The Invisible Battle for America's Airwaves

Competition for the 900mHz segment of the radiofrequency spectrum has grown fierce in recent years as more operators are pushed out of licensed spectrum and into the electromagnetic doldrums. What was once a lonely spectral highway for local news channels and the occasional surveying project is now crisscrossed with signal traffic from all kinds of industrial Internet of Things (IoT). The proliferation of users in the 900 mHz is a side effect of an invisible battle for the right to communicate wirelessly. For years, the Federal Communications Commission has been repackaging spectrum segments to be auctioned off to wealthy private operators like cell carriers. Water, gas, railroads, electrical utilities, and other mission-critical operators all rely on secondary spectrum markets to access those same federally regulated bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. A critical number of state-owned utility and emergency services in the US—from environmental monitoring to industrial communications networks to weather balloons—are privately operated, meaning they don’t qualify for free federal spectrum, no matter how essential their services are. This flattening of the consumer and critical traffic hierarchy forces private, but crucial, services to compete with mega-corporations for access to spectrum.