STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL
Re: International Bureau Presentation on World Radiocommunication Conference 2015 
(WRC-15) (December 17, 2015)
Thank you to the International Bureau for a terrific presentation summarizing last 
month’s World Radio Conference.  More importantly, thank you to everyone who participated in 
the conference as part of the United States delegation.  We are grateful for your time and effort 
and for your work to help revise the Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunications 
Union.  
There was no shortage of signals coming out from this worldwide gathering of spectrum 
interests.  That’s to be expected because we now live in a world gone wireless.  The invisible 
infrastructure of our airwaves powers economies, fuels innovation, and supports global security.  
So the outcomes from this conference matter.  We should celebrate our successes, in particular 
the expansion of the UHF band for mobile broadband in the Americas and the spectrum 
framework adopted to bolster public safety and disaster relief.
Looking ahead, the agenda for the World Radio Conference in 2019 is already packed. 
It will include work on High Altitude Platform Stations, which show real promise to help 
bring connectivity to under-served markets worldwide.  
It will also include the study of a wide range of bands above 6 GHz.  This is terrific, 
because our 5G wireless future requires us to break through old boundaries and explore new 
opportunities in millimeter wave spectrum—the airwaves that are way, way up there.  Although 
these stratospheric frequencies have real propagation challenges, we can turn this limitation into 
a strength by combining these airwaves with small cells packed close together, densifying our 
networks at a lower cost.  The opportunities are real—and we should explore them.  So we 
should join in the effort to study the millimeter wave bands identified for the conference in 2019, 
but at the same time should not be deterred by the failure to include the 28 GHz band in this list.  
We have a global primary mobile allocation in this band—and we should continue to explore this 
spectrum frontier now. Because the race to 5G is on and the United States should lead the way.