Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Beyond WiFi: Airwaves used in creative, lucrative - and unregulated - ways

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 04:19:25 -0400

Beyond WiFi: Airwaves used in creative, lucrative — and unregulated — ways

By Sarah Lai Stirland
Special to The Seattle Times

WASHINGTON — What do camera pills,
cordless phones, wireless Internet service
providers, a radar that checks highways
and a keyless ignition system have in
common?

Answer: The technologies all rely on the airwaves to work. And they have
proliferated, according to a recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
report, because entrepreneurs have commercialized their ideas without having to
secure licenses that could otherwise limit where, when and how their services can
be deployed.

As an indicator of how pervasive wireless devices are in our lives, report authors
Kenneth Carter, Ahmed Lahjouji and Neal McNeil point to industry figures showing
that more than 80 percent of U.S. households own a cordless phone and 41 percent
have garage-door openers.

The devices use so-called unlicensed wireless technologies, the subject of the
report. Unlicensed wireless occupies portions of the airwaves not subject to the
same detailed regulation as the spectrum used by the cellphone industry,
television broadcasters, satellite services and the government.

Companies that make use of the unlicensed bands also never had to pay anyone to
use the spectrum. In contrast, wireless-phone carriers shell out millions at
auction for renewable licenses that give them exclusive use of other portions of
the spectrum.

Critics have said this framework for managing the nation's airwaves is
inefficient, and the FCC is making another attempt to respond through a series of
proceedings designed to overhaul the current system.

In addition, the Bush administration last week announced a major one-year
initiative to examine how it can improve the way it allocates spectrum to
government agencies. While the FCC oversees commercial spectrum use, the
administration oversees government-agency spectrum use through the National
Telecommunications & Information Administration.

Need for unlicensed spectrum

Although the report notes that recent financial growth in unlicensed wireless
comes mostly from the standard popularly known as Wi-Fi, it explores other
wireless technologies, their applications and their significance. It lays out the
regulatory framework, outlines recent steps by the FCC to reform airwave
management and suggests that the nation needs more unlicensed spectrum.
That is the spectrum used by devices complying with what are known as the FCC's
Part 15 rules. The rules permit the operation of low-power devices as long as they
comply with FCC technical certifications and don't cause harmful interference of
other services.

Among the technologies included are spread spectrum (used by cordless phones),
unlicensed personal communications services (wireless office-phone systems),
millimeter wave technologies (computer-to-computer communications) and
ultra-wideband (expected in electronics products beginning next year to transmit
multimedia content across short distances).

The FCC report, released late last month, follows its commissioners' recent vote
to allow spectrum lease holders to trade and sublease their licenses.  Though the
FCC has made previous attempts to reform spectrum management, the issue is front
and center right now because commissioners want to see competition between
wireless services and the wireline world, says Rudy Baca of the Precursor Group in
Washington, D.C.

"There is this philosophical goal of the commission to try and arrive at
intermodal competition where wireless would be one of the broadband pipes in the
home, and you don't get that unless you get more spectrum out there," he says.
Pulling it together Dewayne Hendricks, chief executive officer of the Dandin Group
in Fremont, Calif., has been prodding the commission on spectrum reform for years.

"There's a lot of talk on The Hill, and the FCC and all over the place," said
Hendricks. "The Congress critters get it. They know the Wi-Fi word, so it was
incumbent on the commission to put all this together in one place.  Garage door
openers, foot warmers, whatever — it's all there. But there's a lot more going on
and where we'll go is going to be constrained by politics."
As a so-called white paper, the report doesn't reflect a specific viewpoint of any
FCC commissioner. Instead, it is meant to contribute to what is expected to be a
highly political debate on exactly how the FCC should manage the airwaves as
computing makes new and more efficient uses possible.

The report's lack of focus on certain kinds of wireless technologies and their
implications sidesteps some of the harder questions: Why does any technological
framework need more discrete spectrum allocation if digital communications and
intelligent devices can route around such scarcity?

And how can some unlicensed technologies share licensed spectrum "free," even as
others are expected to trade or pay for access to that spectrum in a secondary
market?

Desirable broadcast spectrum

The issue affects Microsoft, Intel and others that want to provide consumers with
services on airwaves exclusively held largely by broadcasters.

Microsoft is among technology companies and public interest groups pushing the
commission to permit more unlicensed sharing of spectrum.

In a recent FCC filing, Microsoft's attorneys emphasized that the broadcasting
spectrum is especially valuable for broadband networking.  That's because it
allows for more robust communications, such as the ability to transmit over longer
distances and through walls.

"For rural areas, for the development of mesh networks, and for urban buildings
where new wiring is prohibitively expensive, these propagation characteristics
could make all the difference between broadband service (being) available or not,"
the attorneys asserted. "It is our expectation that the engineering record will
demonstrate that unlicensed devices can share spectrum with broadcasters, public
safety operations and other users of the bands."

Microsoft currently leases unused portions of the FM spectrum from radio giant
Clear Channel Communications for a technology it is developing to broadcast data
to consumer products such as Smart watches. Called the Smart Personal Objects
Technology (SPOT) platform, it enables users to receive sports scores, weather,
and other personalized information.
Multibillion-dollar markets

For its part, the commission's May white paper sidestepped any strong
recommendations, other than saying that it may take an act of Congress to force
the issue. Instead, the paper outlines the history of unlicensed devices and
points to the $1.65 billion market in cordless phones, the $2.3 billion market in
wireless networking devices and the $1.2 billion market in radio-frequency
identification (RFID) devices used to track products, vehicles or animals.

It simply says that the remarkable growth and innovations in these markets need to
be fostered. The report shows that unlicensed wireless technologies can be used
for a wide variety of purposes and contends that it is this flexibility that's
behind the unlicensed world's growth and success, as businesses, governments and
other sectors of society experiment with and figure out new uses.

Example: The M2A Pill. Doctors use the pill to diagnose medical problems in a
patient's intestines. The patient swallows a capsule containing a tiny "camera." A
transmitter inside the capsule sends the images to be uploaded to a computer for
analysis and diagnosis. This innovation is just one out of several that the
authors use to bolster their case for more spectrum for unlicensed uses and to
show that there's a whole unlicensed world out there beyond Wi-Fi.

"Seeing Wi-Fi everywhere and hearing Wi-Fi everywhere, there was a natural
curiosity to get our thumb on the pulse of what's going on here," said Carter, the
report author. "There's some really neat stuff coming out here and it's
potentially disruptive (but) some of the most interesting developments will not be
in Wi-Fi."

Sarah Lai Stirland, a free-lancer in Washington, D.C., frequently writes about
public policy and technology.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134937813_wireless090.html

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