America’s broadband future is at risk. In this episode, Dr. Roslyn Layton, a leading broadband economist, exposes how outdated spectrum policies and government gridlock are holding back 5G innovation—and letting China pull ahead. Learn why America’s digital economy, national security, and even your daily phone experience depend on freeing up wireless spectrum now. Discover what Congress must do to secure our technological leadership and how this issue affects every American relying on fast, reliable internet.
America’s broadband future is at risk. In this episode, Dr. Roslyn Layton, a leading broadband economist, exposes how outdated spectrum policies and government gridlock are holding back 5G innovation—and letting China pull ahead. Learn why America’s digital economy, national security, and even your daily phone experience depend on freeing up wireless spectrum now. Discover what Congress must do to secure our technological leadership and how this issue affects every American relying on fast, reliable internet.
X/Twitter: @RoslynLayton | @jennybethm
Website: https://roslynlayton.com/
Roslyn Layton (00:00):
This is a lot of video. There's tremendous amount of video. There's podcasts, there's entertainment, there's health information, there's work from home. There's any number of these uses. We have a $5 trillion digital economy in large part because we've got the broadband. If we didn't have the broadband, there would be no digital economy. That's the bottom line of the story.
Narrator (00:22):
Keeping our republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author of filmmaker and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:54):
Today we have a special guest with us. She's a PhD in broadband economics. I bet you didn't even know you could get one. We're going to learn about that and why broadband matters and why we should care about it. Today we have joining us, Dr. Rosalyn Layton. Dr. Layton, thank you so much for being with us today.
Roslyn Layton (01:12):
Oh, I'm thrilled. I'm happy to speak to the Patriot audience about something that I'm very passionate about.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:19):
So tell me, what is broadband and broadband spectrum and why should people care about this?
Roslyn Layton (01:28):
Well, I'm happy to have this to speak to this audience because I think if anybody would care about broadband and the way that it's how we allocate the radio spectrum, which is the airwaves, this is probably, I think, the most important policy issue that doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's really critical now, so I have a little bit of time to talk to you about it, and so that's why I'm here. But we've kind of gone through, as we all know, a sort of technological revolution. We have computing power in our mobile phones. We have businesses from our home. We have a digital economy worth $5 trillion. People do jobs that they didn't imagine they would do 5, 10, 20 years ago. And all of this is because of our broadband economy. American broadband providers are investing about a hundred billion dollars a year in wireless and wireline networks, and probably the fastest growing innovation ever has really been the mobile network.
Roslyn Layton (02:36):
This is what we're going to talk about 5G today. That's what people may know, but this is a technological standard to design the capability to distribute signals through the air. And that allows us, in the past we had the telephone, which was a copper wire. We have fiber through the ground, but we can also get our broadband through the air, lightning fast speed because of 5G, which is a standard designed to encode data in such a way that it can travel over a distance, not degrade, be at a high speed and have security. And that's essentially what 5G is about. And the reason that this is an issue now is because the airwaves to deliver that spectrum are running out and we have no pipeline. This is something that I think we should be worked up about because Congress who's in charge of this has been asleep at the wheel for some time.
Roslyn Layton (03:33):
Now, of course, we have some great people in the Congress are trying to do something about it, but it has really been a gridlock issue for a long time. And this is going to the heart of what Patriots care about, being the government control over resources. And now for 80 years, almost 100 years, most of the airwaves are controlled or essentially held onto by the federal government. Essentially the Department of Defense. They have been loaned certain spectrum to perform defense functions. We don't know how well they use it, how efficient it is, but they tend to be using quite inefficiently spectrum or not using it at all that we actually need as consumers for broadband and any other number of uses and all kinds of innovative purposes. And so now we're here at a point where in a very short period of time, in a few months, we're going to experience degradation if we don't fix this problem.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:33):
Okay. There's a lot to unpack here, so I'm going to try to go through it and ask questions to make sure that people who are listening understand the issue more. Let's take it just a step back and get to kind of a basic level. A lot of people, if you're my children's age, they're 22-year-old twins now or younger. They probably don't think about this very often, but a little bit older than that. And our age certainly remember that we had radios with antennas and there are televisions that had antennas in addition to cable, but we could receive communication through those antennas that was coming through the airwaves. But now so often I think that people have forgotten that the way that the phone communicates is also through the airwaves. It's just sort of so automatic and we don't have to go, can you hear me? Can you hear me? The way we did when cell phones first came out. So we're just not thinking about the fact that it's communicating on the airwaves, the computers that we use in our houses and our works when they're on wifi, that's still communicating through the airwaves. That's what you're talking about, right? And you're talking about certain bands within the airwaves, but it all is going through that communication channel.
