Freeing the Airwaves

As some of you may know, I have spent a lot of time in my other career working on technology policy.  That's why I really enjoyed "Google Public Policy Blog: Time to "Free the Airwaves." America has fallen behind other countries in deploying broadband and we need to do everythign we can to catch up and pass our competitors.  creating better utilization for Whitespaces might play a part in that process.   Whitespaces, or the distances between transmitted frequencies, represent one of the lats unoccupied spaces in the radio spectrum - increasingly crowded and expensive real estate doled out by the FCC.  In recent years, the FCC has made some smart decisions and left open pieces of frequency so that innovative open services can be provided.  Cordless telephones and Wi-fi connections were the result of that smart policy.

Now, we have a chance to do it again.  Recently, I read another study about software programmable radios, that is radios that can listen for open frequencies and then transmit on those frequencies on the fly.  Whitespaces, or the distances between transmitted frequencies could be best utilized as a test bed for this technology.  One company, headed up by Vanu Bose, has donesome great work commercializing this technology.  I hope you will take a minute to sign the petition to the FCC asking them to open up whotespaces for these and other innovative purposes.