Net Neutrality: It’s Much More Important Than It Should Be

By: John Shepler

The Internet has been my life for the last 20 years or so. Oh, it’s been around longer than that. I only got on when they released it to the public commercially in the mid-90’s. Back then it was all dial-up modems and make-your-own websites. One ad that ran at the time sticks vividly in my mind. It said something like “What’s different on the Internet about IBM and a kid with a science fair site about ducks?” The answer: “Nothing.”

On the Internet, the World is Flat
What didn’t soak in to many of us when we started communicating over computer networks was the inherent democracy, the equality of it all. Distance disappears. At the speed of light, the printer in the next room and the one on the other side of the world are equally close. You can locate team members anywhere and they forget they aren’t all in one big building… co-located, but just too far to walk over for a visit. Video conferencing takes care of that need for face-to-face.

The Internet is based on this idea of one big network that anyone can join anywhere in the world and be electronically in the same room as anyone else. I’ve gotten comfortable on Facebook with a circle of friends who collaborate on projects, but also share our personal lives. It wouldn’t be much different if we all worked in the same building or hung out at the same coffee shop. We share our joys and sorrows as if we were neighbors.

Bless the Level Playing Field
I got my feet wet online with Prodigy, then AOL, then Netscape over a local ISP. I built my first website using Adobe Pagemill and a floppy disk with some graphics that I bought at an office supply store. I wanted a place to showcase magazine-type articles that I was writing so I could also display affiliate banners to generate income to pay for the Internet connection. It had a tilde in the URL that looked a little weird on a business card, but getting a real domain name was pricey back then.

Yeah, I had a duck site. My wife and I still call amateur looking websites “duck sites”, after that commercial I mentioned earlier. The honest truth was and still is, as of this writing, that getting to my duck site was just as easy as getting to the IBM corporate site or Amazon, or the White House or anyplace else on the Web. The Internet is flat. It is level. It is democratic. It is egalitarian. The DOD that funded the genesis of the Internet, called ARPANET, built it with the best of American principles… they designed it to be free. That freedom is called neutrality: Net Neutrality.

Power to the People
Let me just say this first. I am a capitalist and proud of it. Capitalism has been very, very good to me. Better for some than others, I understand. But for most of us in what’s called the American Middle Class, we’ve grown up and aged with the opportunity to make something of ourselves by selling our skills to employers and building our own businesses. The Internet has added a whole whole new dimension of virtual business opportunities that cost little or nothing to enter, with rewards based more on sweat equity than the need for heavy debt to get started. The capitalistic opportunity of the Web has been more of a job creator, in the sense of people creating their own jobs, than any of the actual “jobs” programs that are being touted.

Having said that, I must admit that I’m horrified by what’s being promoted as capitalism these days. There seems to be a strong move afoot to return to the “Gilded Age” of the post Civil War era when the famed “robber barons” of industry and the railroad trusts lived like kings and most people lived like paupers. The game of Monopoly was actually invented as a cautionary tale to demonstrate what happens when there are no checks and balances in society. Players may start out on an equal footing, but in a few or more than a few hours, one person has everything and everyone else is flat broke. In real life, we don’t even start out equally advantaged.

Does It Have To Be All or Nothing?
This brings us back to net neutrality. For years, I was on the fence about whether to maintain all Internet traffic perfectly equal or allow some prioritization. A lot of VoIP phone calls on the internet sound like crap. It’s because real time packets of audio signals are highly sensitive to latency, jitter and packet loss. The least bit of congestion in the network turns a clear call into a distorted mess. There are ways to improve this, such as running your own voice network or having a dedicated access line to the core of the Internet. Not as good or easy, though, as if there were protected channels just for voice over the net.

Forget it. We don’t live in a world run by volunteer Internet engineers whose morals are driven by ensuring excellence and justice for all users. What we’re faced with now is dominance by large corporate entities that, despite expression of high minded intentions, will be driven by ruthless competition and demanding shareholders to maximize returns, if not immediately, then a quarter or two down the road.

Without any constraints at all, the era of duck sites will be over and only those with the big bucks will have unfettered worldwide visibility. It could be like a scene from those depression era films: “Nice web site you got there. Be a shame if nobody could get to it.”

