Wireless Future Program: Latest Articles

Broadband Data Improvement Act Passes Senate, House, A.K.A. Find Why U.S. is on Continuous Decline

Articles — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:34:00 -0400

In a major win for the public interest, the Broadband Data Improvement Act passed the Senate (on September 26th) and the House (on September 29th). Due to amendments, it now goes back to the Senate for final approval (should be pro-forma) before it lands on George Bush's desk.

With the United States falling further and further behind a host of other countries, the question on many people's minds (including the folks over at Point-Topic who created this graphic) is, "Why is this happening?"

Yes, that's the United States, chugging along ever closer to the bottom of the pack.

Senator Inouye… more

It's Official: China Now Has More Broadband Lines than the United States

Articles — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:19:00 -0400

It was just last year that those of us raising alarms about the massive half-decade market failure in the United States to adequately provision broadband services were facing a misinformation campaign that raw numbers mattered more than percentage rankings. According to this argument, the U.S. broadband market was sound because we had more broadband lines than anyone else.

The misinformation brigade got so much attention (mainly due to incumbents funding a propaganda campaign that "everything is fine here, nothing to see"), that public interest groups had to issue reports systematically refuting the PR are marketing hype. In fact, Free Press issued a point-by-point rebuttal, "'Shooting the Messenger' Myth vs. Reality:… more

RIAA Loses Again

Articles — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:20:00 -0400

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking a lot of people to court--basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost… again. ZDnet covered the verdict.

At its heart, the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the same as actually distributing the work. In other words, copyright holders actually have to show harm before they can sue the… more

Media Mergers a Threat To Community News?

Ron Tang — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:54:00 -0400

The policies set by the U.S. federal government on media ownership have tremendous impact on community media that traditionally has played an important role in fostering community awareness and involvement. For local municipalities and constituencies, the on-the-ground media ownership rules ultimately boils down to the question of how diverse the opinions expressed in local media will be and how representative of topical issues the local news will be.

The past twenty years have seen an unprecedented number of media mergers spanning TV, radio, film, publishing and online holdings. An oligopoly has emerged whereby a half-dozen massive corporations control enormous numbers of… more

Overseas Wireless Deployments Offer Lessons For U.S.

Ron Tang — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:45:00 -0400

How we measure success is as important as what we are measuring. On March 19, 2008, the FCC dramatically revised its broadband data collection, in essence, finally giving in to mounting evidence that current assessments have been woefully inadequate. Previous data collection may have allowed politicians to declare "mission accomplished" -- that universal affordable broadband is available throughout the United States -- yet the fact remains that large swaths of the United States have fallen behind a growing list of other countries in broadband provision.

Within the U.S. context, wireless networks have often followed a familiar trajectory: utilizing hyperbolic and misleading… more

Philadelphia Network Flop Points To Failure Of Corporate Franchise Model

Ron Tang — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:21:00 -0400

Last year, New America Foundation released an in-depth report and analysis of the Wireless Philadelphia Project, “The Philadelphia Story: Learning from a Municipal Wireless Pioneer.” We concluded that the private franchise model was suboptimal and that Philadelphia’s solution was problematic in a number of ways. At the time, we received good press coverage and a helluvalot of blowback from certain constituencies (who continued to assert that everything was on track).

Now that we’ve made it to May, 2008, Wireless Philadelphia is on its last legs. While many of us are still working to salvage something from this mess, reading through… more

The COMMONS Initiative

Ron Tang — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:52:00 -0400

Over the past several years, interest in municipal wireless and community networking has increased dramatically. Thus far, these initiatives have generally focused on networking local communities. The next evolution in networking involves peering these networks together. Research on broadband service provision is desperately needed to help forge new national telecommunications policies and inspire innovation in networking technologies.

With this goal in mind, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (“CAIDA”) held a workshop to discuss -- and ultimately propose -- collaboration among researchers and networks to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet. First, there exists a self-reported… more

Municipal Wireless Success Demands Public Involvement, Experts Say

Ron Tang — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:00:00 -0400

Most media have it wrong. Municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't stumble in 2007 -- high-profile cities where deals fell apart, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all. The business model that faltered in 2007 was the "private corporate franchise" model based on the deal that Philadelphia and EarthLink agreed to in 2006. It was, in fact, the free market that failed last year -- not governments in their traditional role as the builders and maintainers of critical infrastructure.

How we… more

Broadcast to Broadband

Ron Tang — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Although much public attention has focused on the US digital TV transition -- and the resulting reallocation of analog TV channels by auction to wireless carriers -- the US Federal Communications Commission will decide how to reallocate an even larger swath of prime TV band spectrum this year: the unused “white space” between occupied DTV channels. This reallocation of unused spectrum from broadcasting to broadband permits unlicensed access for both fixed and mobile applications.

