Politics

Wireless Regulation Matters Even More, Now

As the FCC hands the wires back to the oedipal bells and ka-ching cable, the one path for packets that hasn't been monopolized is more important than ever.

by Marlon Schafer Consultant and CEO, Odessa Office [December 9, 2005]

Way back when, an otherwise unremarkable event took place and the telephone was born. I have to believe that few of the people alive at the time could have possibly envisioned the revolution that instant communication would bring.

Heck, I'm living through the changes that the Internet is bringing to the table, and even after a decade of providing Internet access to nearly half my county via dialup, DSL, fiber, and wireless, I'm constantly amazed at the day to day changes in people's lives.

What amazes me even more is how much faster we could be deploying and how much further ahead we could have been.

DSL is old news
Let me take the second point first. Did you know that DSL technology is over 30 years old now? You never heard of it prior to 1995 or so though did you? That's because the Telcos were busy selling these fancy data circuits called T-1's. And, lets face it, in the days prior to about 2002 anything near a T-1 (1500KBps) was amazing geek-only internet stuff!

Fast forward to today. The '96 Telecom Act is pretty well gutted. It's not even a shell of its former self. Looking back over the years, pick the industry, you can tell that monopolies generally don't like to share anything, especially customers.

Now that the government says that they don't have to share, the big companies aren't. Cable companies are outright refusing to share their infrastructures. Even though they've had monopoly protection far longer than needed to pay for the investment. I've got an ISP friend that's basically been given 15 days to find a new home for his DSL customers because the telco isn't going to sell lines to him anymore. It's a bit more complicated than that, but not much.

Like a daycare center with a case of Magic Markers left unattended, the handwriting is all over the wall. Build your own network or be run out of business.

So what's going to be left for the consumer shortly? Ma Bell and Cash and Carry cable. That's it. It'll be Internet access right up there in quality with American autos of the mid '70s. Yippy.

That is if (and this is a big if) all things keep going the way they are going.

Wireless to the rescue
But that cowboy riding into town, covered in trail dust, is the mostly unheard of third connection to your home or office. The Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). The WISP is a local provider of Internet services, a community entrepreneur, the guy (and most are guys) you are just as likely to bump into at the grocery store as you are to hear answering the phones at work.

At this point, the best estimates of the Wireless Internet Service Providers' Association (WISPA) (motto: "cut the wires!") place the number of WISPs at 3,000 to 6,000 depending on how you run your numbers. Some estimates place them at closer to 10,000 to 12,000.

Unfortunately, only 400 of the thousands that exist filled out the mandatory FCC form 477 [.xls], a broadband reporting form that the government uses to help gauge the state of broadband penetration in the USA.

You get your voting power based on the census. Since the census failed to count the majority of WISPs, our influence is less than it should be.

Real victories for wireless
Right now, WISPA has a bit over 300 members on its free mailing list and far fewer on its paid membership roster. That's in spite of the fact that the battles waged so far have been going mostly in favor of the group:

• It's no longer necessary to certify every single antenna you want to use with every single radio you wish to deploy.
• It's not easy yet, but it is possible to use more than 4 watts in the 2.4 GHz band.
• There is 225 MHz of new spectrum in the 5 GHz band.
• There's 50 MHz now available in the 3.650 GHz band.

And there's an open issue at the FCC as to what to do with unused (empty, fallow, not being used at this time) TV bands. (Did you know that even the biggest markets in this country, 40 per of the space allotted to TV lies unused not just open but not even bid for —not even licensed!?)

WISPA is now fighting battle at the FCC and in Congress over the TV bands. The shenanigans being pulled by the broadcasters are amazing. Think exploding gas tank 60 Minutes news type stuff. One of these days I hope to write about that issue a bit more about how government works as opposed to how it should work (or get out of the way of business).

If you are interested, touch base with the New America Foundation. They are well versed in what's happening (see, for example, the 69 page report "Measuring the TV "White Space" Available for Unlicensed Wireless Broadband" [.pdf]).

There are other things happening at this time too:

• The 5.4 GHz band is being held up by the Department of Defense. There's no firm date yet on when it'll finally be available. However, equipment is available almost everywhere else in the world at this time.
• A few big companies (lead by Motorola) have petitioned the FCC to make the 3650 MHz band a licensed band.
• The TV band issue is very much in doubt and at this point looks like it'll just continue to be tied up by big money types, such as the broadcast industry.

The only hope for the consumer and for small business seems to be a huge amount of grass roots activity by small business owners and ISPs. If we don't make ourselves heard, we can go right back to the bad ol' days of technology being buried under thick layers of bureaucracy and profiteering.

The wireless industry is thriving and change is rapid. But the telcos are not investing in research, and even the cable companies are lagging the rest of the world (see DSL Prime: 100 Mbps in North America and Europe).

Monopolies become complacent, like the auto industry of the 1970s (see, for example, the book The Reckoning by David Halberstam).

If you don't remember what the telecommunications past was like, here's some history from the book CLEC An Insider's Look at the Rise and Fall of Local Exchange Competition (p.4) by Martin F. McDermott III:

Touch Tone service was first developed by Bell Labs in 1948. It was first deployed in the early 1960s.

We can no longer hold back technology to fit the schedule of a regulated, risk free industry. Innovation requires competition and risk taking. The FCC claims to support competition, but its definition of competition has always been part of the plan to end real competition (see Triennial Review Part I: A Definition of Competition).

Competition keeps prices down and quality up. It's the free enterprise way of keeping companies honest.

—End