Protect Your Freedom or Lose It
I’m not normally given to scare mongering, but I’m very much concerned that we’re looking at the end of the bootstrapping entrepreneur and even the end of unfettered freedom to explore and utilize the wealth of diverse resources available around the world. The farmers market, the arts and crafts festival, the country roads, the public bulletin board in the hardware store and the political stump in the town square are all about to be replaced by the toll bridge and the parking meter. Is that what we want?

Here’s what you need to do before it is too late. Voice your opposition to losing net neutrality and with it your personal freedom to post anything you want and go anywhere you want to go without having to pay extra fees or switch service providers. Use the resources you have now to Google your senators and representatives. Send messages through their websites. Get their office phone numbers online or call the US Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. You don’t need to make a speech. Just say you are opposed to destroying net neutrality and want them to intervene.

Most of all, call the FCC who actually makes the rules. Here’s the number: (202) 418-1000 Take 10 seconds and leave them a voice mail. While one voice may not make a difference, thousands or millions of one voice each certainly will. Will you join me before it’s too late?


Note: Net Neutrality logo courtesy of Camilo Sanchez on Wikimedia Commons.

Do You Still Have Broadband?

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had the feeling that Internet broadband speeds have been accelerating lately, you’d be right. Broadband service was an amazing improvement on dial-up access when it was first introduced and then quickly took over. For a lot of years a few Mbps seemed plenty fast enough. Then 10 Mbps became the benchmark to shoot for. Now businesses are moving quickly to 100 Mbps and beyond, while the FCC is codifying 25 Mbps as the threshold where broadband begins. What does this really mean and what does it portend for the future?

What Does The New Standard Represent?
Official broadband standards have never been a leading indicator. They are set after a technology is well proven and the need clearly demonstrated. The move from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps is quite a jump and it tells you something important about where bandwidth requirements are going. Is 25 Mbps the end of the road for awhile? Not likely and here’s why.

Few individuals and fewer businesses are going to pay up for higher line speeds for simple bragging rights. Something is driving the need to upgrade and then upgrade some more. The big factors are the move from local to remote resources and the nature of content itself.

The Rapid Growth of Computing Requirements
Remember message boards? Digital communications used to mean ASCII text transmissions. No need to press up against the speed of light just to get a few KB of characters to a distant server. It was the text-based model of computing that prompted Bill Gates to declare that 640K of RAM was plenty for the original PC, because who could possibly need more? Well, nobody did when the migration was starting from 64KB 8-bit processors. In just a few years, 640 KB was a joke. How long before 640 GB becomes a limitation? Probably sooner that any of us think possible.

Processor speeds have bumped up against some practical manufacturing limits, but the way around that is multiple processors. Memory, both RAM and Disk (now solid state), are sill growing. Bandwidth? Why is anybody surprised that WAN bandwidth requirements are going up when processing capability and memory are steadily increasing?

What's Next?
Computers always seem on the verge of not being able to keep up with us because of the functions we ask them to do. Text? That’s kids stuff. Photos? Easy. HD and 4K video? That’s more of a challenge. Will 4K be fully deployed before 8K starts to take over? What then?

You might think that software is getting less sophisticated because of the relatively small size of downloaded apps compared with some of the huge software packages that used to come in fancy cardboard boxes. That’s an illusion. The real power of of the apps we use is in all of the back-end processing that is going on at some remote server. Now everything is being tied to locality (with GPS) and highly personalized. A lot of this personalization is subtle and automatic. The system watches your behavior instead of you having to manually input a bunch of parameters.

Big data was a big bottleneck when it had to be handled locally. Just how much of a database can you put on a PC and how much grief is it going to be to keep up to date and accurate? Enormous data bases in equally enormous data centers can present a wealth of opportunity. The way the investment in gathering and managing all this data makes sense is to keep it simple for the end user. That doesn’t mean the system is simple. It just means that you and I are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg when we access these systems.

Big Data, Big Support Required
Big Data and sophisticated business applications have driven IT to a new architecture: The Cloud. The cloud pools all the processing and memory you can possibly use in a system that allows individual tenants to scale resources up and down at will. What you don’t need right now can be used by someone else. The resources they release can be put to work on your growing applications. As long as there are sufficient resources above and beyond what everybody needs at the moment, the system appears to be infinitely expandable.

What often isn’t infinitely expandable or even seems that way is bandwidth. The WAN connection, be it a dedicated line or Internet connection, has become the new bottleneck. Think of those clouds as enormous lakes full of data and you are getting your share through an old garden hose.

