WiFi Eyes the Empty Airwaves

WIFI EYES THE EMPTY AIRWAVES
[SOURCE: BusinessWeek, AUTHOR: Mark Gimein]
The white space -- unused spectrum between TV channels -- could be key to new wireless services, but big telcos say it's a threat. Ever since the government licensed the first radio stations, we've been accustomed to thinking of the airwaves as a scarce resource. Once handed out to the politically well-connected, in more recent years it has been auctioned off to services such as wireless phones for many billions of dollars. Now Michael Calabrese, a vice-president at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, has advanced a new plan to use some of the wireless spectrum. It qualifies as one of the most promising and innovative ideas in communications. The idea: to open up "white space" -- unused frequencies between TV channels -- for unlicensed use to anybody who wants to put up a transmitter. When he first proposed it in 2001, Calabrese says it seemed like a quixotic plan. That's no longer so. The Federal Communications Commission is interested enough in the proposal that it has gone to the stage of soliciting public comments. And technology companies are very much behind it. Broadcasters have opposed the new plan, waging what Calabrese calls a "scorched earth" campaign against it. They claim their main concern is interference with TV signals. But regulators have been trying to pry some of their spectrum away from broadcasters for years, and there might be a lot more at work than just concerns about interference. In earlier decades, having a broadcast license meant having a right to deliver one kind of service -- radio or TV, for instance. But now lots of new data services can use just about any frequency. Letting new services into the space between TV channels reduces broadcasters' hopes that eventually they would just get to keep their big swaths of spectrum and might be allowed use them to offer new services without having to spend billions to buy spectrum at auction.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_31/b3995073.htm?chan=tc&...