Roslyn Layton (05:59):
That's true. Absolutely. You've talked about that when you use your mobile phone, when you're on the street, you're in your car, you get a call. That's because a mobile operator has purchased a license to use a certain band to deliver that signal to your phone. And now when you're in your home, you're using what's called a wifi network that is a local area network that you have a router in your phone. As you know, these bands are also used for radar satellite into space broadcasting. The traditional radio that we know, satellite radio, all of the things that have any kind of communication, they're involving some kind of spectrum and we are finding new uses for it. And the amazing part is that when a lot of these frequencies were handed out, nobody realized that it would someday become a trillion, multi-trillion dollar business. It would become a global industry, and it was sort of indiscriminately given away.
Roslyn Layton (06:57):
And now that we, because of technological innovation and markets, we realize, wow, these bans have some value. Why don't we bring a market-based discipline to distributing them? In fact, this was proposed in the 1950s and the economists who won an Bel Prize amongst for a variety of reasons, but he was ignored on this issue for 30 years. And now, today, rightly so, we recognize the value of spectrum auctions. Now, the spectrum we use for mobile communications is typically allocated through an auction. So different companies are competing to get the rights to that spectrum to deliver it to your phone. And this raises billions of dollars for the treasury. It is now become the defacto way that countries distribute this kind of spectrum, and it's extremely valuable. We don't have to raise money on taxpayers. We could be able to use these kinds of methods. Now, the sad part of the story, Jenny, is that over two years ago, the ability to conduct these auctions, which is done at the Federal Communications Commission lapsed, we've not been able to get over that because the Department of Defense and other parties, which are entrenched interests that have a lot of spectrum that they don't want to relinquish, they are putting the kibosh on further activities to try to free up the spectrum, if you will.
Roslyn Layton (08:32):
And that's hurting our economy. It's hurting our users. We're also not getting the money from it. So this is kind of the battle where we're at, and it's part of the what's going on now in the Congress to try to save our country, basically to get things back on the right fiscal track. And getting the spectrum in order is absolute priority.
Jenny Beth Martin (08:55):
Okay. So how did the ability to conduct the auctions with the FCC lapse and also a few moments ago, you mentioned that there's gridlock in Congress over this. What are they fighting about with this? It just seems like this. It isn't partisan. It
Roslyn Layton (09:14):
Should be obvious, right? If you had said, look, I'm offering you, we can raise a hundred billion dollars, no problem. Why would we not all be on board? But this has to do with unfortunately a lot of sort of cronyism and nimbyism in that there are certain defense projects which are sacred cows in certain locations, and they are using perhaps not the best spectrum, but they don't want to retool and farm the way everybody else has been doing. So the thing is, we can still keep those programs, those people compete their jobs, but they need to move to a better band. One that's aligned with international standards, one that allows us to maximize the value of our commercial spectrum. So this is one of the things that I'm sure for a patriot audience could be pretty galling, where you can see the economic benefit on the one hand, what's good for consumers, what's good for taxpayers, and it's being held up because one particular powerful party, whatever this is, a defense contract or a particular senator or whatever, can be able to stop the whole process literally for years.
