All of our infrastructure is wireline based. So that has been a good thing in the context of throughput for broadband speeds because you are not paying for data bits based on usage. We just acquired three Additional Properties in florida and california and texas where we bought some of the fios assets from verizon and we have lightningfast speeds with lots of content and choice for consumers. Host how big is frontier . Guest we are the fourth largest teleco. I think a tshgt t and verizon a am not saying them in order then century link and then us. We are the eighth largest provider of video content. Host we invited you on the communicators to talk about the rollout of 5g. The fcc is meeting about that next week. I want to show video of the fcc chairman talking about 5g. If the Commission Approves my proposal next month the United States will be the first country in the world to open up high band spectrum for 5g networks and applications and that is damn important because it means that u. S. Companies will be the first out of the gate. We will be repeating the formula that made the United States the world leader in 4g. Unlike some countries, we did not believe that we should spend the next couple of years studying what 5g should be or how it should operate and how it allocates spectrum based on those assumptions. Like the examples i gave earlier, the future has a way of inventing itself, turning innovators loose is far preferable than expecting committees and regulators to define the future. Host kathleen abernathy, do you agree with chairman wheeler . Guest absolutely. It has been an amazing history to be the leader in the telecommunication division. In 1993, i joined by first telecommunication job and left my stable job at the fcc and folks said are you kidding . Why are you going into the this fly by night Wireless World . They will be out of business in a couple of years. The market flourished, the benefits to consumers are not just in what the technology does, as far as mo mobility and access to information but job creation, technological advancement, driving the framework for wireless products and services. We have been the leader in that and should continue to stay the leader. Host one more question before we bring howard from daily communication. What is 5g exactly . Guest more, faster better. It just shows there is an evolution in technology that allows you to do more with less. You have remember spectrum is a finite resources. There are airways out there but they are being used in many ways by the government and private sector. When you talk about the next evolution you have to find spectrum, make sure you are not interfering with existing users and you have to develop the technology that allows you to tap into the spectrum and deliver the products Consumers Want and deserve. There has been a lot of discussion about the u. S. Maintaining its competitiveness. What steps do the fcc need to take to spur the move toward 5g . Guest i think they are taking the steps. They are identifying spectrum and moving ahead and figure what the pram framework and rules are and creating the Regulatory Framework. There is a lot of studying that has to happen. You dont want to go off in one direction when everyone else is developing standards around another and you dont want to cross interference and certainly not cross border interference. I think identifying and freeing up the spectrum is hugely important and then in a sense, the wireless carriers, who are direct competitors, gives them incentive to make investments and create jobs and new p products. When do you expect to see 5g out there with consumers using it every day gue . Guest i know verizon will probably have a product around 20172018 and others are saying more like 2020. In a Perfect World the consumer doesnt care how you label it. They just care about can i do mo more, do i have more choices, and will it help with education. Somewhere between 20172020. What are consumers going to notice . They may not know they are on 5g as opposed to 4g but what will they notice . They might notice they will be able to have different kinds of applications that warrant more devices in the home that are wireless friendly. You may be able to manage and better use your energy so you are using, for example, out west, fewer water resources. Or managing your electricity flow. Or Getting Health Care records or monitoring of medical devices. So when you drive down spectrum costs then the finite resource you can be more creative about the kinds of products and services you can offer to consumers. Host Kathleen Sebelius, you said that frontier your company, is a pure play company. Why would it matter to you if you had 5g or not . Guest well, we will never have 5g in the sense of as a company we kentucky enter the wireless market right now. It is too late to go in and compete with the five incumbents and are strong and well positioned to leverage in the market. But frontier and i personally view it as complimentary. No one entity has enough spectrum, resources or fiber to meet all of the needs of the consumers. If you look at the trajectory of how consumers are using data and video content everything goes through broadband and that means that more entities out there investing, even if it is wireless versus wireline drives Better Technology and Better Options for us as we use our wireline infrastructure. It is a competitive environment and i want less regulation not more so that is good for me. If we had the opportunity to continue to compete against wireless, which mind you, they are tough competitors as is cable. We have broadband data we deliver to the products and homes and security and education and all of those products. The market is big. And it is just going to grow over time. You were characteriziing it s a pure point but is a problem not having wireless . Guest in a Perfect World we would have it all but we dont. Size matters as far as having resources and eyeballs to enter the Video Content Market and make the investments we have had to make to turn ourselves from a traditional phone company where the pipe to the home is real talk. Now the pipe to the home delivers so many other values and so we have had to invest, redefine, build, and that is what we have been doing with our acquisition. It is a robust and reliable service. The fiber assets we are are valuable in the marketplace. We are fortunate we are able to design and build our company to move from what many say is a sleepy rural telecommunication into the fourth largest Wireline Broadband Company in the u. S. Tying that back to 5g one of the big things wireless carriers need to build up 5g is what we like to call back hall or the connection between cell tower and tying back