Mar. 14, 2005 – On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered the opening of a little-used band of the electromagnetic spectrum, or "airwaves," -- to promote the growth of wireless broadband networking. Organizations campaigning for greater high-speed Internet access in remote and low-income communities celebrated the new policy as a victory, but cautioned that it might not adequately protect community-based, grassroots networking projects from interference by large corporate competitors.
The FCC said it has devised a spectrum-sharing arrangement that attempts to balance major commercial and rural networks, which tend to use high-power base stations to transmit long-range signals, and low-power community wireless projects, which typically rely on linked antennas to form a "mesh" network.
According to the FCC?s announcement, although networks will still need government authorization to use the band occupying the 3650 to 3700 megahertz range on the spectrum, the implementation of special technology to prevent signal interference among networks will allow an unlimited number of both high- and low-power operations to coexist. FCC Commissioner Michael Powell said in a press statement that this "hybrid approach" to spectrum allocation "provides sufficient operating power and flexibility to help speed the introduction of new services to the marketplace."
Wireless activists have long demanded that federal and local governments work to enhance broadband services for underserved populations and to prevent telecommunications monopolies from squelching community-initiated and public networks.
"The Commission has taken a huge step in making wireless broadband available to people who don't have access to DSL and cable broadband, or who can't afford it," commented Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project, in a joint press statement by wireless advocacy groups.
In the same statement, however, Jim Snider, senior research fellow for the New America Foundation, warned that since the exact ground rules for staking out the new spectrum are currently unclear, high-power systems might still find ways to dominate the liberated spectrum and crowd out lower-power networks. "We won't know for sure if this is a good thing until we see the details," he said.
