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How the New Spectrum Bill Would Harm the Tech Community
An anonymous reader writes "One version of new spectrum legislation poses a threat to unlicensed wireless, which is where technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate. Your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies are safe, but the future of the proposed White Spaces broadband also known as Super Wi-Fi, and new unlicensed spectrum is in doubt under the draft bill. And hiding in those unlicensed airwaves could be the next Wi-Fi. 'The draft bill says that in order for unlicensed spectrum to win out over a licensed bidder, an entity or a group of people would have to collectively bid more than a licensed bidder would. This would be akin to having a group of people who want more unlicensed airwaves going up against Verizon or AT&T. As a reminder Verizon spent $9.63 billion on spectrum licenses in the last auction while AT&T spent $6.64 billion. The legislators may have envisioned Google playing a heroic role here and thus enabling the government to make some extra money in a spectrum auction as opposed to just letting such potentially lucrative spectrum become a public radio panacea regulated by the FCC.'"
Interesting spectrum, but all other obstacles aside, it's not likely to become "the next Wi-Fi", and therefore be as widely deployed or successful.
Wi-Fi as we all know it today falls in the ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) bands which are defined by the ITU, and are (with some channel-by-channel exceptions) internationally universal. In other words, your US Wi-Fi card will work and be (mostly) legal to operate in lots of the rest of the world.
This lets the chipset and device manufacturers build a small number of chips and devices, and handle the regulatory country-to-country differences in software, thus achieving great economies of scale, which means cheapass consumer price points for the devices.
There would seem to be a lot of obstacles to making that happen with this chunk of spectrum.
Red