FCC Chair Brendan Carr on AI, Spectrum, Drones & the Future of Connectivity

Towers. We're in Vegas. We should clarify it's towers, poles, but...

But towers and tractors.

Oh, it's yeah, it's been over, gosh, probably a dozen years since my first one. I remember back then it seemed like, you know, the TVs were all the rage, and they still are. We still love our TVs. But to see everything that's happened in the US tech innovation space is just mind-blowing. You know, drones and AI. I mean, it's such a phenomenal, frothy, competitive, innovative time for this industry. And this is just a great treat to get to get out here and in one place get to sort of quickly visit and see so many different entrepreneurs and innovators in this country. So, it's great.

Well, I think all the drone stuff, all the AI stuff, you know, we've been working hard over the last couple months in particular, you know, President Trump and all across the administration. We're working to unleash American drone dominance, and you see that at so many different exhibits, and obviously AI plays a part of that. Just yesterday, I was at an event adjacent to this at the Las Vegas Police Department where they're unveiling the launch of more than a dozen new US drones to help improve public safety. And so, it was really great to get to see how they're using that. And again, you know, tech that you usually just see here on the show floor, you can already see out on the street in Las Vegas. And it's really neat to see.

Biggest accomplishment has been laying low, staying, you know, out of the headlines, below the radar, just focusing on the blocking and tackling, you know, the mundane stuff at the FCC.

Yeah, some mark. Some mark. No, it's been just phenomenal. This job is such a treat. It's such an honor to do it. As you noted, I started at the FCC as a staffer all the way back in 2012. My thought was I would stick around for two years and then, you know, leave the agency, and it's sort of been a Forrest Gump career since then. I've gotten lots of really interesting jobs and opportunities from general counsel to commissioner in the majority, commissioner in the minority, now back to chair. And so getting the chance to sort of have an agenda, run an agenda, run an entire building of a thousand people, some of the most, you know, talented public servants that you're ever going to interact with. It's just a lot of fun. You look back at the year and it was just in a lot of ways it was a whirlwind. It was super busy. We're getting a ton of stuff done. I was talking earlier how what's interesting about this job is you can see the things that are interesting and impactful for this year, plus the stuff that's going to really make a difference for this country in three, four, five years. And you watch sort of the media perception of what you're doing, and it obviously doesn't align. That's perfectly fine. But to get to sort of sit in the chair and see, okay, this is something that's really going to mean something for the country in five years. And there's just a lot of wins. We've, you know, helped to unleash more high-speed builds. We've, you know, taken really good progress on spectrum, which is what's increasingly necessary to power all these innovations. As you noted, the space economy. I was out in El Segundo just south of LAX earlier in the year. Last year, I got to make that transition to 26.

And we're just cutting through all the backlogs at the agency. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun. The team's getting some really good work done.

Yeah, big news sort of just in time, thankfully for CES. We took another big step. We're going to be voting this month at the FCC to increase the utility of a big unlicensed spectrum band, the 6 gigahertz band. We're going to effectively be supercharging Wi-Fi, probably the best way for consumers to understand it, sort of higher power, more outdoor uses, and everything you're seeing right here from AR to VR is going to benefit from these increased enhancements that we're doing in the 6 gigahertz band. And look, you're right as a general matter that US leadership in spectrum is part and parcel of our geopolitical leadership. When we free up spectrum, the world takes notice. Jobs come here, innovators come here, the things that are being developed will launch here in the US first. And over the last, you know, four or five years before last year, I thought we sort of fell into a deep spectrum malaise where we weren't really doing the work necessary to bring more spectrum into the market, and we're changing that. We're going to have the first spectrum auction in a couple of years happen here in the first half of this year, the AWS-3 band, which we auctioned before, but we're going to auction it again. We're also making a lot of progress this year in the C-band. We did a big C-band auction during Trump 45, about 280 megahertz of spectrum, and we're now looking to do, you know, at least over 100 megahertz of spectrum in this second round of C-band. But the C-band spectrum work is going to be a big, big work stream inside the building. And again, spectrum is jobs. Spectrum is driving down prices. When you free up spectrum and someone can then bring in a new fixed wireless technology in a place that might have only had single cable modem service before, it drives down prices, and so it's really good for consumers. And so we got a big spectrum agenda. But I mean, more broadly on spectrum, in my philosophy, it's, I guess you got to think of it in two pieces. One is the auctions, which we're doing again, which is good, and that's frankly, that's thanks to President Trump's leadership. What was the one big beautiful bill, but now the working families tax cut legislation restored our auction authority. So, we're doing that, 800 megahertz of spectrum, a real spectrum pipeline. That's good. But we're also taking a hard look at the secondary markets and spectrum that's already out there. And historically, we've had, you know, buildout obligations, and they're over many, many years, sometimes a decade. And we find that a lot of that spectrum isn't necessarily getting loaded or used. And I think in my view that spectrum in the secondary market, the market has a home that it tells the spectrum where it wants to be. And I think just having spectrum out there and lit up on towers isn't necessarily the best public interest outcome. We want to get that spectrum loaded and actually, you know, carrying traffic and carrying data. Otherwise, I don't know what the analogy is. Maybe you've got a Lamborghini that's just going 5 miles an hour in a parking lot. It doesn't want to do that. And spectrum doesn't just want to be lit up on towers. Spectrum wants to carry data. So, you'll see the work we're doing in the secondary market to encourage folks to have spectrum find the home that the market wants and to remove any barriers that were preventing spectrum from finding its long-term home.

