Beyond WiFi: Airwaves used in creative, lucrative — and unregulated — ways

WASHINGTON — What do camera pills, cordless phones, wireless Internet service providers, a radar that checks highways and a keyless ignition system have in common?

Answer: The technologies all rely on the airwaves to work. And they have proliferated, according to a recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report, because entrepreneurs have commercialized their ideas without having to secure licenses that could otherwise limit where, when and how their services can be deployed.

As an indicator of how pervasive wireless devices are in our lives, report authors Kenneth Carter, Ahmed Lahjouji and Neal McNeil point to industry figures showing that more than 80 percent of U.S. households own a cordless phone and 41 percent have garage-door openers.

The devices use so-called unlicensed wireless technologies, the subject of the report. Unlicensed wireless occupies portions of the airwaves not subject to the same detailed regulation as the spectrum used by the cellphone industry, television broadcasters, satellite services and the government.

Companies that make use of the unlicensed bands also never had to pay anyone to use the spectrum. In contrast, wireless-phone carriers shell out millions at auction for renewable licenses that give them exclusive use of other portions of the spectrum.

Critics have said this framework for managing the nation's airwaves is inefficient, and the FCC is making another attempt to respond through a series of proceedings designed to overhaul the current system.

In addition, the Bush administration last week announced a major one-year initiative to examine how it can improve the way it allocates spectrum to government agencies. While the FCC oversees commercial spectrum use, the administration oversees government-agency spectrum use through the National Telecommunications & Information Administration.

Need for unlicensed spectrum

Although the report notes that recent financial growth in unlicensed wireless comes mostly from the standard popularly known as Wi-Fi, it explores other wireless technologies, their applications and their significance. It lays out the regulatory framework, outlines recent steps by the FCC to reform airwave management and suggests that the nation needs more unlicensed spectrum.

That is the spectrum used by devices complying with what are known as the FCC's Part 15 rules. The rules permit the operation of low-power devices as long as they comply with FCC technical certifications and don't cause harmful interference of other services.

Among the technologies included are spread spectrum (used by cordless phones), unlicensed personal communications services (wireless office-phone systems), millimeter wave technologies (computer-to-computer communications) and ultra-wideband (expected in electronics products beginning next year to transmit multimedia content across short distances).

The FCC report, released late last month, follows its commissioners' recent vote to allow spectrum lease holders to trade and sublease their licenses. Though the FCC has made previous attempts to reform spectrum management, the issue is front and center right now because commissioners want to see competition between wireless services and the wireline world, says Rudy Baca of the Precursor Group in Washington, D.C.

"There is this philosophical goal of the commission to try and arrive at intermodal competition where wireless would be one of the broadband pipes in the home, and you don't get that unless you get more spectrum out there," he says.

Pulling it together

Dewayne Hendricks, chief executive officer of the Dandin Group in Fremont, Calif., has been prodding the commission on spectrum reform for years.

"There's a lot of talk on The Hill, and the FCC and all over the place," said Hendricks. "The Congress critters get it. They know the Wi-Fi word, so it was incumbent on the commission to put all this together in one place. Garage door openers, foot warmers, whatever — it's all there. But there's a lot more going on and where we'll go is going to be constrained by politics."

As a so-called white paper, the report doesn't reflect a specific viewpoint of any FCC commissioner. Instead, it is meant to contribute to what is expected to be a highly political debate on exactly how the FCC should manage the airwaves as computing makes new and more efficient uses possible.

The report's lack of focus on certain kinds of wireless technologies and their implications sidesteps some of the harder questions: Why does any technological framework need more discrete spectrum allocation if digital communications and intelligent devices can route around such scarcity?

And how can some unlicensed technologies share licensed spectrum "free," even as others are expected to trade or pay for access to that spectrum in a secondary market?

Desirable broadcast spectrum

The issue affects Microsoft, Intel and others that want to provide consumers with services on airwaves exclusively held largely by broadcasters.

Microsoft is among technology companies and public interest groups pushing the commission to permit more unlicensed sharing of spectrum.

In a recent FCC filing, Microsoft's attorneys emphasized that the broadcasting spectrum is especially valuable for broadband networking. That's because it allows for more robust communications, such as the ability to transmit over longer distances and through walls.

"For rural areas, for the development of mesh networks, and for urban buildings where new wiring is prohibitively expensive, these propagation characteristics could make all the difference between broadband service (being) available or not," the attorneys asserted. "It is our expectation that the engineering record will demonstrate that unlicensed devices can share spectrum with broadcasters, public safety operations and other users of the bands."

Microsoft currently leases unused portions of the FM spectrum from radio giant Clear Channel Communications for a technology it is developing to broadcast data to consumer products such as Smart watches. Called the Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) platform, it enables users to receive sports scores, weather, and other personalized information.

Multibillion-dollar markets

For its part, the commission's May white paper sidestepped any strong recommendations, other than saying that it may take an act of Congress to force the issue. Instead, the paper outlines the history of unlicensed devices and points to the $1.65 billion market in cordless phones, the $2.3 billion market in wireless networking devices and the $1.2 billion market in radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices used to track products, vehicles or animals.

It simply says that the remarkable growth and innovations in these markets need to be fostered. The report shows that unlicensed wireless technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes and contends that it is this flexibility that's behind the unlicensed world's growth and success, as businesses, governments and other sectors of society experiment with and figure out new uses.

Example: The M2A Pill. Doctors use the pill to diagnose medical problems in a patient's intestines. The patient swallows a capsule containing a tiny "camera." A transmitter inside the capsule sends the images to be uploaded to a computer for analysis and diagnosis. This innovation is just one out of several that the authors use to bolster their case for more spectrum for unlicensed uses and to show that there's a whole unlicensed world out there beyond Wi-Fi.

"Seeing Wi-Fi everywhere and hearing Wi-Fi everywhere, there was a natural curiosity to get our thumb on the pulse of what's going on here," said Carter, the report author. "There's some really neat stuff coming out here and it's potentially disruptive (but) some of the most interesting developments will not be in Wi-Fi."

Sarah Lai Stirland, a free-lancer in Washington, D.C., frequently writes about public policy and technology.