into the network and that is really important. How big a role will Companies Like yours play in that part of 5g . That is a fascinating discussion. Some people argued that role, that back hall row, is critically important and it is and price regulations for that piece of the equation is impacting 5g but it has nothing to do with 5g. 5g will happen regardless of the infrastructure costs of building the transmission. The real issue is investing in the spectrum and holding the auction for the spectrum. The large carrier a to larger carrier b negotiations about back costs is part of building up a network. And unlike with spectrum, where you have to have spectrum to be a wireless provider, these are build out infrastructure costs that many people compete for. We compete for them. Cable competes for them, other carriers compete for these back hall resources. I think it is a bit of a red herring and an example where every company tries to get what i call their fair regulatory advantage. If i can leverage regulation to get a pricing advantage that is great for me. I dont see it as having any impact on 5g because that train left the station. The fcc islooking at prices in that special access, they like to call it business data services, i think that is kind of there is sort of similar terms but where do you what do you see coming out of this fcc investigation . What are your concerns . Guest i think the fcc has been a bit mislead. If the fcc looks at that market and says, you know, two providers, two Big Companies with lots of lawyers, negotiating contracts, that is not enough, we need to price regulate that and i would say wait a minute, you are setting down the path where two providers isnt enough and in the Wireless World there are plenty of markets where there are one or two providers. If you start saying in this market the Company Negotiations are not sophisticated to negotiate fair price and regulation makes sense i think you are heading into the a market where you say maybe we start price regulating other services where there are only o two providers. Do you expect the probe to wrap up under the current chairman and if so, what do you expect the fcc will do here . Guest i think the fcc wants to try to wrap it up before the end of the year. I am hoping as they look at this market and particularly the fact these are companytoCompany Negotiations. Mind you the wireless specter this year will have about a hundred billion in earnings and the wireline companies they are negotiating with are a fair point. Century link. We will have about ten billion. We are smaller but a sophisticated company. Engaging in and micromanaging the business negotiations makes no sense and i will continue to urge the fcc to focus on rolling out 5g not on managing, pricing practices that have been unregulated for a number of years. Host kathleen abernathy, next thursday, july 14th, the fcc is meeting to discuss and potentially vote on a rollout of 5g. What are they going to be doing . Guest what they will be doing is identifying the spectrum and other stuff i am not sure because they are not allowed to share that with any of us in advance. The goal is to say we have the spectrum, the vision thing about where we are want to go, and we are going to push ahead to insure that the u. S. Maintains its Global Leadership in the wireless arena and i think that is terrific for our country. I would argue it is essential because this is one of those areas where u. S. Global leadership has yielded tremendous benefits economically and from a jobs perspective. When you say they have the spectrum, is it public . Are they selling it . Will it be released . Guest some of it will be up for auction. Some will have licensed and unlicensed common use. And i believe, i am the wireline person and havent in been wireless in a while, but i believe they will have a layered approach sitting in multiple buckets. Unlicense is like wifi. That is a better way to think about it. I wanted to ask you, you used to work for a carrier, isnt it interesting to you that at this point, the fcc is now looking at opening up the High Frequency bands. These are bands way up on the spectrum almost not able to imagine that. Can you reflect on that in it is fascinating the Way Technology moves ahead. Every time you think you head a wall with spectrum being available we say we are done and we cannot access any more because there is no technology. The engineers go back to the drawing board, the insatiable appetite we have to communicate better, faster, more often drives creativity and you are finding new bands that were previously unusable. Could never use them. All of a sudden they are very valuable. Different characteristics that require different build outs and standards but nevertheless valuable for driving the ongoing demand for wireless applications. I will point out from a wifi perspective we do a ton of wifi. We dont own wireless spectrum but we leverage all of the wifi capabilities and when we build out in the markets we will provide wifi in stadiums, restaurants and businesses and in the home. So we can give a lot of mobility to our customers without actually owning the spectrum. You have somewhat of a business interest in seeing more spectrum set aside for wifi. Absolutely. Why have you been buying fio systems . Guest because they are there. Two things. One, you have to scale up if you want to stay in this business. If you reinvent your company to be more than just a phone company that means you are putting a lot of money into capital to build out broadband and that means stale matters for purchasings buying requipment and content agreement and verizon was willing to sell. And not only were they willing to sell assets but they were willing to sell fios assets which are incredible. The opportunity for us to scale up with these fios was too good to be true. It was a big step to us to take because we double in size with this purchase. But it freed us up and gave us the scale and Technological Capabilities we need to continue to move our business forward. And to drive better products and services. Host have you faced issues in that scaling up and buying of fios products . Yes, it is hard. Unlike most acquisitions where you can start operating right away we were buying piece parts of verizon. Separating entire networks from what i call the mothership meaning we have to duplicate that infrastructure. We have to have employees getting trained and building the data capabilities and mirror all of that capability to remove it from the verizon system and put it on the frontier system. The good news is we were 99 effective at the cut over. 99 when you are talking about teleco and communication capabilities and that means there were still