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Is Microsoft Hustling Us With 'White Spaces'? (wired.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the reading-between-the-channels dept.

rgh02 writes: Microsoft recently announced their plan to deploy unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. And while the media painted this effort as a noble one, at Backchannel, Susan Crawford reveals the truth: "Microsoft's plans aren't really about consumer internet access, don't actually focus on rural areas, and aren't targeted at the US -- except for political purposes." So what is Microsoft really up to?
The article's author believes Microsoft's real game is "to be the soup-to-nuts provider of Internet of Things devices, software, and consulting services to zillions of local and national governments around the world. Need to use energy more efficiently, manage your traffic lights, target preventative maintenance, and optimize your public transport -- but you're a local government with limited resources and competence? Call Microsoft."

The article argues Microsoft wants to bypass mobile data carriers who "will want a pound of flesh -- a percentage -- in exchange for shipping data generated by Microsoft devices from Point A to Point B... [I]n many places, they are the only ones allowed to use airwave frequencies -- spectrum -- under licenses from local governments for which they have paid hundreds of millions of dollars."

10 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Evil MS by avandesande · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wants to undercut mobile data providers so municipalities can save money. Evil!

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
    1. Re:Evil MS by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The old TV spectrum is extremely valuable because the lower the frequency, the better the radio wave propagation at a given transmission power. That makes it ideal for low power devices like sensor networks, automated meter reading, and portables.

      The trade off is that because propagation is good you need to manage it carefully, because one device hogging a frequency blocks other devices in a wide area. For things like sensors and meter reading that's no problem, as they tend to transmit very small amounts of data anyway. A few bytes an hour, or even a month for something like an electricity meter.

      Not sure it's a good idea putting it in the hands of a corporation like Microsoft.

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    2. Re:Evil MS by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      More unlicensed spectrum would be good from everyone except the telcos. It would spur innovation, cut costs, and provide no specific benefit to Microsoft. Microsoft is a small participant in the IoT market, and they have a poor track record outside their dominant markets. Google and Amazon will benefit from this much more than Microsoft.

      Microsoft is doing a Good Thing here.

  2. And? by DRJlaw · · Score: 2

    The article argues Microsoft wants to bypass mobile data carriers who "will want a pound of flesh -- a percentage -- in exchange for shipping data generated by Microsoft devices from Point A to Point B... [I]n many places, they are the only ones allowed to use airwave frequencies -- spectrum -- under licenses from local governments for which they have paid hundreds of millions of dollars."

    Oh no! Bypassing monopolies and disintermediating middlemen?! The horror...

  3. Good news by sphealey · · Score: 4, Funny

    - - - - - The article's author believes Microsoft's real game is "to be the soup-to-nuts provider of Internet of Things devices, software, and consulting services to zillions of local and national governments around the world - - - - -

    That's good news: the so-called "internet of things" needed to be knocked back 20 years until society can get a handle on security and accountability. Microsoft is just the organization to provide the necessary retrograde motion.

  4. Mobile and Microsoft by grasshoppa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Microsoft hasn't had a successful entry into a new market since..what? The xbox? Their mobile efforts have not only been disasters, they've been repeated and predictable disasters.

    They've got their core markets ( desktop, server/services, gaming ), and are arguably "improving" them successfully ( with some serious mis steps along the way ), but I just don't see how anyone can think they'll pull a rabbit out of their hat here.

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    1. Re:Mobile and Microsoft by kronix1986 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You forgot cloud platforms. Office 365 is #1 in cloud "productivity" and Azure is #2 in cloud hosting.

  5. Smart market to get into by rbrander · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Once they become, not just a "product" but a whole "ecosystem" of products for municipal governments, they will never have more loyal, nay, slavishly devoted customers. I just finished 30 years with a local government. I was in the water department, which had its own budget for a little of the early-PC era, when they were considered toys. I watched the IT department take over that end.

    I watched with my bewilderment gradually exceeding my disgust as the same bunch that clung bitterly to their IBM mainframe environment long after it was obviously obsolete, jumped eagerly into the arms of Microsoft, glad to have new Masters that would tell them their strategy and what to buy. Once they paid attention to the formerly-hated PCs at all, they ensured the fewest-possible vendors in the "environment" by going MS with *everything* that MS sold. Macs were quickly eliminated, then competing software, anywhere that MS had an offering. It wasn't just the office products and all the development tools, dutifully switching from VB to .Net to C# when MS told them to: it was how they became MS salesmen themselves 5 minutes after leaving the sales meeting.

    Nothing was ever even discussed in terms of "choices" or selections, things like OLE and MSN and IE and Silverlight were just enthusiastically described as the obvious future, the only road forward.

    So I can't recommend strongly enough to MS shareholders that you get your company installed in local governments everywhere. They're big enough to buy lots of product, and not courageous enough to try anything else. Out in the service-providing departments, customers that are paying for all this, can come forward with obviously-superior products at lower prices, and IT will blandly mouth words about "Total Cost of Ownership", and "Integration with other products" without doing a cost-study, and never look into them. Why would they? MS will be the obvious Road Ahead, onward to the 22nd century.

    1. Re:Smart market to get into by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 3, Funny

      You do realize that Microsoft brings huge value to enterprises by simplifying the support requirements for a computing environment right? They are popular because of the easy to setup and maintain not because "the wimpy IT and business leaders want a master". FFS, IT departments would be enormous if they had to support a huge heterogeneous set of end point technologies as well as bespoke solutions that required maintenance....let alone the necessary expertise to maintain such systems from a feature set perspective and a security perspective.

  6. Re:Boo F-ing Hoo by Noishkel · · Score: 2

    The data cap is too damn high!