Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves and carefully planned humor.

I'm Evan Sportsdriver, your host.

On today's show, 5G and the next generation of wireless broadband.

Today, the Senate Commerce Committee approved the Mobile Now Act. Will this

legislation pave the way for the future of wireless? Will this legislation help free up the

spectrum needed to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband? Joining me to discuss this is Tom

Struble, Policy Council at Tech Freedom. Tom, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me,

Evan. Happy to be here. And also joining me is someone who's somewhere on the spectrum, Baron Soka, President

of Tech Freedom. Barron? I'm here with lots of carefully scripted humor. Well, that's great. Our

listeners can look forward to that. So, gentlemen, demand for mobile broadband is growing exponentially

as more people around the world access the

internet through smartphones and tablets on mobile networks rather than or in addition to the

traditional way of accessing the internet through wireline and pipes and as a Cisco study recently

showed global mobile data traffic grew 4,000 fold over the past 10 years. It grew 74% in 2015 alone,

and it's slated to grow eightfold by 2020. So clearly the demand is exploding, and it really

remains to be seen if governments are doing what's necessary to meet that demand. So today, we've got

the Commerce Committee in the Senate approving the

Mobile Now Act, and this is really an effort to deal with some of the problems facing broadband

deployment. So Tom, what is the issue with Spectrum? Why is there not enough Spectrum to meet

the growing demand today? Well, you may have heard the shortage of spectrum referred to as a crunch.

The spectrum crunch is what they often say.

And it is a real thing, particularly in urban areas, like here in Washington, D.C., along the

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