I focus on unlicensed with you because I sort of know the audience, but...

In other places I talk more about licensed.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, again, you know, again, you look back to Trump 45, that's the first time that we opened up 1,200 megahertz in the 6 GHz band. We're seeing great Wi-Fi connectivity. Probably some of the headsets right here are connected on that. And again, we're going to supercharge that with another vote. And you're right, it's got to be balanced. You got to have, you know, unlicensed, licensed, and particularly when it comes to that valuable mid-band spectrum. That's why we're pushing so hard on C-band and many other places.

Yeah, look, we're happy with a lot of the spectrum that's moving. I think again during the last four years, whether it was competition review at DOJ or perhaps FCC review, it felt really static where spectrum wasn't moving. We're just seeing tremendous movement right now in the secondary markets of spectrum. In fact, one spectrum transaction alone that happened in the first nine months of last year allowed one provider to increase 5G speeds by something like 80%. And that was purely by just taking spectrum that was already out there that wasn't necessarily as loaded as it could have been. So that's key. And also on spectrum in general, just to back up, I think one of the really exciting things for the country and eventually for the world, although I care less about the world than I do about the country, is this movement towards direct-to-cell technology. So we've got unlicensed, which is awesome. You've got terrestrial licensed. Then historically we had, you know, some satellite services that historically were much slower than terrestrial options. But right now we're moving into this new type of technology where you can go direct from a satellite right to a smartphone. There's a lot of things you have to do right as a country to promote that happening here. And right now this is an area where, you know, we talk about what's going to make a big difference for the country in a couple years. The US is right now leading the world and is going to continue to in this new direct-to-cell technology. Dish has just proposed to move a lot of spectrum over into the hands of SpaceX Starlink, which can be used to enable direct-to-cell technology. Other providers are looking to offer that, and I think when you then step back and see we got all this great unlicensed Wi-Fi connectivity, terrestrial, but you add on top of that the direct-to-cell, which is effectively, you know, cell sites in low Earth orbit, I'm really, really optimistic about what that's going to do for, you know, connectivity, driving down prices for competition. But again, that's an area where we're working at the FCC to make sure that the US does lead the way, and we're in a good spot right now.

There's a couple. One, you know, we need to find the spectrum that can be used for direct-to-cell technology, and we're doing some work on that. Two is we haven't really built a sort of a full regulatory framework about how direct-to-cell is going to work. Now, there's ways you can build a framework that creates disincentives, or there's a way that you can create a framework that creates the certainty so that people can make the multi-billion-dollar investments in direct-to-cell. So I think over the course of this year, I think you'll see us start to flesh out more of our vision of a regulatory framework for direct-to-cell that will enable those multi-billion-dollar investments.

Yeah, we won. We won.

Well, I think it's, we're blending into this sort of more entire world of connectivity again, whether it's the new generation of low Earth orbit satellites, which are going to, you know, all these sort of new mini dishes, or it's direct-to-cell, or it's unlicensed, or fixed wireless. We're in a new era of true convergence, and you can put 6G as a label around that. That's fine. But I think it's really that more choice, more competition, multiple modes of technology that are going to blend and that are going to come together. And that's really the future for us right now.

Yeah, this program is a really good concept. It's built effectively on the idea of the Energy Star program, which is sort of a voluntary system where if you go through it, you get, you know, a certificate, a label, and it can give consumers a little bit more information and comfort with investing in, purchasing in, say, an IoT device, where these IoT devices in many cases are so, you know, cheap and inexpensive that there isn't necessarily the incentive to make sure they have robust cybersecurity protection. So that was stood up during the last administration. The administrator that had been sort of tentatively selected recently withdrew, but we just opened up this week a new comment period for people to volunteer to be the lead administrator. And so we're all in on that. We hope to get, you know, one or more hopefully companies that want to perform the lead administrator role, and we'll work with them to finalize all the steps to stand the program up.