Roslyn Layton (10:23):
And so that's the gridlock that we're in. And I want to give Senator Cruz the credit because he has come out very strongly for some time, and Senator Thune basically to say, we owe deference to the defense department to appoint, but this doesn't mean that they get to squat on all of the valuable resources they still have to perform. This spectrum has been loaned to them for a purpose. We get to audit it, we get to see that what, it doesn't have to be public, it can be done, but they have been refusing to, the defense department has refused to conduct an inventory to share it privately, to go through the steps that they need to go through so that we can see is this being used wisely. And just to put a fine point on it, there are people across America who would like better broadband, more options, better prices.
Roslyn Layton (11:18):
We can get that through 5G. We can get that through wireless spectrum. We can get broadband through the air. We could be doing all of that today with our existing technology if we just got our spectrum. And the other thing is when you do have the spectrum, you don't even need to use as much infrastructure, meaning you don't have to put up as many towers because if the spectrum is properly aligned, you can do it more efficiently that it can traverse a distance quite well. So you have fewer towers, fewer antennas to a point, but are important trade-offs that we sort of have just thrown to the side because we handed out these frequencies to various federal agencies 80 years ago, which have never had to account for them. They've never needed to show how efficient they are. And here we are now in 2025 where China is eating our lunch in the many areas of the wireless economy and globally, and we're just sitting there not even having the capability to do an auction. So for me, this just goes to the heart of kind of what you have the work that you've done in your audience is to say, enough is enough. We need to be smart about our resources. We need to use 'em wisely. We need to make good fiscal decisions. We can of course have a strong military, but they don't just get to run roughshod over every asset. They also need to be intelligent and steward the resources they use.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:55):
I have a question that maybe this is going to be out of left field, and so maybe it's wrong, but as you were talking about this and the military using the bands for the last 80 years and not auditing and contractors who don't want to retool their systems to keep up with the most, the more modern technology with better supports, communications wirelessly, it made me wonder is this some of the problems that we're having with the FA system in LaGuardia and other places around the country? The same kind of thinking, not necessarily spectrum, but just we've got government contracts in place to run various systems and they just haven't been upgraded in years. And I heard the transportation secretary say that the data coming into LaGuardia was coming in so fast that they have to throttle it to slow it down because the systems can't even keep up with the inflow.
Roslyn Layton (14:01):
Yeah. You've given us a great example, I think, and the FAA can cost lives, meaning if we don't get our air traffic control system correct, people will die. That is absolutely correct. And what you're talking about is a modernization that hasn't happened for 40 years, maybe longer. It will cost tens of billions of dollars. And actually I think it's a great opportunity to take a step back and say, is this a system that should be even run by the government? There's nations around the world which have a privatized or partially privatized air traffic control. I will tell you, I don't have the killer app example, but I do know that a number of nations have had success with privatizing parts of it. And as you know, our country is extremely reliant on our aviation. It has to be fail safe, it has to work 100% of the time.
Roslyn Layton (14:59):
And we don't have that confidence right now. We know that it has been neglected. We know that it has suffered from the gridlock as we've discussed, and we know that it's very frustrating for the people in those jobs who want to do the jobs and they don't have the right tools. So this is not an acceptable situation and it's also frustrating because it could be avoided. So you're absolutely correct. There's a parallel and it goes to I think what a lot of American feel as very much frustration we see every day when we engage with enterprise in the business world. We have world-class systems and we want to know, well, why aren't our government systems the same? Why are we putting up with substandard air traffic control? There should be no reason why that should be. So those are the kinds of it maybe a different discussion, but this whole feeling of this whole idea of what happened, where do we lose the way that the systems we're all relying on are somehow not working?
Roslyn Layton (15:59):
And it's not a question of money because there's plenty of money being spent on things that we probably agree we don't need to spend money on, but air traffic control we do. And this is also a question to say, is it that the government should be running all of it? Could there be a smarter way to do it? And the same thing has been brought up about the spectrum because it actually began as a private effort. There were common law property rights. It was organized by regimes that didn't have to involve the federal government, and it worked very well. The reason it came under federal control was essentially a takings by the government, which never compensated the individual radio operators at the time. But in 1927, the federal government reclaimed it all and then said it belonged to the federal government and they're in charge now of handing things out. This is a hundred years ago now, and we haven't modernized the federal side of things, which is a real challenge. And we're dealing with that today the same way that we are with air traffic control.
