The New Wireless Wars

An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek has a story on the coming wireless wars. It's a look at how the upcoming government auction of wireless spectrum will open the door to a new crop of competitors. The new players, from Google and Microsoft to Intel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire, will compete in new wireless voice services and in wireless broadband. Look out Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint-Nextel."

Comments

An idea for our socialist friends...

[Zaphod2016]

Note to all members of the Ayn Rand reading club: the below post is not for you.

With so much recent debate in regards to the NSA, and the age-old privacy/security debate, the growth of WiFi raises an interesting hypothetical IMO.

Let us pretend that Community X is a small town, with a centralized "village" area spanning a few blocks, including a few parks, public areas, etc. The community government taxes the citizens, and provides a quality WiFi network throughout the village, including the schools and libraries.

As owner and administrator, Community X could police the network traffic however they pleased. They could look for people buying pot on craigs list, or scumbags stalking children on MySpace.

To those thinking "but I'll always own my line to the web"....sure, me too. And of course you'd have to be a pretty dumb criminal to be using a public WiFi network in this manner. However, I argue that catching dumb criminals is the only thing the local police are good at anyway, and at least this way, they have less time to pull me over for rolling through stop signs at 3am.

But what if: Bibleville, OH can now ban pornography on their community WiFi network directly. They could even block bloggers talking about Satan or whatever else offended their sensibilities.

Rather than focus on sweeping federal legislation, forcing morality upon millions of unhappy citizens, these complicated issues could be pushed back to a local level, and maybe, just maybe, compromised into some sort of working solution.

BwaaHahahaha!!!

[mpapet]

Competition in telcommunication! Here comes the cliche' ROFL

An auction that won't go to a massive telco? I've got some fairies for you to meet and a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale too.

"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! It's not over until WE say it's over. Who's with me? C'mon!" Let's go buy some spectrum!