April 9-15: Spectrum -- The Air That We Breathe

Although we try not to play favorites, Headlines, like you, has sources and authors we love to turn to help make sense of the latest developments in communications and, especially, telecommunications policy. GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham is one of those people for us. Our April 15 daily newsletter bore the title of one of Higginbotham's latest pieces -- "Everything You Need to Know About the Fight for TV Spectrum." This debate has been one of the hottest topics of late and this past week especially with the broadcast industry meeting in Las Vegas for its annual convention.

Higginbotham does a great job in her piece of identifying what the issue is, who the players are, and what's at stake. In addition, Higginbotham's colleague, Om Malik, sat down with Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder of Juniper Networks. Sindhu believes (and many agree) that the rise of mobility, or “anywhere computing,” is going to change the whole notion of information infrastructure. Most of us want “to consume information and information services anytime, anywhere, with no limitations, and preferably in the same way across all devices,” he points out. Sindhu argues that we shouldn't distinguish between a wired or a wireless network, for in the future the network traffic is going to be more unpredictable, with demand coming from any client device, from any app at anytime. As our readers well know (we hope), the National Broadband Plan and President Barack Obama are strongly committed to identifying and freeing up more spectrum to provide mobile broadband services. The move is meant to provide some more competition both within the wireless industry and between wireless and wireline Internet service providers -- and reduce the cost of providing broadband services in rural areas. A big part of the debate is figuring out where the needed spectrum will come from.