Jenny Beth Martin (17:06):
Well, and I'm sure a hundred years ago they couldn't even fathom what we're able to do with the radio waves today. I mean, maybe a little bit. I'm sure they were imagining at some point space travel. I'm sure that they're imagining those things. But the kind of communications that we have, the satellite communications, the cellular communications, all of it is just something that would've been very hard to envision a hundred years ago. But it's interesting and it's important to note that that same tech, it's not the technology, it's just the ability to use technology to take advantage of what the earth provides because we're not inventing, we didn't the radio waves, we've just found a way to use them.
Roslyn Layton (17:52):
It's the innovators. They have figured out. I mean, necessity is the mother of invention that spectrum, the little bits of spectrum that we do allow to be auctioned for private companies since those auctions began, if the efficiency of those bands have increased on the order of 400 times, the innovators figure out how to use that spectrum ever more efficiently because it's so limited. And that's what the 5G standard does. We have had two G, 3G, 4G soon will have 60 G we're 5G, and this is yet the fastest, the most innovative, the best security, the most reliable, the most efficient, all of those things. Because in order, if you've purchased that license, you want to make use of it. You want that customer, you want that customer's paying you a subscription. There's other options in the marketplace, not just other mobile providers. There's other technologies for you to get connectivity.
Roslyn Layton (18:51):
So these competitive forces underlying that innovation, and unfortunately the government doesn't have to attack the same discipline. You just hand it to the Pentagon and say, protect us. There's no controls other than they can go to Congress, whatever, once a year and be in a hearing and they ask them, how did you do for us? And if anything, if you look at the record, we are not safe. We are fallen behind in China in Supersonics. We've fallen behind Russia in drones. We are not where we should be on our satellite technology, our rocket technology in so many areas. And so this idea that we've just given away so much spectrum to the defense department has been a good thing. Today is not shown. I will tell you in the past, our soldiers, our people in battle have done an amazing job in World War ii in Vietnam, in the Gulf War.
Roslyn Layton (19:48):
But our adversaries have figured out that they too want to take advantage of their radio spectrum and they're not fooling around. They are very smart, especially China saying, we are going to make sure that we align all of our 5G ecosystem to the right spectrum because we want to build the equipment and the phones and the mobile apps to take over the world. We're not going to fool around. We're going to do it right from the technological perspective. And that's what they do other, and they're also pushing that agenda at all of the international fora in the United States. We are sort of trying to optimize around the edges because the defense is just sitting right in the middle. And then the private industry has to work on the sidelines, if you will, albeit they are amazing to make it efficient, but it's not optimal and it's certainly not optimal for us as consumers if we're in a world where we are suffering with our phone experience, which we rely on for our jobs, our education, our healthcare because of this gridlock in
Jenny Beth Martin (20:53):
Congress. So how are we falling behind China? Exactly. And as I was doing the research to prepare for this interview, I saw that we have limited use of 5G in America compared to other countries. How is it limited and what are practical examples of that?
Roslyn Layton (21:18):
Well just start with 5G in the military. I mean the ability, when you use a 5G signal, the 5G technology allows you to make slices. So you can say, I want a slice for my factory, a slice for my farm, a slice for my military, and that means within that channel it's yours. You get the perfect security and the perfect slice. And so Chinese military, the Nordic militaries, they are using those slices so that their militaries can have the most UpToDate applications in the United States. We can only do this on select military bases because our military is just not, it's not that the people working there don't want to do it, but the sort of the bureaucracy and the culture has a hard time to adapt. I'm sure you've had guests who can talk all about challenge of military modernization, but in the practice they're not taking advantage of the slicing and the kinds of things that they can do.
Roslyn Layton (22:18):
Now, why would you want a 5G military app? Well, first of all, it's latency because the ability to get the signal out back, you use it for reconnaissance, you would use it for different kind of surveillance, different sorts of things where you need to have ultra fast capability, hypersonic weapons, whole range of things. So that's one area. But when we talk about China, when they have, and again, I don't want to take the Chinese system, but I'm just going as I studied it and I can study how they organize their system, why do they do it? How does it work for them? It's not something I want to replicate, but at least we can attest that it's been intelligent where they have said, look, they want to make the equipment that you build the 5G base station, or you want to build the equipment to build 5G.