The way businesses are going to continue accelerating productivity is to let the machines do more and more of the work. Paper pushing is already a thing of the past in most clerical operations. Manually filling out forms is as obsolete as standing at a drill press or using a scythe to cut grain. Make no mistake that performance will continue to increase and probably accelerate. If you don’t make it happen, competitors will. That means more and more sophisticated processing, more mobility, and more data to present in simple, usable formats, more flexibility in manufacturing (think 3D printing) and larger data communication channels.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
In the long run, we have no idea how many Gbps or Tbps or Pbps will be needed. Right now, we can make some good estimates on what’s needed immediately and what that will grow to over the next few years.

Single digit Mbps connectivity has had its day. The only place T1 lines are still appropriate is for simple point of sale terminals and remote locations where there really isn’t any better solution. Bonding T1 lines can take you to 10 or 12 Mbps, but that’s just a stopgap. You’ll be needing more in the future.

If the consumer threshold for broadband is 25 Mbps, then that seems like a reasonable amount for businesses too. Granted, most business users aren’t creating or consuming a stream of HD movies all day. But they are accessing cloud applications, doing desktop or conference room video conferencing, sharing large files among business locations and running the phone system in the cloud. Remember that one consumer or a family is using that 25 Mbps. Your business demands per person may not be as consistently high, but you have lots of them on the same line. Productivity is also more of an issue when you are paying people. You don’t really want them sitting around waiting for the computers.

That argues for at least 10 Mbps for really small operations and 25 to 50 Mbps more commonly. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps used to be expensive and hard to come by. Now it’s reasonably priced and readily available. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for a medium size office to have 100 Mbps broadband… especially when that 100 Mbps may not cost much more than the 1.5 Mbps T1 line you budgeted for when you first got broadband many years ago.

Larger companies or sophisticated operations creating video content or doing 3D printing on an industrial scale can easily justify Gigabit Ethernet. So can school districts and anybody else with hundreds of simultaneous users.

How about really big companies? The new threshold may well be 10 Gbps Ethernet or 10 GigE. That service is readily available in metro areas and 100 GigE is starting to deploy nationwide on some carriers. This is where the upper end will be soon. Can Tbps service be far behind? It’s in development now.

Ethernet is the Way to Go Now
Note that all of these recommended services are Carrier Ethernet based. That’s where the industry is going for ease of interfacing and rapidly scalability. Like cloud resources, connectivity changes will be on-demand as well.

How is your company doing for broadband? Feeling the squeeze as you try to get more packets through the old lines? Feeling put upon now that the FCC has declared your connection as below broadband standards? Not to worry. Faster fiber optic bandwidth connections are plentiful and now cost much less than you might think. This is a good day to make a broadband upgrade.

E-Rate Supports Gigabit Internet for Schools & Libraries

By: John Shepler

It’s clear that broadband Internet is a key infrastructure for business, education and personal use. Schools and libraries may have the greatest need of all to access information online. We’re living in a Google, Wikipedia, e-book world and information is going more electronic by the day.

Schools & Libraries are Lagging
What might surprise you is that many elementary schools and libraries area woefully behind the times when it comes to electronic access. They need modern broadband service. Not the Megabit per second standard that was thought fast when we were moving from dial-up modems to always-on high speed Internet. Today’s standards need to be based on what fiber optic connections can provide. Is Gigabit Ethernet too fast… or just about right?

The FCC is now in the just about right camp. The latest round of improvements to the government’s E-Rate program are targeting Internet speeds of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff now, moving up to 1,000 Mbps in the longer term. Libraries that serve fewer than 50,000 people should get at least 100 Mbps. Larger libraries, those serving more than 50,000 people need 1 Gbps or higher Internet access speeds. Looking ahead, the FCC wants WAN/Last Mile connectivity to be scalable to 10 Gbps per 1,000 students. You know it won’t be long before that is what we’ll think of as typical.

More Funding for Higher Bandwidths
The amount of funding for E-Rate discounts has been running a $2.4 billion a year. That has been recently increased by $1.5 billon to $3.9 billion per year. A good part of this funding will support high speed Internet access. The rest will be used for infrastructure within the facilities, particularly Wi-Fi access. Wireless vs wired Ethernet connections are particularly important for students and library patrons. Funding will be ended for legacy services such as paging and traditional landline telephones.

