I would love to see a day come where we are no longer having to worry about whether we have capacity or whether we have a mobility, not just to connect from anywhere, but to connect in the most efficient and effective manner. Cell phones as an example, there is no reason, if you and I are in the same building, that we should have to be routed through a central tower. The only reason why that architecture has been put in place is because in the United States, I get charged on the way up that tower and you get charged on the way down from that tower. The network owner gets to charge twice for that call, even though for you and I, we would have better, faster and cheaper communications if our devices were connected directly to one another. I would like to cut out middlemen whenever possible. I’d like to cut out hierarchies that are unnecessary for effective communications, whenever possible. I would like to cut out tolling, adding expense for no other reason than you control the network, whenever possible. Those battles between a distributed, peer-to-peer infrastructure, an opportunistic infrastructure and a command-and-control tolled infrastructure are really where the near future – the next half decade – the battles are all going to be fought.

Policy recommendations excerpted from an interview with Sacha Meinrath of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program, by Lee Dryburgh of eComm:

1. Public airwaves have been enclosed and 90% is going to waste

“it’s very clear that media diversity has been thrown out of the window. Local control of the media has been thrown out of the window over the last eight years. These are reforms that need to be made. We really need to re-empower the populace to take control over what is ours; the public airwaves are held in trust for us to use, and has been granted to corporations and entities that have made incredibly inefficient use of them.

Government research – National Science Foundation here in the United States has conducted extensive research on actual spectrum usage. What we found is that even though the allocations of space – this part for FM radio, that part for AM radio, this part for television broadcast – the allocations show a completely full spectrum. When you look at the assignments, you find, “CBS gets this station, and WRFU gets that station”. These assignments show there is a lot of empty space, but then when you look at actual use, what’s happening on the ground, you find that over ninety percent of the airwaves are vacant, in any specific location in any specific time.

You can imagine a resource that’s being used less than ten percent efficiently, and that’s what we have, today, with the public airwaves. I look at that and I look at the scarcity, and I look at the desire to make better use of the public airwaves, by people all across the country, and I think that’s egregiously unfair.”

2. Alternatives do exist

“There are many alternatives. One of the big ones we’re pushing for is called “Opportunistic Spectrum Reuse”. People can think of this in terms of a Wi-Fi device that can scan and find an open channel. Or, if you remember home telephones, radiotelephones, where you would hit the on button and it might scan a number of channels and choose the one that had the clearest signal. These technologies have been around for quite some time.

With the television white space and in the spaces that we used to – if you were flipping through your television, you would have snow on your screen; those spaces can be reutilized for broadband access and for all sorts of different purposes. We’ve pushed very hard at the FCC to allow unused television spaces to be used by next generation hardware or software, etc. This is a fundamental shift in how we license our spectrums, and basically says, “Look, as long as we’re using less than ten percent of the space, let’s reuse the unallocated space, the underutilized space, on an ad hoc basis, by next generation hardware, so people can do all sorts of new, innovative things with it”. That’s a huge change.

The second one that we’ve been fighting for, and have lost thus far, is what’s called “Interference Temperature,” which is that in the same was as a rock concert, people in the audience can whisper, or yell for that matter, and not be disruptive to the concert itself, we want to see very low powered usage on occupied channels.

The idea is if you’re sitting next to a 100,000-watt television transmitter and you want to utilize a device to connect your laptop computer to your television, fifteen feet away, you should be allowed to do that in the same space. Of course, the incumbents have said, “If you allow any of these things, it will destroy radio, or television,” or whatever it is that they own or license. Of course, time and time again, we’ve found that these claims of disruption have been blown way out of proportion. The disruptions that have been promised have never come to pass.”

3. We are at a critical juncture for policy change:

“There are three elements to what is creating this critical juncture. The first is that new digital technologies are really maturing at an incredibly speedy rate, leading to all sorts of innovations and new uses. The second is that there is an unprecedented consumer demand to make use of resources like the public airwaves, in ways we really haven’t seen since the CB radio craze of the 1970’s or in the 1920’s, the amateur radio craze. People really want to utilize wireless technologies in ways that are unprecedented. The third is that we have this shift in regulatory structures and administrations. The three of those, the regulatory shifts, the consumer demand, and the new technologies are sort of swirling together and creating this “perfect storm” that has the potential, at least, to shift the trajectory of telecommunications, of fundamental communications, for generations to come.

Over the next year to three years, is really this moment in time that will determine what that trajectory looks like. After that, things will really be a lot more locked down and will not be nearly as innovative an environment. So, the battles that are being waged right now are absolutely, fundamentally important to the future of human communications. The reality is; warts and all, what’s decided here in the United States often reverberates internationally, globally. “