Roslyn Layton (23:10):
Now what really makes a 5G are the chips that is still largely western technology that has been Qualcomm and Intel and Nokia and so on. That stuff is still relying largely on Western technology again, that we have, as I would say, our country is fighting to try to protect that through export controls. You have to fight from theft, workarounds, Nvidia, there's all this business around their chips are being resold where they shouldn't and other countries and so on. So that the chips are a big deal, and that's how you want that processing of the data. It's got to go on the chip. Then you have the phones. There's another big challenge, and the phones are made by Huawei. The phones are made by Xmi. Of course, apple makes phones largely in China. As you probably know. We could some argue it's a China, even though it may be American design.
Roslyn Layton (24:09):
It's a Chinese manufacturing process. Samsung and Korea makes phones. So where the United States has led to the large extent is the software part. All of the apps on our phone, we use Google search, we use Google Maps, we use Facebook, we use any number of apps. But what we haven't invented was TikTok or tmu or all these new apps which Americans are using. I would say willy-nilly not thinking about the security risks associated with them, but because China has that ecosystem with the spectrum, their versions of artificial intelligence, they're able to incubate their technology in China and export it. So Africa, south America, Asia, United States. So they are embedding their technology through their 5G system, their 5G clouds, their 5G networks and designing it so it can be a global product. And that is not the thinking that we have in the United States. We have parts of that ecosystem. We've been lucky because it was great for a long time. It was the defacto winner. Of course, it's high quality. Our software is amazing, the chips are amazing. But we didn't sit down to say, well, how do we get the ecosystem and we're missing out on the spectrum, which is critical.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:33):
It's kind of when you describe it all, it is kind of frustrating to me just as a regular American citizen to think that we have American companies like Qualcomm that have innovated and come up. They came up with 5G and the modems that allow that kind of communication. And it's an American company. And then our American government is preventing that new technology that was developed by an American company to be fully used in America, but in other countries that are not America, they are taking more advantage of it because of this problem you mentioned.
Roslyn Layton (26:10):
Well, part of the reason we do have a process to harmonize to a large extent the bands. And it's precisely for the device makers because if you make a device and you take your phone, you want to use it when you travel, if you're making a product, imagine we made a product in the United States that could be used in other countries because it can receive the signals it's designed to receive this particular band at this particular wavelength. The Chinese have not missed that boat. They have made sure that from day one they were going to do that and they put all their people on at all the international to sort of bludgeon the process. So what I'd say is, I'm not trying to say this needs to be central planning, but don't be stupid about it. We should be smart. And that we, for so long, we kind of rested on the laurels.
Roslyn Layton (26:57):
We were very lucky that the various technology domains in the US could compensate for the government incompetence. But that's not going to work anymore because there's no pipeline today. There's no spectrum authority. And if we can't get this across the finish line, what Senator Cruz is proposing, 800 megahertz, the ability to do the auction for another 10 years, that would bring in 80 billion to help retire debt and other priorities. If we can't get, and you would think we should have 100 senators should be on board with that. And that's not where we are today. So it is definitely frustrating. And I would also say the media gets very bored about this topic that they don't want to, it is kind of hum because everything works fine for now. It's like a lot of things. We've been asleep at the wheel of China, we're asleep at the wheel of spectrum. And so I'm really grateful that I can talk to you and your audience about it because we don't want to be in a place a year from now. Would our mobile phones have been slowed because we haven't done the job we should have done 20 years ago?
Jenny Beth Martin (28:09):
Yeah, absolutely not. I certainly don't. I travel all the time. I need my phone working and I need it working fast whenever, wherever I am. It's the most frustrating thing when you're sitting there trying to download something and you can't because you're in a bad spot.