How to Qualify for E-Rate Discounts
Any school, school district or library that wants to participate in the E-Rate program needs to submit an application through the program administrator, USAC or the Universal Service Administrative Company. Any carriers, or service providers, that want to offer E-Rate qualified services also need to submit an application. They are then assigned a SPIN or Service Provider Identification Number. Many of the larger carriers have already taken this step and have the ability to install fiber optic broadband Internet or WAN connections at speeds ranging from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps or more.

How Much Are the Savings?
E-Rate is a discounted service price. In other words, if you qualify for E-Rate you’ll pay less for broadband access than commercial entities for the same line speeds. The actual discount that each school or library receives is based on the poverty level of the population they serve and whether the population is considered urban or rural. The actual calculations are based on the percentage of students eligible for the national school lunch program. Discounts then range from as low as 20% to as high as 90%.

The Easy Want to Find E-Rate Broadband
You can do the research yourself by contacting local service providers or searching online for national carriers. However, it’s much easier to use a company that works with many different carriers and knows who has E-Rate capability in your area. There is no cost for this service. It’s available to any interested school or library. It’s also fast and easy to make a no-obligation inquiry. Check for carriers offering E-Rate bandwidth services now.

E-Rate Discounted Broadband Internet for Schools and Libraries

By: John Shepler

Schools and libraries are clamoring for high speed Internet access. In our connected world, broadband has become a utility that enables business, personal development and learning of all types. While many, if not most, public resources have Internet access of some kind, pressure is mounting to increase the access speed to enable more users and more sophisticated applications. What stands in the way of doing this? Cost.

Discounted Service is Available
Fortunately, there is a government program that makes it possible for most K-12 schools and libraries to upgrade their broadband Internet at discounted rates that vary from 20% to 90% of the service cost. Instead of poking along at a few Mbps, it’s now quite reasonable to make the leap to fiber optic service offering 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet or 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet.

Better Pricing Plus Affordability Equals Higher Bandwidth
Part of the affordability for higher bandwidth comes from the rapid expansion of competitive fiber optic services for business users. Competitive carriers have driven down the price per Mbps of broadband so that even GigE bandwidth is within reason for most companies and other organizations. Schools and libraries have the extra benefit of support through the government E-Rate program that makes possible discounted telecommunications, Internet access and internal connectivity.

How E-Rate Works
E-Rate gets it funding from the Universal Service fee charged to telecommunication companies. Originally, the idea was to create a pool of resources to ensure that everyone had telephone service, even if they couldn’t afford it. The ability to make and receive telephone calls was considered a strategic necessity for the country. Times change and the traditional landline is fading into obscurity. What’s replacing it as a necessity is broadband and mobility. With that in mind, the Federal Communication Commission has broadened the Universal Service Fund to include Internet as well as telephony.

Who Qualifies for E-Rate Discounts
E-Rate is targeted at two specific entities: schools and libraries. Each school, school district and library that wants the discounts submits an application through the administrator of the program, USAC or the Universal Service Administrative Company. Each carrier or service provider who wants to offer E-Rate qualified services must also apply and be assigned a SPIN or Service Provider Identification Number. As you might expect, there are various official forms that need to be completed. More information can be found on the USAC website.

How the Discounts are Calculated
The size of the discount for each school or library is based on the level of poverty and the urban/rural status of the population served. That sounds like it might be a pretty difficult thing to figure out. The determination is made much easier by basing it on the percentage of students eligible for the national school lunch program. Better off areas might only qualify for 20% service discounts. Those with severe poverty might qualify for discounts as high as 90%.

The Size of E-Rate Funding
How much money are we talking about? The E-Rate program funding cap for FY2014 is over $2.4 billion. If your school or library isn’t getting your share of the discounts applied to Internet service, it’s likely well worth your while to get on board. Others who are already benefiting from E-Rate service discounts and feeling the need to upgrade service levels should know that many major service providers now offer E-Rate qualified services. One or more is likely to be able to provide the kind of bandwidth you need, ranging from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps.

Bandwidth Upgrades are Needed Now
A recent report indicated that many libraries nationwide are feeling the need to move as quickly as possible to 100 Mbps broadband. School districts with heavy classroom and administrative use may need to have Gigabit bandwidth installed. With fiber based Ethernet service, bandwidth levels are very scalable and can usually be increased without equipment changes.

