Implementing the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations was the House Democrat’s top priority during their recent “first 100 hours” legislative spree. One of the recommendations addressed in the resulting H.R. 1 bill had to do with public safety communications interoperability. The 9/11 Commission found that communications between firefighters, police officers, and other emergency personnel failed that day with deadly consequences. Here is a quick analysis of H.R. 1’s interoperability provisions, as well as the Commission’s recommendation itself, in which I argue that they are both overlooking the fundamental causes of the interoperability problem.
Continue reading →
My favorite press critic, Jack Shafer of Slate, penned a fun piece last week entitled “The Case fo Killing the FCC and Selling Off the Spectrum.” The essay builds heavily on the work of Tom Hazlett and Peter Huber, two fine libertarian minds that many of us here at the TLF admire. Here’s some of what Shafer has to say:
“Although today’s FCC is nowhere near as controlling as earlier FCCs, it still treats the radio spectrum like a scarce resource that its bureaucrats must manage for the “public good,” even though the government’s scarcity argument has been a joke for half a century or longer. The almost uniformly accepted modern view is that information-carrying capacity of the airwaves isn’t static, that capacity is a function of technology and design architecture that inventors and entrepreneurs throw at spectrum. To paraphrase this forward-thinking 1994 paper, the old ideas about spectrum capacity are out, and new ones about spectrum efficiency are in.
…
Technology alone can’t bring the spectrum feast to entrepreneurs and consumers. More capitalism–not less–charts the path to abundance. Hazlett and others, going back to economist Ronald H. Coase in 1959, have advocated the establishment of spectrum property rights and would leave it to the market to reallocate the airwaves to the highest bidders. Such a price system would tend to encourage the further expansion of spectrum capacity.”
Amen brother. Read the whole thing.
While in this country we’re debating whether the government should hand over to a single entrepreneur 30 of the 36 MHz of prime radio spectrum slated for auction after the digital TV transition, in the UK they’re doing things a little different. According to GigaOm:
British carriers might have spent over 20 billion pounds on 3G wireless auctions several years ago, but they will soon get a chance to spend even more for “the UK’s largest single release of radio spectrum”, says British regulator Ofcom. This morning Ofcom outlined a plan for wireless auctions, which will be technology agnostic, but could include spectrum for WiMAX, mobile TV, mobile broadcast and even 3G. Ofcom is asking for a consultation period until March 2007. Ofcom says the three bands that will be available are: 2010-2025 MHz, 2290-2300 MHz and 2500-2690 MHz, and a total of 215 MHz will be on the market. There will be two initial auctions which will be part of a bigger plan to sell off up to 400 MHz over the following years.
You heard right, 400 Mhz of technology agnostic spectrum. I invite my friends concerned about net neutrality to look at this. We all would like to see new competition in broadband, and spectrum reform seems to me to be the first obvious step in that direction.
HONG KONG, December 5, 2006–The convergence of telecommunications and media is posing problem for communications regulators all over the world, and many of them swapped stories here about the best way to cope with rapid technological change.
Most government panelists participating in two morning sessions at the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom World conference here agreed on the need for a unified communications authority.
But they differed after whether competition policy could prove adequate to dealing with issues of telecommunications and media. In other words, would the need for communications regulation fade over time?
Officials from France and Hong Kong are both in the midst of re-evaluating their existing regulatory structures, which include two separate agencies. In each case, one agency is charged with overseeing broadcasting, and the other agency oversees telephone communications.
Continue reading →
HONG KONG, December 4, 2006–Global regulators had a mixed message for the telecommunications industry here on Monday: Governments should ease restrictions on companies in the presence of competition–but otherwise tighten them.
At the opening forum at Telecom World 2006, government officials from China, Hong Kong, the European Commission and International Telecommunications Union delivered a similar message, but with varying degrees of specificity.
Vivian Reding, the European commissioner responsible for information society and media, was the most direct: “Competition and open markets drive investment and innovation. Monopolies don’t.”
Reding and the other regulators spoke here at the triennial conference of the ITU, a hybrid international body based in Geneva, Switzerland, that is part of the United Nations. The union represents telecommunications companies as well as U.N. member states.
Continue reading →
According to Congress Daily, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff “said today his department will ensure that the highest-risk urban areas have interoperable [public safety] communications equipment by the end of next year, and that all states have it by the end of 2008.” DHS has been under pressure from the incoming Democratic majority to do something about the lack of communications among first responders. According to the article,
Without explicitly acknowledging the looming pressure for faster action, Chertoff told a conference of emergency response officials that metropolitan regions under his department’s Urban Areas Security Initiative grant program will have interoperable communications by the end of the 2007 calendar year, followed by all states by the end of 2008.