Roslyn Layton (28:26):
Let me say something on that one. It can be the phone. It is very frequent that people have a lot of apps on their phone. They take up a lot of the memory on the phone or the capacity. That is one issue. But there can also be congestion on the network. You could also be on a wifi network where there's a lot of users. I mean, that's the key difference with 5G and wifi. Wifi is not a licensed network, so whoever uses it gets to use as much as they want within reason. 5G is basically, it's a licensed proprietary network designed to give you a quality of experience. But again, a lot of these things are regulated as well. I mean, I've fought for 10 years to try to remove bad FCC regulation, trying to control how these networks were run. This is the long-term, these so many bad idea left minded regulations that were getting in the way of innovators.
Roslyn Layton (29:19):
So I'm with you. If we could just get out of our own way and allow the innovators to innovate, let's give them the room to do it. And that is really what it's about. And this is going back, as I said a hundred years ago, all of the mobile phone technology began in decades ago. It began in the seventies. All of these things didn't happen overnight. I mean, the people who've been working on them, they have been toiling for a long time. And I would argue that things, we actually, it's kind of like a lot of wonder drugs. They're in the pipeline for a long time because they have to go through the trials and so on. And when we finally get them by the grace of whatever regulator who lets us get them, we could have had them sooner. But this is also, so this is kind of what's at stake,
Jenny Beth Martin (30:12):
Right? That makes sense what you are saying. It takes a long time to have the innovation to bring an idea in a mind to actual fruition and updating the network the way that it needs to be updated. It's really not updating the network, it's updating the licensing around the network, it sounds like.
Roslyn Layton (30:34):
Well, it's more about we need to add more capacity. So I mean, this is getting into one of my other areas that I like to talk about is of course the network is being upgraded all the time. It's like a gallon of milk. If you don't upgrade it. If you don't replace it, it will expire. So you can use it up. Then you got to buy a new gallon of milk. If it sits in the fridge, it will get moldy. So it's not just that, but when you go from 4G to 5G, you do need new equipment. You need a new base station, you need new electronics, of course. But the other issue is we just use more data. And that's staggering. I mean, even in the last 10 years, we've added, we've another 40 million American internet users. It's an astounding feat in a modern country like the United States. We still added because a lot of people have been slow. COVID really got everybody online. But for example, my father never used a mobile phone. He didn't want to, he's passed away now, but I can remember he would refuse to get a mobile phone. So there have been some seniors and what have you, but there's nobody today under the age of 20 who doesn't use a phone. I mean, as you know,
Jenny Beth Martin (31:47):
Including nine month old babies,
Roslyn Layton (31:49):
Even children. So we all kind of accept that this is the way we're going to do it. And of course there's a lot of benefits. But the point of all that is that we need more capacity just to deliver the data. And this is a lot of video. There's tremendous amount of video. There's podcasts, there's entertainment, there's health information, there's work from home. There's any number of these uses. And we need just to have, basically it's building a bigger highway, if you will, because of the data that Americans consume. And again, that we have a 5 trillion digital economy in large part because we've got the broadband. If we didn't have the broadband, there would be no digital economy. That's the bottom line of the story.
Jenny Beth Martin (32:39):
Yeah, that is absolutely correct. And then when we're thinking about the future and what can be assuming that they get this problem under control, we're looking at six G now and more of the internet of things. I think people who really follow technology have thought about the internet of things, but people who haven't aren't really thinking about it because it still hasn't come to fruition in America yet.
Roslyn Layton (33:06):
Yeah, well, I mean, to give an example, I mean, it's a kind of, and again, I don't mean to get it ideological, but just to put it on one level, when you plug in an electric car, there's sensor data that the electric car will have collected that can put up a terabyte of data to the internet through your home internet connection. A terabyte of data is what a whole family would use in a month. And a terabyte of data is a lot. So the car is internet of things. The car is a smartphone on wheels. So what are we thinking about when we talk about six G now? A lot of those, again, it's an evolution. It's not a one day. If you look at 5G, it has many, many standards. The capability to connect with a satellite is there different kinds of security, different amounts of encoding and what have you.
