FCC Opens Spectrum —continued

Proximity to change
David C. King, Proxim (NASDAQ:PROX) chairman, president and chief executive officer, lavished praise on federal regulators.

"We commend the FCC for taking this important step to promote competition on a level playing field and encourage the development of a new generation of advanced broadband wireless networking technology," King said.

Other leading members of HomeRF included Charter Communications, Inc., Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ), Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) and Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT). The tech leaders agree that the FCC has made an entirely new generation of high-speed wireless goods and services possible.

Steve Silva, Charter Communications (NASDAQ:CHTR) senior vice president said the FCC rules change was a big win for U.S. consumers.

"With this ruling, the FCC not only enables broadband providers to offer a wider range of multimedia services into the home, but gives consumers the freedom to have broadband capabilities throughout their homes or offices," Silva said.

Dissent
Not everyone favored the FCC's new rules.

The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), and others filed comments opposing the FCC Notice. They argued that the proposed rule change would increase interference to devices operating in the 2400 2483 megahertz band.

The WECA asserted that frequency hopping systems using increased bandwidth would not be able to withstand interference from other frequency hopping systems and from direct sequence systems. According to WECA the new wideband frequency hopping systems are likely to increase their power output or retransmit signals more often in order to overcome interference. The result will be increasing interference to other unlicensed devices operating in the spectrum.

The WECA's mission is "to certify interoperability of Wi-Fi™ (IEEE 802.11) products and to promote Wi-Fi as the global wireless LAN standard across all market segments." Its member companies are listed here.

Members' objections to this FCC decision, including the objections of Lucent and Cisco, can be found in pdf format on this WECA page.

Cisco's Telecommunications Policy Counsel, for example, posts his letter to the FCC, where he argues:

Cisco supports the WECA compromise proposal which suggests adoption of: 1) a 60 mW power limit for wideband frequency hopping (WBFH) devices; 2) a cap of 100 hops/sec for WBFH devices having channel widths in excess of 1 MHz; 3) receiver performance tests for WBFH systems; 4) a ban on overlapping channels; and 5) a 4 MHz maximum frequency hopping bandwidth. The WECA compromise proposal will limit the amount of interference expereinced by 802.11 systems, while allowing the HomeRF manufacturers to obtain higher data rates than currently possible.

FCC's conclusion
In a joint statement Commissioners Ness and Furchtgott-Roth, along with Chairman Kennard, said they understood that most existing wireless devices are already designed to deal with interference from sources like microwave ovens and spread spectrum systems. The federal regulators believe that developments in error correction technology and the ability to retransmit signals as required would deal with any interference.

"In most cases, consumers are unaware that interference occurred," the statement read. "We do not believe that wide band frequency hopping devices will significantly alter the performance of devices already in the hands of consumers."

In dismissing WECA's concerns, the regulators said that "any further power reduction would constrain the useful operating range to such an extent that wireless devices would not be useful."

The FCC concurred with the HomeRF plan to provision 15 non-overlapping channels in order to accommodate the bandwidth required to facilitate spectrum hopping. Faster data speeds and backward compatibility with existing wireless devices was more important to the Commission than WECA's fear of potential interference in the spectrum.

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