Finding E-Rate Services
Are you looking for new or upgraded Internet access for your eligible school district or library system? Find carriers offering E-Rate bandwidth services quickly and easily now.


Note: Photo of Duluth Central High School courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Cell Phone Bill Shock Is So Easy To Avoid

The Federal Communications Commission has gotten so many complaints about "cell phone bill shock" that they are considering new regulation. If you’ve been a victim, this probably sounds like something long overdue. But why be a victim in the first place?

Cell phone bill shock, aka “bill shock”, is the horrible feeling you experience when you open your monthly cell phone bill to find humongous overage charges. Your first reaction may be a stunned silence, followed by rubbing your eyes to see if those numbers are really on the paper. Then a gasp of “WHAAAAT??????”

If you haven’t collapsed by this point, you’ll be scouring the bill trying to figure out if it’s for real or a mistake by your carrier. Overages of hundreds or thousands of dollars have to be a mistake, right?

Oh, no they’re not. Sure, any billing system can make a once-in-a-blue-moon error. The vast majority of the time, however, those charges are absolutely accurate. The problem is that the cellular company didn’t make the error... you did.

That’s right. The error you made was not knowing every picky detail of your contract and/or not paying close enough attention to your usage. Often, the problem arises when someone else uses your phone. Teenagers are blissfully ignorant of wireless contract terms. They’ll play games, download music & videos, and yak it up till the battery goes dead. Hey, it’s not a problem on the home computer or telephone line so why would they expect it to be on a cell phone?

As bill shock victims can attest, this IS a problem with wireless services. That package of anytime minutes has a hard limit. Exceed it and the cost per minute goes up to the Moon. The same is true of data plans. How many people truly realize that they have a 2GB or 5GB limit with large per KB overages above that? If you never hit the limit, you might think you have unlimited service. The first time you exceed it, you’ll get a nasty, nasty dose of reality.

The FCC is considering mandating that wireless carriers send users a text message to tell their customers when they get within 80% of their usage limit or are about to incur expensive data-roaming charges. That sounds like a sensible reminder. If you get the warning and exceed the limits anyway, at least you can’t say you weren’t warned.

If you enjoy the benefits of having a particular phone on a traditional cell phone plan, including getting a free phone, then you need to be vigilant about your usage or upgrade to an unlimited plan so you don’t have to worry about it. But if you want more control over your cellular costs, consider a pre-paid service instead. Pre-paid is just what it sounds like. You buy a certain bundle of minutes in advance and then work them down. When you run out, you buy more minutes or simply stop using the phone... at least for awhile.

NET10 is one of the leaders in pre-paid cell phone service. The “10” in NET10 stands for 10 cents per minute. That’s what all calls cost you. There are no roaming charges, no overages, no contracts and no bills. You pay 10 cents per minute for calls. Text messages are 5 cents each. It’s easy to remember and easy to manage.

It’s really easy to manage NET10 prepaid cell phone service because you buy a special phone that displays your exact airtime balance. When you get low, you can buy more time on the Web, in retail stores that sell airtime “cards”, or by calling a toll free number for NET10. Your minutes don’t expire, but you do need to refresh your service to keep it active.

If you are a casual user or just want to keep a cell phone around for emergencies, pre-paid service can be a big money saver. It will cost you $15 a month on an automatic monthly plan for 150 minutes. That’s half the cost of the smallest plans offered by most traditional carriers. Plus you avoid signing a contract or having your credit checked. When you want to discontinue service, you simply stop using it. Pretty easy, right?

If prepaid cellular service sounds like the service for you, take a few minutes and see what NET10 has to offer in the way of phones and plans. It could save you from that awful cell phone bill shock that has horrified so many others.

FCC Confiscates Remaining TV Channels For Twitter

Shocked and horrified by the geometrically expanding demand for wireless broadband services, the Federal Commfiscation Commission exercised its powers of eminent domain today and confiscated the remaining broadcast television channels not already sold at auction. Most surprising of all was the declaration that this rare and important spectrum is going to be dedicated exclusively to the text messaging service, Twitter.

FCC Chairman Lowon B. Andwidth explained that the Commission just completed an intensive study of Internet usage and found that the Twitter service is growing at such an astonishing rate that it will soon devour all available bandwidth. “While it is bad enough that Twitter will bring web browsing, video streaming, text messaging and email to a halt,” said Mr. Andwidth, “a far worse situation will occur when Twitter users have to take a number and get in line to post their tweets. I don’t want to be in Washington when that mob of anti-social networkers descends on Capitol Hill.”