Roslyn Layton (33:57):
And so six G builds upon that and it doesn't get rolled out in one day. It gets rolled out over time because as the chip is upgraded or as you have to get the device that can do those things. But where are we going with this now is a factory of the future, of the factory of today. I mean the advanced manufacturing, which would use robots, they will use computation and the ability, precision farming is another area. The kinds of industries where you would need to have seamless connectivity, different kinds of, there can be other applications. Now there is actually a real world of people who do competitive video gaming, and this is a sport like other spectator sports. So I think maybe some people wouldn't recognize that as a real feature or as a real endeavor. But it is, it's a big business. People do competitive sports.
Roslyn Layton (34:53):
There's all kinds trademarks and product marketing and things associated with it. But again, it's a way that people compete. You can do war games with it. You can do any kinds of sort of things like that. So being able to have digital economy in an intelligent way. Also, I think that for a lot of Americans, they just want better broadband at home. Maybe one spouse is going to be at home running a home-based business, the other one may be in a workplace or something. You want to be able to have enough capacity that the kids can do the schoolwork, that you can be able to get the health information you need, whatever the case may be. And having the adequate spectrum makes all of that possible.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:42):
So what is it exactly that Senator Cruz is trying to do and how can this audience help?
Roslyn Layton (35:49):
Well, thank you for that. So Senator Cruz has basically proposed to say within a relatively short period of time, we want to get 800 megahertz. It's a large amount, eight hundreds of megahertz of spectrum to auction. Also to restore the capability of the Federal Communication Commission to conduct an auction. That's very important. And part of this sweetener of the deal is that some of the money raised will go to defense to help them fund some of their modernization projects. And there's even an explicit promise, if you will, that there are certain existing defense installations that can remain, even though that may not be ideal, they can still remain fine, but there's enough there that we can reclaim 800 megahertz conduct that auction. The mobile operators need the spectrum today. They're ready to bid, they're ready to bid for that spectrum, and we can raise 80 some billion goes to the treasury.
Roslyn Layton (36:54):
So that is what is on the table. And we should support that. We should keep, I mean, I think all Congress people should support that. That is just a no-brainer. And I think the area has been the issue is that the Defense Department feels entitled that they had the spectrum for 80 years. Well, then they have not really been forthright because they've waffled. We found out they haven't used it so efficiently. So I think that it's not necessarily part of this picture, but they could definitely be more forthcoming, more transparent to be able to say, well, look, we can do a better job.
Jenny Beth Martin (37:37):
Well, if they were more transparent and maybe it's transparent inside of a skiff or in a classified meeting with people have clearance, but if they were transparent and said, we actually are using it and here's everything that we're doing and it is important and vital for national security, then it would be a different story. But if they're not being transparent, they haven't been audited, they're unwilling to be audited, then it leaves doubt in people's minds whether you're an elected member of Congress or just an average person going, well, if you're not willing to have the scrutiny and to withstand the scrutiny, then you're probably not doing everything the way you should be doing it.
Roslyn Layton (38:17):
You're absolutely right. And this actually, this is teeing up this sort of gold dome scenario, which you may have heard about because we have neglected, not only have we neglected the spectrum side, but on the defense part, all of the technologies that we need to defend our nation, we're not up to speed on those things and they have to go through this process anyway to retool for what are our modern threats today to get ahead of the adversaries. So this has to happen anyway. They have to look at, because there's the set of defense that we have today does not protect us. We cannot protect our nation that a hypersonic missile can destroy our nation in about 20 minutes. It has to hit us before we can stop it. And the Chinese developed that capability. We're not there. We missed the boat 30 years ago.
Roslyn Layton (39:07):
And because of the entrenched view of the defense elites, if you will, they were so embedded on the old systems and could not adapt. And that is the view that they have about spectrum. They have their particular defense radar platform. It's got to work this way, not adapting. Well, that hurts us because we're not safe. We are now at risk and we have to now double back and catch up with the golden dome. So all of this stuff is interconnected, and at the end of the day, the American people suffer in their security. They suffer in their broadband experience. We suffer in our economy and not being as dynamic as it could be.