In 2002, the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force recommended that spectrum efficiency and innovation could be enhanced by reallocating unused and underutilized spectrum for both flexible-use… more

The New Network Neutrality: Criteria for Internet Freedom

Ron Tang — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The past year witnessed an event unprecedented in modern U.S. telecommunications history. A relatively obscure telecommunications policy debate spilled outside the rarefied airs of Congressional Committees and the Federal Communications Commission’s eighth floor to rage across the Blogosphere, major newspapers, YouTube and episodes of The Daily Show. This contentious discussion centers on an issue known as “network neutrality,” defined broadly as the non-discriminatory interconnectedness among data communication networks that allows users to access the content, and run the services, applications, and devices of their choice. Timothy Wu coined the term “network neutrality” in his seminal 2003 work, “Network Neutrality, Broadband… more

New Television, Old Politics

Articles — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:27:00 -0500

When the definitive history of the 20th century is written, America’s transition to digital TV (DTV) may come to be viewed as the classic illustration of what can go wrong with a high tech industrial policy. For more than 20 years this transition has been taking place. It has already been the subject of half a dozen books and countless popular articles, let alone thousands of pages of Congressional Testimony and tens of thousands of pages of FCC comments. Hernan Galperin, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California, brings this story into the 21st… more

Public Needs to Know How Government Runs Its Airwaves

Articles — Wed, 10 May 2006 03:00:00 -0400

Popularly known as the "public airwaves," spectrum is becoming to the information era what land was to the agricultural era and energy to the industrial era: its defining and most valuable natural resource.

Spectrum allows people and machines to communicate without being connected to wires. Most households have dozens of spectrum using devices, including cordless phones, cellular telephones, garage door remotes, FM radios, satellite TVs, wireless car keys, Bluetooth headphones, invisible fences, and WiFi broadband connections.

Most spectrum is reserved for the federal government, and not for private use. The federal government allocates spectrum, and not unsurprisingly, allocated most for its own… more

Which is More Important for Spectrum Policy: FCC or DOT?

Articles — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 04:00:00 -0500

Which has more influence on spectrum policy: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or the various federal, state, and local departments of transportation? Conventional wisdom would place the FCC as the hands down winner. Surely, that continues to be the case. But if current technological trends continue, the departments of transportation, especially the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), could end up a strong second. We're all familiar with the growing importance of municipal Wi-Fi. But why not highway Wi-Fi? Why should Wi-Fi stop at city boundaries?

That's where the USDOT's planned Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) could come… more

Spectrum Reform an Urgent U.S. Priority

Articles — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 04:00:00 -0500

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one of the hottest topics was WiFi, the technology that uses license-exempt (unlicensed) spectrum to share high-speed wireless Internet connections. In the United States, wireless networking is the fastest-growing segment in telecommunications, while in less developed countries it is seen as the means to leapfrog the lack of a wired infrastructure.

While the WiFi boom has been about short-range mobility, roughly 1,500 wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) already are using unlicensed spectrum to offer high-speed broadband to homes and businesses up to 30 miles from the Internet backbone. This is particularly… more

Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future

Articles — Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:00:00 -0500

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas. Tennenhouse was intrigued enough to authorize several hundred thousand dollars in funding. Then he moved on to the next bizarre… more

Should the Public Meeting Enter the Information Age?

Articles — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?

Articles — Sun, 12 Oct 2003 06:00:00 -0400

In the fall of 2000, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had not yet earned any powerful enemies, at least so far as they were aware. They were just two obscure Swedish entrepreneurs who had worked with three Estonian programmers to write a file-sharing application called Kazaa. At the time, the free program was merely one of Napster's several weak stepsisters, lumped together in news reports with the likes of Snarfzilla and ToadNode.

But a few months later, the record industry and its lawyers swatted down Napster. And Kazaa, with its easy-to-use interface and reliable technology, quickly began scooping up users.… more

Up in the Air

Articles — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 03:00:00 -0400

Each economic era has a resource that drives wealth creation. In the agricultural era it was land. In the industrial era it was energy. Today it may be the airwaves, also known as the radio-frequency spectrum -- the most valuable resource of the emerging information economy. Economists estimate that in the United States alone the commercial value of access to it could be more than $750 billion. But it's a resource that's being managed wastefully and inequitably, and what's at stake is the future of technologies that can enable the tremendous economic and social potential… more

A Private Windfall for Public Property

Articles — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 03:00:00 -0400

We're no fans of the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to relax ownership requirements for TV stations and newspapers, but it would be a shame if the battle between FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Congress on this issue distracted attention from another harmful move being contemplated by the commission.

We're talking about the privatization of the airwaves, a public resource worth hundreds of billions of dollars in both market value and future federal revenue. The contemplated FCC action could result in the biggest special interest windfall at the expense of American taxpayers in history.

The… more

Your Cellphone is a Homing Device

Articles — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 03:00:00 -0400

If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important perk should you ever find your hand pinned beneath an immovable boulder in rural Utah, as Aron Ralston did recently.… more