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A world LESS wired?

Thursday, March 29, 2007

The USA is of course a world leader in information technology. It’s an oddity, though, for those of us who’ve lived in Europe and visited Japan, to observe how America is a terrible laggard when it comes to mobile mass communication.

Watch a veteran London politician double-thumbing text messages to her spokesperson's office from the back of her car, or a Tokyo shopper pay for his purchases by confidently waving his cellphone over a barcode-reader, and we see sharply the extent to which the US has lost leadership in this critical area of telecomms – a legacy, paradoxically enough, of being so effectively hard-wired for so long.

 

But I’m reassured to know that change is in the air. A development of enormous importance is imminent, and I want to hail it with an enthusiastically waving flag.

 

Within a few weeks the Federal Communications Commission will decide on the terms under which it will, probably over the summer, auction off a newly-available slice of the radio spectrum. It’s a tranche of frequencies liberated now that the television industry is at last abandoning its old-style UHF transmissions in favor of digital broadcasts. It means a vast fresh opportunity for American communicators to link us all up with high-quality, broadband - and wireless - transmission of audio, video, graphic and text material.

 

The relative lowness of the frequencies involved means there will be greater coverage too, because such signals can reach further, and pass much more effectively than today’s cellphone services through walls, floors, roofs and ceilings.

 

Inevitably, it will be phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint Nextel who aggressively bid for these potentially golden (nay, platinum) airwaves  -  to universal groans from millions of long-suffering customers, I am sure. But gratifyingly they won’t have the field to themselves.

 

The “new money” of  the digital revolution (and lots of it, though it hardly seems very new any more) will also be coming to auction, in the shape of Google, Yahoo and their respective internet-based partners. Piling in as well will be the cable TV operators like Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision, and their satellite service competitors like EchoStar and DirecTV.

 

Those computer-based upstarts (upstarts, I guess, only in the sense that by comparison AT&T can trace origins back to Ma Bell’s time) are the ones to watch, but we’ll need discriminating eyesight to do so. Google and Yahoo will probably not actually be bidding themselves, as themselves  –  they cannily sense they’d deeply offend the major carriers in competing with them, and they do need these big old guys’ co-operation generally, in some established partnerships and some still to come.

 

The two Silicon Valley companies are, in a somewhat rare new-pals act, cloaking themselves in a broad partnership called the Alliance for 4-G America. (Europe and Japan already have reached the so-called “third generation” of mobile phone technology, or 3-G, so this is America’s chance to leap forward by one numeral).

 

One important idea the Alliance will be lobbying for is that the big phone companies should not derive benefit from being the industry’s established incumbents. The big old guys, of course, always maintain at significant regulatory crossroads like this one that they’ve invested billions in infrastructure, and their investments deserve “protection”.

 

The other argument that Yahoo and Google might see fit to push through their Alliance (and it’s of enormous interest to all citizens of the digital universe) is that telephone companies, and cable providers too for that matter, are all-too-ready proponents of tiered pricing. Such pricing would offer a privileged, preferential service to those who can and are prepared to pay for it, and it offends fundamentally against the increasingly vital principles of ‘net neutrality’ and universal web-access.

 

The newer, internet-based guys may lack an existing physical network of towers and dishes around the country, but I know which of the two generations - old or new - I would back in handling the nation’s wireless future.