Unlicensed Wireless Broadband Profiles
Policy Paper
April 16, 2004
In recent years, the license-exempt bands have been the font of astounding economic growth in the telecom sector and expanded opportunities for broadband Internet access for hundreds of thousands of Americans. In 2003 alone, an estimated 22.7 million wireless access points and networking cards using unlicensed spectrum were shipped, generating over $2.5 billion in revenues. The wide-scale adoption of WiFi technology (short for “Wireless Fidelity,” but referring to the 802.11 engineering standard for wireless local area networking) largely explains the success of the unlicensed bands. But merely attributing the success of unlicensed spectrum to WiFi overlooks the diverse variety of applications that exist because of the shared spectrum protocol employed in the unlicensed bands.
Unlicensed wireless broadband is not only a technology of immense promise, it is also a demonstrated protocol for a more efficient and equitable allocation of the public airwaves. License-free access, characterized by low-power frequency sharing and the use of smart radio devices, represents a movement of both technological, political, and social importance, the likes of which the spectrum policy community is only now beginning to fully understand. This paper attempts to describe just a few of the more prominent success stories, as they exist on the community level and among municipal and commercial broadband access providers.
The following profiles focus on how and why community networks and commercial Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) have taken advantage of open and shared access to the unlicensed bands to bring high-speed Internet access – and sometimes community Intranets – to rural and low income areas nationwide. The paper is intended to demonstrate the diversity of environments, organizations, and applications in which unlicensed wireless is deployed. It is by no means a comprehensive or complete compendium of case studies, but merely the tip of the unlicensed iceberg.
This document is organized in three sections: 1) Community Networks; 2) Municipal Networks; 3) Commercial Networks. Each section includes a summary of activity in that sector and a few representative profiles illustrating how these networks are built and their applications.
For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version below.