In shortest supply is wireless bandwidth. Apparently, the lion’s share of cellular phone activity involves posting messages to Twitter rather than the growth previously expected from mobile video and web browsing. One young smartphone user was heard to exclaim, “Does anyone actually surf the Web anymore? Who has the patience to read blogs and web pages? Anything worth saying can be said in 140 characters or less.”

Twitter itself issued a 130 character statement expressing delight at the government’s pre-emptive action to prevent a massive Fail Whale epidemic from sweeping the nation, and requesting re-tweets. They vowed to expand server capacity to match the new wireless bandwidth capacity as best they can. TV stations that follow Twitter have already been tweeted to cease broadcasting immediately and return their licenses. The remaining stations will be getting old school telegrams. “It’s unlikely anyone will be inconvenienced by this change,” explained Chairman Andwidth. “Everybody is on cable and satellite by now, anyway.”

Expectations are that a swift coordinated move by the public and private sectors can ensure adequate messaging capacity at least until after the fall elections. After that, the FCC will likely look at shutting down other less important uses of the electromagnetic spectrum including most AM and FM music stations. “We may even have to shut down microwave ovens and garage door openers if we can’t keep up with texting bandwidth demand,” exclaimed an obviously frustrated chairman.

Also making quick moves to protect its interests, Google announced that it is going to take over non-wireless Internet service by offering 1 Gbps fiber optic connections to every city that performed ridiculous stunts to try to win Google broadband service for its residents. “All other cities that didn’t make fools of themselves will be getting 10 Gbps Google Internet access free of charge,” according to an unofficial Google statement. It went on to say: “There is only one acceptable day for any foolishness and that is April 1.”

Hey, Look, More Spectrum!

If your dreams of a Wireless empire were dashed by the results of the FCC's recent 700 MHz spectrum auction, you're not sure how you'd make your fortune with that Public Safety D-Block that's still up for grabs, and scrounging around in the "white spaces" isn't quite your style, take heart. There's soon to be more juicy spectrum slices on the market.

So what happened? Did the FCC find some more available bands hiding in the attic? No, they've pretty much cleared the shelves. What's happening now is what might be termed the secondary market. It's a little like collecting art. Sometimes people will collect unique works of art for decades, only to decide later to auction off the whole collection. In this case NextWave Wireless went to a lot of trouble to collect licenses on rare slices of the microwave spectrum. Now they've decided they really don't want them after all. NextWave is going to concentrate on its hardware business and has hired Deutsche Band and UBS Investment Bank to help them sell off the collection.

NextWave's licensed portfolio is enough to make a cellular carrier or WiMAX startup drool in envy. It consists of 154 licenses in the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) bands at 1.7 GHz and 2.1 GHz, 30 licenses in the Wireless Communications Service (WCS) band at 2.3 GHz, and 22 licenses in the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) and Broadband Radio Service (BRS) band at 2.5 GHz. That's 206 licenses that cover a population area of 251 million people in the United States.

How much will you have to pay to be a Wireless spectrum baron? That remains to be seen. NextWave is reported to have spent around $500 million to build their license collection. What they'll be able to collect on their spectrum sale will depend on how valuable the big players happen to think these licensed frequencies really are. The 700 MHz feeding frenzy was at least in part due to the highly desirable propagation characteristics of radio waves in the UHF band compared to the higher frequency microwave bands. But who knows? Perhaps Google will take a second shot at getting into the wireless operator business.

My guess is that NextWave's portfolio will command a pretty penny. Wireless communications is still a growth story. Cellular carriers may have mature telephone services, but they're still low on the learning curve when it comes to deploying mobile television and high speed broadband services. How much broadband penetration has there been in the automobile market? How much mobile video service is there really? Not much. Not yet anyway.

Some of this spectrum might be snatched up to support backhaul service for existing tower sites. All the carriers are feeling the pinch of limited bandwidth as they try to upgrade their wireless data services to 3G and 4G capability. Bonded T1 lines will get them so far. After that they need fiber or wireless to support higher transmission speeds. WiMAX will only exacerbate that problem.

How is your business set for bandwidth? Feeling limited by traffic congestion on your current service? Find better prices on faster line speeds using our GeoQuote (tm) carrier services search tool.