customers that didnt have the experience we wanted. We had to come back from that. We are in the market proving ourselves and business as usual mode. We are out there earning the trust and respect of the new customers across the state of florida, texas and california. Do you see frontier becoming a provider . A programming Provider Company as well at some point . Guest entering the programming market is very hard but what we have done is we have thousands, runs of thousands of video assets in our video on demand, and we have an agreement with netflix for our customers to have access to all of those assets. We have one of the biggest video libraries in the country for accompanying our size. It is bigger than many cable competitors. That is one way we play on the video space without owning video. Your ability to negotiate reasonable terms and conditions is proportional to having the scale that is necessary to say if i negotiate here is how many hou households i can bring to the table. Privacy rules for isps is something they are working on and i think consumers will notice that because they will have more choices and they will have to deal with privacy choices more. Where do you see that headed . Do you think the fcc will succeed in approving rules this year or so . One of the outgrowths of getting online anywhere is Everybody Knows what you are doing. The next generation of kids, my daughter, they dont even think about privacy. My Company Thinks about it all of the time think about it. They want to insure the customers privacy rights are protected. But it is messy. Not only do you have to know how to protect the rights you have to know low to convey and explain it. The challenge we have in the privacy space is that there is two layers of rules and nobody out there in america who goes online when they type in a Google Search says i wonder how priva privacy rules apply. They dont. They want to believe it works. So the issue is trying to come up with a framework that protects consumers. We have them explained and in the marketplace and on our website. Different rules for different providers and it will get confusing for customers so i think what is important is overtime to try to reconcile all of the rules to the general framework. Is your company concerned if the fcc hands down rules for isps that are stricter than the edge providers which is Companies Like facebook and netflix . Guest yes, because lets be honest facebook, google, twitter versus frontier . They are a little bigger. They are very adept at using dana mining and marketing to consumers. I believe there is a good solid frak mark. A consumer isnt going to say well, of course, since i was using amazon or facebook my privacy wasnt protected. They wont know that. So consistency of protection is a very important concern. One final question on that. In the real world, that doesnt seem like the fcc is heading strongly toward the separate rules that will be a lot tougher. It does seem like that. I think it is because the fcc is looking at it saying these are the right rules and should be in place. My answer would be you need to reconcile with the realities of the marketplace. One of the hardest things when you are regulating is you know what you want the world to be. You just dont know how to create the Regulatory Framework to get you to that space. And if in designing your regulations there is a lot of loopholes you didnt accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in the first place and that is always the frustrating part. Jurisdictional boundaries, scope of your legal authority, constantly put pressure on what you can do, and that is why to the extent possible where the market works let it work. I think in the privacy arena you do need to have rules and regs in place. But you have to appreciate that if you put your thumb on the scale here somebody over heres has a different set of rules and requirements and are you really accomplishing what you want. Host when you go to the hill what are the issues you talk about more frequently . Guest what is most frequently discussed is broadband to Rural Communities because there is a lot of rural markets out there that dont have Broadband Access and capability. The fcc came up with a program called the connect america fund. If is basically a revamping of the old universal service fund to say lets use it to help subsidize broadband instead of voice to Rural Communities. Why do you need it subsahar subsaharan subsidized . The cost so significant it would not get there any time soon. We know how critical broadband is in our daily lives particularly in a rural mark like with medical care, advanced math teachers, submitting resumes for jobs online. Broadband to Rural America is critical. We have taken all of the connect america funds money we can get because we are committed to building up the rural markets. That has been a gain has helped congress and the fcc. Host we ask how the telecom act has affected your life and if you would like to see an extensive rewrite . Guest the telecom act is largely outdated. Instead of providing products and Services Consistent with technology of today you are trying to shoe horn it into a regulatory structure that is outdated. On the other hand, be careful what you ask for. You never know what comes out of are rewrite and i am not optimistic there will be a rewrite any time soon so most companies, like my company, we look at the framework of the statute and say this is what we have to deal with. We have to work with regulators in a way that perceives the Public Policy interest and we have to figure out a way to deliver values to our customers and new products and services. For the most part, all companies have been figure out a way to do that. Sometimes it results in what you call unfairness because the statute isnt identical for all companies that are providing somewhat identical products. You just have to get over that. It will never be totally fair. It is like telling your children life isnt fair. You have to say how do i live within the confines of the statute, provide Services Consistent with that, and how do i work regulators to explain why i think some regulations makes sense and some doesnt. Host Kathleen Sebelius is former member of the fcc and Vice President of frontier. Howard buskirk is executive editor at daily communications. Now a look at the use of Capital Punishment and whether the practice will ever and here in the u. S. This discussion includes a lawyer who has represented clients facing the Death Penalty in the former u. S. Solicitor general. From the aspen ideas festival in colorado, this is just under an hour. Thank you all for being here. Maybe the bravest decision that Society Makes outside of going to war is