptops, and they're all sitting there working. We have a couple of Wi-Fi hubs set up, and 2,000 people are working in the same room using a microwave oven spectrum, and we worry about interference. It's just crazy. So the advancements that we've made in radios are just amazing, and what we can do for that $5 that goes into your laptop or your telephone now in the Wi-Fi chip is an amazing piece of technology, and it can really, really change the world, and it really works. The FCC has been working on white space for about five years. This has been debated and looked at and so on. There has been this process for spectrum sensing and testing prototypes. I can tell you I found one guy at MIT and I hired him to make a prototype of spectrum sensing. He's a really smart guy. I tried to get him to hire some more people. We have a couple of people in that group, and we're trying to hire more. Those things are prototypes, and they've been treated like it's a phone that's released, and it's not. It's a proof of concept. It's about this big. It has wires coming out of it and so on. We've somehow got in this state where politically we're doing field testing of really what is a prototype device. I've actually been very happy with the results of those tests. They're able to detect signals that are very small and avoid interference and all those things. I actually think they're a tremendous technical achievement. It's not a shipping device ready for you to buy. In general, when the FCC has done things, they haven't said, "Oh, you have to prove that you might be able to do this thing" "before you really do it in order for us to say that you can do it." That's the state we're in. We've got this kind of convoluted logic. All we need is the FCC to say what it generally says, which is, "You can produce the device if it's shown that it doesn't interfere." I have 100% confidence that will happen. In fact, if the FCC does that and says, "You can produce a device like you produce" "for Wi-Fi or these other bands that does not interfere," there will be hundreds of millions of dollars invested in making those things non-interfering tomorrow. People will write those checks, and it will happen. That is not what's being debated. What's being debated now is, "Oh, there might be issues," "so those can never be solved, so we should never let you try." "You shouldn't be allowed to try to solve those issues" "because we don't want you to use the spectrum." "We want to do something else with it." That's really what's happening. I just want people to really understand that. I'm happy to answer more questions about that. There is nobody in the world who would truthfully tell you there's no way to produce these devices without interference. That is just garbage. Not true. That seems to be the prevailing kind of point of view from the other side. I would point out that the other side in these issues has a lot to benefit by keeping control of spectrum. If you look at all the people who are arguing against this, they all directly benefit against the public good in this area. So please think long and hard before you all repeat those arguments or think they're true. I really don't think they're true. Maybe I should even say more about that because I feel like this is part of the main issue. I was amazed, actually. They have these trials they're running that they set up to test some of these things, and they're expecting our side of this people to be able to detect wireless microphones that were actually broadcasting on the same channel as TV stations. That's impossible. There's no way to do that. What I'm telling you is the test was rigged deliberately, and that's been out there. So yeah, if you're trying to detect a wireless microphone that's on the same frequency as a television station that is broadcasting with way more power, you're going to detect the television station, not the wireless microphone. It's not rocket science. So that's the kind of thing that we've been up against here, and I find it despicable, so I just wanted to make that really clear. This is not a technology issue. I'd be very happy, and I think everyone in the alliance would be very happy if the FCC came out and said, "You can produce any device you want" "as long as it doesn't interfere." The FCC has amazing technical people. They're good at testing things for interference. All they need to do is say that. It's not a big deal. We actually don't need to go through all this complexity right now at all. But in any case, we are where we're at. We're actually very confident of this. You can actually remove all the interference issues entirely and just say, "We're not going to broadcast in areas where we know there are TV stations." In fact, there's already a database of all the television stations and where they are, and they actually don't move them very often. A television station is a pretty big piece of equipment. It doesn't get moved. You can go online and check. You can know roughly where you are. This phone knows where it is to three feet. It's not a big deal to know where you are, even for a mobile device. Just make sure that you're not interfering with any of those things. So there's a variety of reasonable solutions to this. We've proposed the numbers, and I'm very confident that we'll get through this. The time is now for the FCC to