The Dark Side of Spectrum Renewal

Fifty years ago, the federal government was avidly supporting a process called urban renewal. The idea was that some areas in major cities were just too far gone to be refurbished. Instead, whole city blocks were demolished and rebuilt as housing projects or re-purposed to support new highways out to the suburbs.

Today, we're seeing a parallel approach to radio frequency spectrum allocation. In this case, portions of the RF spectrum are considered too valuable to be used for what are considered to be out-of-date technologies. Most notable are the upcoming shutdowns of over the air analog television broadcasting and analog cell phone service.

What's driving this "spectrum renewal"? It's not lack of use or demand by the public. Just the opposite is true. Hundreds of millions of analog TV sets built over the last 60 years are running just fine, to the delight of their owners. Sure, everybody wants a shiny new HDTV set so they can see the grain of the football or the individual hairs in the lion's mane on their own big-screen. But how many of us can afford to instantly replace a collection of a half-dozen sets acquired over the years and deployed throughout the house?

The AMPS mobile phone system is in a similar pickle. Sure, all the cool new cell phones and Blackberries are 100% digital. But there may be as many as a million mobiles still using the original analog cells on the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel networks. AMPS is at the heart of about 500,000 OnStar equipped cars sold since 2003. It's also used by as many as 400,000 home security alarm systems. When the service is shut down on February 18, 2008 many of these users will be left in the lurch as their systems are too "old" to be upgraded.

So if the public isn't clamoring to get rid of these technologies, then why is it happening? The answer is fierce competition for a scarce resource.

It wasn't always this way. When FM radio was developed it was in addition to the already popular AM service. Radios were mandated to receive both bands. Over the years, FM listenership has grown and AM's has declined. But both are still in service. When UHF television channels were opened, nobody demanded that the VHF channels be turned off. New sets had UHF tuners in addition to the familiar VHF tuners. Even color television was mandated to be backward compatible with the millions of black and white sets already in use, so that no TVs would become virtual snow globes.

They will after February 17, 2009. Hundreds of millions of analog TVs that work just fine today will receive no over the air signals after that date. Some will live on, with signals provided for awhile by Cable TV systems, Satellite receivers or ATSC converter boxes. Many more will take their toxic chemicals with them to an early grave in the city landfills.

The problem with enabling new technology is oddly similar to dealing with decaying factories, now moved to China, or run down residential areas long abandoned to the poorest of the poor. Will Rogers once quipped: "Invest in land. They ain't making any more of the stuff." Today he might say the same thing about spectrum.

The radio frequency spectrum encompasses everything from power line radiation to radio, TV and cell phone channels, satellite transmissions, heat, light and out to Gamma rays. Back when our technology could only use small parts of this spectrum, you could locate new services on undeveloped frequencies. But unused frequencies are hard to find now. Worse, everybody wants the prime real estate areas of the spectrum. Those are the frequencies that offer large amounts of bandwidth to accommodate voice, data and video services, and also have good propagation characteristics. That means covering large areas and easily penetrating buildings. Generally, the higher you go in frequency, especially in the coveted microwave bands, the easier it is for buildings, tree leaves, and rain storms to block the signal.

There's a sweet spot in the spectrum covering the UHF TV and cellular bands around 700 to 900 MHz that offers an especially good combination of high bandwidth and excellent propagation. Squatter's rights would say that AMPS mobile should stay right where it is and digital TV signals should be an addition to the analog broadcasts already established. But demand for more cell phones, more public service radio channels and wide area wireless broadband services that have no place to locate in the spectrum creates a competitive pressure to tear down the old technologies and replace them with new ones.

Urban renewal programs got a black eye for destroying established neighborhood cultures, tossing people out into the streets and favoring those with wealth and connections. Spectrum renewal has an equally dark side to it. The billions of dollars that the FCC is collecting from spectrum auctions has certainly hastened the demise of analog television. BPL or Broadband Over Power Line radiation threatens to poison the short wave bands for ham radio operators and short wave listeners. All analog radio services seem likely to get the ax at some future date. In fact, if the Internet Protocol networking becomes ubiquitous, any non-IP services could meet their demise.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In the long run it's a necessary thing, as long as we want more and better mobile services. The real and perhaps unmet challenge is to minimize the pain and disruption as new technologies displace and replace the ones we've become accustomed to.