Jenny Beth Martin (39:51):
Well, you're right, and we need the defense department to be innovating and to think outside the box. All that you have to do is look at what's happened with Russia and Ukraine and the drones in that war without doing an in-depth study of it. Just glancing through the headlines. And you see that the technology is different right now that we're using in war than we did 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 80 years ago. And certainly what Israel has done in Iran very recently, it's pretty amazing the innovation they've
Roslyn Layton (40:31):
Right. So not to confuse here, but Israel has an iron dome which is basically built on SB band spectrum. They only use that. And we have a defense department saying, oh no, we're not going to use that. We're going to use this C-band spectrum. Or the Israel has been protecting itself with all of the things around it, stopping the missiles with SB band. So we actually have real world examples that are in play with legit wars and militaries doing it the right way, not what our defense department's mutant version of the spectrum should be. So right there, you've just provided the perfect example of the sort of duplicity that we've had experienced. And this is, I guess it's the issue around how can we as Americans hold this accountable? Because we can't all be security experts and spectrum experts, and obviously you're trying to bring everybody to your show, but it's so hard to stay on top of everything.
Roslyn Layton (41:32):
But this is a where it does matter. And certainly what you see in the countries where their enemies are on their doorstep, they don't fool around. So for example, in Finland, they have like 800 mile border with Russia. You bet They get their spectrum strategy. They're not fooling around. They're making sure that it is working, that they maximize what they're offering in the commercial side so they can raise the money through the auction, but they make sure that their defense is lean and mean and they don't fool around with the mishmash of things. So the same with Taiwan, the same with Israel. They're not going to say, oh, well, let's just try this fancy little thing over there, this pet project. Every single thing has got to work. Now, I'm not trying to dismiss, of course America has provided intelligence, but if you think about where we are in the world, we don't have the enemies on the doorstep the way that China or Russia or Iran is so that we sometimes can be so lulled into complacency and think, well, let's just have this boutique example of a radar system. So if you look at the countries where they have to defend every single day from an evil adversary, they make sure they get their spectrum policy.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:56):
Those are really, really good example. So we don't have to be an expert in spectrum or informed policy or in military policy or in computers or any of it. It really for our organization and for this audience, it comes down to some pretty simple basic things. We need the government to run efficiently. We need it to be as limited as possible and run constitutionally. And right now not running, it is running inefficiently when it comes to this issue. And there isn't the proper transparency, at least for people to provide that check and balance over those who are supposed to be managing and monitoring the spectrum. So we need to support what Senator Cruz is doing. And for Pete's sake, it doesn't even seem like it should be a Republican or a Democrat issue. How can
Roslyn Layton (43:47):
It's bipartisan. Absolutely. It should be,
Jenny Beth Martin (43:49):
Right?
Roslyn Layton (43:50):
Yeah. So it historically has been bipartisan and even the spectrum inventory bill, this was Mike Lee and Ed Markey for over 10 years. They've always proposing this spectrum inventory bill, so credit there, but this is a case. I mean, I think we have kind of a divided Congress, but I would say that it's a bad form not to do it. But unfortunately, some Republicans have not been on board with, they have taken the side of defense unfortunately. But I think Cruz has the right, he has been in the right place as long as I can recall. And Senator, they had the bill ready to go last year. He has teed it up. There's a fantastic hearing you can watch back in March where he brought the various experts to the table. He has made it very clear about what's at stake, and he's been extremely forthcoming around allowing the defense department to maintain a sizable amount of their spectrum portfolio. It can't be 100%. It has to be something that is reasonable, and where we are today is not reasonable and it's not
Jenny Beth Martin (45:02):
Sustainable. Well, let's see. I hope that our audience can help you and your efforts and Senator Cruz and his efforts to get it back to a point where we can have the auctions again, clean up the way that the process is handled, and make sure that we're securing America and providing Americans with better opportunities.
Roslyn Layton (45:25):
Thank you.
Jenny Beth Martin (45:27):
Thanks so much for joining me today, Dr. Layton.
Narrator (45:30):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Han, and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (45:50):
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