act. There's been a lot of debate, there's been a lot of work that's gone on, a lot of it very good, and I'm really hopeful that they'll release an order to move forward before the election. I really would encourage them to do that. I think that's a really important thing, for them to act quickly. There's a billion people, a billion devices that aren't getting produced today because the FCC has not acted. This is an area where we could show real leadership in the world in a way that matters to everybody. So I think that's a really important thing. We've been running a campaign called Free the Airwaves, which you've probably seen a little bit about, and I've been really excited about the results we've had. We put up this website, we got a little bit of attention paid to it, and just with that, in just over a month, we've had more than 15,000 people-- I think you'll see on the graph here as it's counting up each state there-- send a message to the FCC through this website. They sent a message directly to the FCC saying that they support these efforts. I think that shows you, even with a little bit of attention and a little bit of time, the number of people who really care deeply about this issue. I think that it's really important that the FCC stand up and really take good action here that's in everybody's interests--that's in the economic interests. That will help everybody go about their daily lives, and things they already use, like Wi-Fi and so on, will be radically improved by this--not a small amount of improvement, a radical improvement. I think the promise here is huge. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm spending time on this. There is virtually no cost for any of these things. This is a spectrum that is not being used well now. There's a lot of spectrum that's not being used well now, and I think that by doing this we can actually make progress also on the rest of that spectrum, which is a really important social thing. How we got to the stage where a little bit of junk spectrum has caused us to have a billion devices being produced every year just because it's unlicensed--and that's basically the only chunk that we have that's unlicensed, and why we're debating whether we need a little bit more unlicensed spectrum is beyond me. But if people want to debate me on that, I'm happy to do it. It's so obvious that we should do this that I don't even know how there's a debate on that. So with that, I think those are the main things I wanted to say. Maybe we'll open it up for questions. I think we've got a mike. >>[woman] We've got a wireless mike. >>PAGE: Oh, we've got a wireless mike, which hopefully will work. Oh, it's wired. Why don't we have people line up in front here and then we can-- >>[woman inaudible] >>PAGE: It'll be quickest, if people want to ask questions, line up behind this nice gentleman, and then we can ask them quickly. Yeah? >>GOLDSTEIN: I'm Phil Goldstein from FierceWireless. First of all, great presentation yesterday in New York. This is a question that's probably on everyone's mind. You talked about it a little bit. How concerned is Google that this decision is going to be punted towards the next administration? And if that happens, how does that change, if at all, Google's strategy? >>PAGE: Like I said, I'm very hopeful that they'll take action before the election, and I'm encouraging them to do that, and I think that will happen. We'll be in the fight. It's been going on for a while. We'll continue to do it. There are a billion devices that aren't getting produced per year because we haven't done it yet, but we should do it at some point. >>KIRBY: Paul Kirby with TR Daily. You said the tests were rigged deliberately. The tests were done by the FCC, so you're saying the FCC rigged the tests? >>PAGE: No, I'm not saying that. I think the broadcasters have been very active in this. They've been down at big events and so on like that. I just think that none of those things are necessary. We've actually made a proposal that doesn't require any of those things to actually happen in order to get started on this. Like I said, all that the FCC needs to say is that, "We will allow people to use the spectrum in an unlicensed way" "if their devices don't interfere." Literally, that one sentence is all that needs to be said. The testing and so on can go on once you've spent $100 million to make an actual device. Like I said, I've been very happy with the testing. I think it's gone great. That apparently doesn't matter much, what the actual results are and so on. There have been a number of proposals to deal with these things, so it's difficult to debate the practicality when practically speaking, you know where television stations are, there are safe harbors you can use for the microphones and things like that, you can probably detect the microphones pretty well anyways, and so on. It's hard for me to debate a practical issue when there's actually no need for that, and all they need to say is they're going to certify devices like they certify every other device to be non-interfering, which they're very good at. Somehow it's turned into a political debate rather than a real debate. I'm an engineer, so I like the real debate. >>[woman] I'm going to end it. We don't have any more time. Let's give Larry a big hand. >>PAGE: Thank you. [applause]