New York Times & Wall Street Journal Agree -- The US Needs Wireless Broadband Innovation.

It's rare that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal agree so wholeheartedly on things, but this past week has seen both issue calls for wireless innovation across the United States. The New York Times issued a pro-municipal wireless editorial that, among other things, states:

Broadband service is no longer a luxury. It has become a basic part of the infrastructure of education and democracy. EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made. Even in these tough economic times, cities should keep pushing municipal Wi-Fi and looking for partners and plans that can make it a reality.

Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal issued a pro-White Space Device column that focuses on the successes and potential uses of these new technologies:

The white-space proposal has been in the news in recent weeks because of its strong backing by Microsoft and Google, among others. White space, they say, could help create a "Wi-Fi on steroids," with faster connection speeds running over longer distances than are possible now in the hot spots common in homes and coffee shops. As for interference with TV broadcasts -- or with wireless microphones, which use this same spectrum -- that can be easily handled. Before transmitting any data, a white-space networking device would "listen" to detect if a frequency is in use. A version of this "smart sensing" is already widely and successfully deployed by the U.S. military.

Here are the full stories:

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From the New York Times:

March 29, 2008
Editorial
Broadening Broadband

The big problem in providing Internet service to rural America is often called “the last mile” — the difficulty in reaching the smallest communities and farthest-flung houses and farms. In cities, that problem might be called “the last block” — the difficulty in reaching every neighborhood, no matter how poor.

For a while, many American cities, caught up in a tide of technological and fiscal optimism, promised to try to make Internet coverage available to all by making it citywide, wireless and low-cost or even free.

That has proved to be harder than it seemed at first. EarthLink, an Internet provider that was partnering with Philadelphia, has pulled out of a much-heralded project there, and other service providers are rethinking similar projects.

EarthLink is calling it a change in strategic direction. What that phrase means, simply, is where’s the profit? It is a reasonable question. But for the people who have been left without Internet service as municipal wireless plans have collapsed, there are no reasonable answers, only an all-too-familiar barrier between them and the information age.

The neighborhoods that most need low-cost, public wireless service now find themselves largely dependent on Internet access through public libraries. This may not sound like a terrible thing, but have you seen what’s happened to the budgets — and the operating hours — of public libraries?

To cities and Internet providers, municipal Wi-Fi looked like an ideal partnership. Philadelphia gave EarthLink free access to utility poles for mounting wireless routers. EarthLink promised to build hot spots, offer low-cost residential service and provide still lower-cost access for the poorest customers.

The costs of building a network turned out to be higher than expected — at a time when prices for private Internet service were dropping. It also hurt, in Philadelphia’s case, that there was a major change at EarthLink, which went from being an advocate of municipal Wi-Fi to a company determined to cut costs.

Broadband service is no longer a luxury. It has become a basic part of the infrastructure of education and democracy. EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made. Even in these tough economic times, cities should keep pushing municipal Wi-Fi and looking for partners and plans that can make it a reality.

From the Wall Street Journal:

PORTALS
By LEE GOMES

If Granny Were Real She'd Like the Idea Of 'Wi-Fi on Steroids'
April 2, 2008; Page B1

Granny is a lovable gray-haired lady in a pink sweater who likes nothing better than to sit quietly at home watching her favorite TV shows. It's one of her few remaining joys in life. Why, then, are those billionaire moguls in the high-tech industry trying to take it away?

Granny isn't real: She recently was featured in a TV ad airing in the Washington area. But the scare tactics are. Both are concoctions of the nation's broadcasting lobby, which is currently doing all it can to stop one of the best ideas a federal agency has had in a long time.

The brainstorm belongs to the Federal Communications Commission, which is looking into whether a new generation of wireless computing devices could make use of the empty "white space" spectrum associated with television broadcasts. For technical reasons, not all broadcast TV frequencies are in use in any one geographic area -- think of how some of the channels on your TV are empty.

Spectrum-policy groups have long regarded this white space as a wasted national resource, one that if properly tapped could help close the appalling bandwidth gap, both wired and wireless, between the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. The FCC is testing whether Wi-Fi can run in these white spaces without interfering with normal television broadcasts, even though most Americans get their TV from cable and satellite; a determination is expected later this year.

The white-space proposal has been in the news in recent weeks because of its strong backing by Microsoft and Google, among others. White space, they say, could help create a "Wi-Fi on steroids," with faster connection speeds running over longer distances than are possible now in the hot spots common in homes and coffee shops.

As for interference with TV broadcasts -- or with wireless microphones, which use this same spectrum -- that can be easily handled. Before transmitting any data, a white-space networking device would "listen" to detect if a frequency is in use. A version of this "smart sensing" is already widely and successfully deployed by the U.S. military.

Broadcasters, however, insist that smart sensing just doesn't work. The National Association of Broadcasters and its allies warned in an interview that we shouldn't play "interference roulette" that would "disenfranchise" Americans dependent on broadcast television, "the bulwark that has tied the nation together from an information standpoint."

As evidence of the technical failure of smart sensing, the broadcast lobby points to the occasional failures in the white-space prototypes being tested by the FCC -- the most recent of which occurred just last week. But the tech companies that supplied those prototypes, including Microsoft, Philips and Motorola, say they are early-testing devices whose occasional hiccups indicate nothing about the basic soundness of the smart-sensing/white-space idea.

Rather than just allow the technicians at the FCC to make a calm technical assessment of what should be a dry matter of spectrum physics, the broadcasters are lobbying, with newspaper and TV ads, to inflame emotions.

Enter Granny. In her commercial, she became a bit crotchety when the picture on her screen started to break up because of interference from "unlicensed devices." Intones the announcer, "If high-tech companies like Microsoft get their way, your picture could freeze and become unwatchable."

While the broadcasting lobby is one of Washington's strongest, this battle might be a tough one even for them. For one thing, they need to convince politicians and regulators that the global technology industry, home to all the tech miracles of the past few decades, is fundamentally incapable of a designing a relatively simple bit of hardware.

BlackBerrys, iPhones and the like easily handle spectrum tasks that are every bit as complicated as anything a white-space device would need to do. An industry that can put the Library of Congress in something the size of a fingernail ought to be able to figure it out.

So why, then, are broadcasters so opposed to the idea? Maybe out of habit, or maybe because they want to use the white space for Wi-Fi themselves one day. Sascha Meinrath, a spectrum activist with the New America Foundation policy group in Washington, has another theory: That with smarter use of the spectrum, entirely new forms of broadcasting will become possible that will threaten the monopoly enjoyed by the broadcasters who happen to own spectrum today.

Perhaps as a way of fighting back, white-space activists should take a clue from the broadcasters, and create their own Granny. This Granny would still be able to watch all her favorite broadcast TV shows, because properly using white space won't interfere with them. But she'd also be able to use her new white-space Wi-Fi data network to talk with her grandchildren over two-way, high-definition video. Or to check in with her doctor without leaving home. Or to spend the afternoon reminiscing with girlfriends in other cities.

She can't do a lot of that now, in part because U.S. broadcasters are hogging huge swaths of bandwidth that they don't really need. I wonder what Granny would say were she to find that out; you know how crotchety old people can be.

Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com