Time for Spectrum Reform? Well Past Time, More Like

Back in the early days of radio, we correctly believed that we needed a government agency to manage the use of the airwaves, in much the same way we have traffic cops, traffic signals, stop signs, and rules-of-the-road that regulate the flow of cars and pedestrians and ensure that we don't kill each other and get snarled up in hopeless traffic jams. Back then, we had stupid devices - whether it was radios for communications, radios for listening to broadcasts, or TVs for watching broadcasts from national networks - without regulation, we couldn't help but fall over each other.

We needed to be protected from ourselves, because it would have been bedlam if all the players weren't separated by broad bands of dead zones. Noise is the enemy of radio signals. While that may have been the case in the early days, and the FCC and its regulatory scheme may have been an improvement over market solutions, that is no longer the case, and you would be hard put to find anyone who knows anything about radio to argue differently.

As is often the case with government, it lags behind reality. Our elected leaders too often need to be led. This article makes that cogent argument very well: technology has zoomed past the traditional regulatory scheme of radio spectra and the FCC management is ham-handed, at best. But while it makes that argument well, it leaves the reader short, because it begs the question: "OK, so why does the FCC and its regulatory scheme still exist if its so patently obvious that its not needed?"

The depressing answer is that our government and our society, indeed, our culture, is not rational, even though we wish it would be. Government solutions often overstay their welcome, generally because they develop a political constituency that enjoys the protections afforded by government and works to maintain the status quo, often way past its usefulness. Farm subsidies for corporate farms, anyone? Surplus milk turned into cheese for the poor? And the bigger the incentive to maintain the status quo, the slower reform happens.

And it's hard to imagine a more cozy relationship between big business and big government than the current spectrum regulation at the FCC. Big Business likes spectrum auctions because it keeps the competition out. When it takes billions of dollars to win a spectrum auction, only the big guys win, and the little guys are left penned into their ghetto of unlicensed bands - free to innovate, but not free to grow large and threaten the established players. And Big Government gets the billions from the auctions to fill the government tills and finance the war in Iraq. Pardon me if I get a little cynical here, but I don't see this situation changing in the near term, even if it makes even more sense than it already does. Corruption favors the powerful and maintains their hold on power and this, folks, can only be described as a corrupt and inefficient system. We won't even go into the current relationship between FCC commissioners and staffers and the industry they "regulate."

Still, for the serious student of metropolitan broadband, an understanding of spectrum operations and spectrum management by the federal government is important. For a great primer on spectrum, and an inspiring treatise on the potential of unlicensed sprectrum (and a similar argument about the cure being worse than the disease), see this white paper by Kevin Werbach, a former senior staffer at the FCC and now a wireless guru Radio Revolution: The Coming Age of Unlicensed Wireless. This seminal document, at over 50 pages, inspired me to get into this field a few years back.

Want to dig deeper? See this more brief review that shares the optimism but is much shorter at 6 pages: The Coming Spectrum Explosion — A Regulatory and Business Primer.

Finally, for the municipal reader, it is worth the time to look at a particular band of spectrum focused on public safety, with good potential for favorable treatment and opportunity to leverage for your municipal network: Broadband Public Safety Data Networks in the 4.9 GHz Band: Potential, Pitfalls & Promise.

So, how to stay sane and pleasant, amidst this overwhelming corruption and inefficiency? Well, besides having a bottle of wine now and again, I recommend this advice to overcome any cynicism. Get back in your sandbox. Get an education. Investigate what you can do to push out the envelope, within the current boundaries of federal regulation, no matter how lame you may believe that regulation to be.

Let's all keep hoping for better service from our government, we have to do that, don't we? But for now, let's also focus on what we can each do to leverage what we do have to work with - Wi Fi Mesh in the unlicensed bands. These technologies offer us much potential to do good for ourselves, and each new successful project becomes one more piece of evidence to throw back at the FCC and the Congress, challenge the status quo and motivate reform.