Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Why WiFi warrants Washington's worry

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 15:02:10 -0500

Reports from the territory ahead for network law and policy

Why WiFi warrants Washington's worry

Kevin Werbach came to town the other day to launch a white paper/issue brief, Open
Spectrum, and a policy campaign built around opening up lots more spectrum for wireless
Net access. Both the paper and the campaign are aimed at influencing the FCC's pending
Spectrum Policy(Word doc.)(Powell statement) proceeding.
Now then. Who could possibly come out against more wireless Net access?
Short run, the proposals from Werbach and company look pretty benign:
public-private cooperation to improve spectrum sharing,
more unlicensed spectrum,
fostering -- rather than fighting -- dual use "underlay" of ultrawideband, and
otherwise incubating unlicensed uses.
I haven't thought through the business models. (But I will, I will -- this WiFi business
looks like it could take on the air of a land rush.) So my reservations, such as they are,
are somewhat half-baked.
They stem from my view, that here, as with most other network policy development,
'bottom-up is good (usually); top-down is not so good (usually)'. (Anyone else remember
all the money spent to subsidize environmentally friendly corn-based ethanol?)
So if the policy is for the FCC to subsidize X technology to fight spectrum congestion,
aren't there better, more grass-rootsy, (non-bureacratic) processes for filtering out
expensive gizmos and saving the brilliant hacks? Better than taking them to the agency for
a pick-and-choose process, I mean.
Of course, if the idea is to take a sane view of the SLC regs so that Dave Hughes can get
money to bring Net access to a school way off in the Arctic forest somewhere, I'm in. Sign
me up.

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