Photo courtesy Flickr commons
There was a front-page story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, lamenting about how wonderful a free nationwide WiFi network would be. It will never, ever happen.
Unfortunately, none of this is true. The government is not going to build a nationwide super-Wi-Fi system. The FCC does want to reclaim part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is held by television broadcasters—spectrum that the switch to digital TV has made obsolete. It wants to buy that spectrum back from the television companies and free it for other so-called “unlicensed” uses. It’s the digital equivalent of the government purchasing a plot of unused land and turning it into a national park—free to use but left undeveloped.
What would it take for a nationwide Wi-Fi system to actually be built? The unused spectrum is necessary, but not sufficient. Someone would have to come along and actually construct the system—the broadcast towers, the wiring, the routers, the electronics. Someone would have to connect this physical infrastructure to the Internet’s backbone. Someone would have to manage the traffic on the network just as surely as AT&T currently manages its network. In short, someone would have to invest a ton of money into building and operating a giant Wi-Fi network. TheWashington Post story is silent on who would do this.
