The Buzz about Wireless Internet

October 9, 2009
Posted by Josh Levy

The Chairman of the FCC just name-checked the iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry in a speech. Welcome to 2009, Mr. Chairman!

Here's the text, from Chairman Julius Genachowski's speech at the annual CTIA trade show:

We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month. So we must ask: What happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks? The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum.

Genachowski linked the Clintonian notion of the "information superhighway" to the quick ascent of wireless broadband. Whereas the superhighway of the '90s was laid through coaxial cable and fiber, the 21st century version is buzzing in the air around us.

The future of broadband is wireless, argued Genachowski, and we need more spectrum to allow for the increased wireless broadband activity we'll be seeing. The FCC needs to find better ways to manage that wireless spectrum, making sure that we don't run into what the E-Commerce Times calls a "wireless gridlock."

But while Free Press Research Director Derek Turner agreed with much of the speech, he warned that we haven't reached crisis mode just yet, and simply doling out more spectrum to the cartel of wireless carriers isn't the answer.

"Yes, it's true that we are not using our spectrum that we have efficiently, and I think that's where the FCC's job is really going to be challenging," Turner told the E-Commerce Times. "It's not really a case of handing over more spectrum to AT&T and Verizon and Sprint, but figuring out how to more effectively manage the spectrum we have today."

In fact, studies show that even in congested markets, there's lots of extra, unused spectrum lying around.

Kevin Martin, Genachowski's predecessor at the FCC, actually cracked open the door to more efficient, unlicensed use of spectrum (the so-called "white spaces"). Hopefully we can continue looking for ways to better use spectrum in the public interest.

Genachowski's wants to be sure that the wireless Internet falls under the FCC's anticipated ruling on Net Neutrality. That’s a good sign. That, plus his name-checking of cool phones, bodes well for the future of wireless broadband. Now it's up to us to keep him honest.

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Comments

Agreed. The wireless

Fri, 10/09/2009 - 14:14 — Robb Topolski (not verified)

Agreed. The wireless companies want to use this 'crisis' to get no less than 800 MHz of spectrum. If you were to put this in "land-grab" terms, the wireless companies want everything west of New Mexico -- about a fifth of everything usable by consumer electronics -- to be put under their control.

Before we do that, let's take a look at what we could do. Currently, we're switching to light bulbs that use a fifth of the electricity that their predecessors did. Spectrum re-use? How about using MIMO and beamforming to reduce the footprints of towers, so that spectrum can be reused in even smaller cells? How about eliminating the reservation of spectrum to a single carrier so that multiple carriers can share the same range -- much the same way that police, fire, and public works operations can trunk 45 channels of operation into the space of 5 channels.

I'm convinced the way forward ends exclusive rights to spectrum and, instead, sets up the coordinated shared use of spectrum.

Robb Topolski