On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 12:58:31 -0400, Michael L Teter wrote:

Heard Mr. Hundt speak a while back at an industry
get together, a very impressive individual and speaker,
for sure!

He could always spew it out by the yard....

He was also good at ignoring or disrespecting those of us in the
field who were knowledgeable and involved in enforcing the FCC
regulations, even those regs that he himself was pushing through.
Perhaps he thought that FCC Regs could be complied with by some
magical process.

He came out to San Francisco for "an industry get together" and
didn't have the decency to stop by the field office to show his face
to the staff members there as other Commissioners and Chairmen
usually do - part of having that rank. But his staff bag-carriers
sure insisted that the field staff do all sorts of "gofer" and
"fetch-it" jobs "for the Chairman", including motorcade security.
We didn't mind doing it - that was -our- job - but loyalty, like
respect, has got to be a two way street.

Spoke at length about his tenure at the FCC.

Did you ever hear Dick Wiley speak about -his- tenure at the Commission?

He was the last decent Chairman, excepting for Jim Quello who was a
damn good Commissioner and served a very short time as Acting
Chairman only because the Prez was too embarassed not to designate
him as such just before he retired.

Both of the above knew how to run the Commission to get the work
done properly and were very conscious of the fact that it was the
technical staff that supported the Commissioners. IIRC Mr. Quello
was the last Commissioner to have an Engineering Advisor as a
full-time staff assistant.

What an eye opener! Most noteworthy were his
comments on the resistance to change at a dinasour of
an agency.

The changes that he wanted to make (and finally bludgeoned through)
were to get the agency out of the technical spectrum management
business as its primary function and into the "auction it off to the
highest bidder" business as its primary function.

If you consider that as the role of a telecommunications regulatory
and spectrum management agency, I feel sorry for your ignorance.

When enough of the pros who believed in proper professional spectrum
management finally gave up in disgust, he succeeded. The resulting
state of regulatory anarchy on "the airwaves" is the result.

He would have been far more respected if he would have split the
agency in two, getting The Congress to place the technical
management and enforcement function - which he didn't understand -
into an agency such as NTIA (as Canada did with DoC, now IC) and
keeping the rest - which apparently he did understand - as a separate
entity to play the political and auction games (as Canada does with
its CRTC).

Mike Teter, P.E., M.B.A., Ph.D
Sumisunsansorg LTD

I got letters too.

Phil Kane, P.E., B.E.E., J.D.....
CSI Telecommunications
Communications Law Center
FCC (retired)