Why Simply Selling Our Airwaves Will Cost Us in the Long Run

The deficit super committee and congressional technology committees searching for new money are considering "incentive auctions" of the TV band spectrum. Versions of these plans that focus on simply selling as much spectrum as possible would threaten the future of wireless innovation in the US.

For starters, it would threaten what appears to be the next wave in wireless communications—a wave exemplified by two recently launched products. The first product is Amazon's Kindle Fire, which came out as a purely Wi-Fi device from a company that only four years ago launched the Kindle as a cellular-only device with service baked into the device price. The second is a $19.99 unlimited voice, text, and data service from Republic Wireless, which uses Wi-Fi as baseline infrastructure, and cellular as its fallback. Just as packet switching and Internet protocol replaced circuit switching and the old telephone model, the two launches capture a fundamental switch in how wireless infrastructures are built. Open wireless models, like Wi-Fi, are becoming the basic infrastructure for wireless communications, while exclusively licensed services, like cellular, are becoming the (still critical) backup and supplement.