more on Krugman on "Digital Robber Barons", nyt 6 Dec

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 14:10:58 -0700
To: dave () farber net, ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: <[IP]> more on Krugman on "Digital Robber Barons", nyt 6 Dec

At 10:01 AM 12/6/2002, Dana Blankenthorn wrote:

> Naturally liberals are aghast. Paul Krugman calls the wired boys "Digital
> Robber Barons." (free registration required) On the surface it looks
> terrible, and personally it will be inconvenient.
>
> But Krugman doesn?t know about wireless. He doesn?t know about WISPs, and he
> doesn?t know about UltraWide Band (UWB). Why should he? He?s not a tech
> writer. Wireless is "inside baseball," the province of a small number of
> hobbyists and entrepreneurs. And how can it compete with the phone and cable
> monopolies?
>
> The answer is Moore?s Law. Between the 802.11 A and B standards we?ve got
> plenty of digital space to play with, in unlicensed frequencies. The
> necessary equipment gets cheaper and better every year.

Unfortunately, this is not quite the case. Neither 802.11a or 802.11b
was designed properly for outdoor use, and both are nonoptimal -- to
say the least -- to cover the last mile reliably or on any great scale.
Access points are limited to serving, at best, a few hundred customers.
And the usable range of these access points is limited to a few miles
in rural areas and a city block in densely populated urban areas, often
requiring providers to go to great expense to reach sufficient quantities
of customers and destroying their economies of scale.

What's more, the "free for all" nature of Part 15 of the FCC rules,
which governs the unlicensed bands on which these systems operate,
prevents them from being reliable enough to replace wired infrastructure.
On any day, at any time, at any place, someone can set up a perfectly
legal transmitter that brings down any number of existing links. When
this happens, the parties whose service has been disrupted have no right
to any form of redress whatsoever. Even an ordinary cordless telephone
can disrupt vital infrastructure. In our small city, which has nowhere
near the density or number of providers one sees in more populous areas,
we are already seeing serious "mid-air collisions" between equipment
owned by the City, the schools, private businesses, and several wireless
ISPs. 

The FCC could change the rules to allow wireless to become a serious
contender -- in particular, by allowing providers to reserve spectrum,
and transmit at higher power. It could also make enough spectrum available
so that providers would not have to contend for the same narrow frequency
bands. But will it? Given that this FCC appears to be a servant of the Baby
Bells, cable companies, and other large political contributors, the answer
is probably "no." Just as it is seeking to prevent competition via sharing
of monopoly infrastructure, the FCC is also working -- in this case, by
inaction -- to prevent wireless bypass from becoming a reality.

--Brett Glass


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