Chertoff said the department will give urban locations “interoperability scorecards” next month to help them decide how much money to seek in their upcoming grant applications. He did not provide additional details during his speech.
A Homeland Security Department aide would only add: “We will have further info at later date, as well as further info on the grant guidance.”
The whole speech is here, but it doesn’t really add much. I’m not sure what to make of this, but if the interoperability problem could be solved so simply, by just giving more money in federal grants to states and localities, then we would have fixed it a long time ago. As the Katrina Commission pointed out in its report, “Although some New Orleans and Louisiana state officials attribute the lack of true interoperability for first responders in the region to financial limitations, this explanation flies in the face of the massive amounts of federal grants to Louisiana.” Among other things, the interoperability problem is caused by a collective action problem, which in turn is cause by a spectrum policy that gives each of 50,000 public safety agencies their own (untradable) spectrum license and thus the impetus to build their own custom radio system. Coordination among these 50,000 actors is not easy, and I don’t see how more money will help.
Luckily, the Mercatus Center and Tom Hazlett’s Tech Center at GMU are putting on a symposium along with the FCLJ that will try to offer some solutions for the interoperability issue on Friday, Dec. 8. You’re intvited. Presenting papers on the topic will be Gerald Faulhaber, Jon Peha, Phil Weiser, and yours truly.
Yesterday the FCC did something a little weird. One week after putting up for public comment Cyren Call’s proposal to revamp public safety communications, it rejected the petition but also decided to keep the commenting open. Quite admirably, the Commission cites lack of authority from Congress. What’s weird is that they didn’t decide to reject the petition during the three months they sat on it before putting out for comment. Also weird are the post-decision comments, which will now have another audience: Congress.
In the new issue of Regulation magazine I explain the depth of the public safety interoperability problem and how we might go about tackling it.
In some parts of Europe, private enterprise builds and maintains the public safety network and sells interoperable communications capacity to the agencies there. A similar approach could be pursued in the United States. The government could allow private carriers to build advanced networks on frequencies that it now restricts to public safety use. Instead of building their own incompatible and duplicative networks, agencies and jurisdiction could purchase their communications needs from the private carriers. Because public safety communications typically use very little communications capacity, the carriers could sell space on the network to private entities without interfering with emergency communications.
This a warm-up to a paper I’m writing for FCLJ symposium on public safety interoperability that the Mercatus Center and GMU’s Tech Center are co-sponsoring. The event will take place Dec. 8 at GMU School of Law. Cyren Call’s Morgan O’Brien will be one of the panelists. Event details here.
Yesterday the FCC ruled that the Massachusetts Airport Authority cannot prevent Continental from putting up a Wi-Fi antenna in its Logan Airport lounge. Some folks, such as Julie Ask of Jupiter, have see this ruling as validating the “no one owns it” character of unlicensed spectrum. As I’ve argued before, unlicensed spectrum works in part because it is used consistent with physical property rights. This is why Ask goes on to say that she “dread[s] the day that a Muni network is overlayed or my neighbors set up 802.11n.” This particular case is actually about property and competition.
Continue reading →
I am shocked (shocked!) to hear that politics is interfering with Google and EarthLink’s muni wi-fi plans in San Fran. On his blog, Davis Freeberg discusses how a bunch of San Fran “nuts and fruits” (his term, not mine) have turned out at planning meetings to make silly demands of Google and EarthLink before they are allowed to launch service:
“Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a “requirement” for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts.
… Despite the announcement made last April free WiFi instead has turned out to be vaporware thus far with Google and Earthlink discovering that dealing with the local San Francisco political scene is about as fun as being set up on a blind date with Mike Tyson after being rubbed down in meat sauce.”
Over at TechDirt, Mike has more coverage of the unfolding fiasco. And the latest issue of MIT Technology Review includes a story by Mark Williams on the San Fran wi-fi follies entitled “Golden Gate Lark.” I found the concluding paragraph of his report particularly interesting because it goes beyond politics and gets to the real reason I think most muni wi-fi projects are doomed to fail–they will probably be obsolete before they are even launched:
“In January 2005, the city of Orlando pulled the plug on its free downtown Wi-Fi service because only 27 people a day were accessing it, at a cost to the city of $1,800 a month, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Though San Francisco’s potential network might be larger, that only makes questions of design more urgent: the city could discover too late that its network was too expensive, too spotty, or already dated.”
I’m reading through Yochai Benkler’s argument for a spectrum commons in The Wealth of Networks, and so far I’m not impressed. His footnotes pointed to this fantastic working paper by Gerald Faulhaber and David Farber that I think makes the case better than I could:
Establishing property rights in spectrum is often portrayed as eliminating the commons (Benkler (1997), Reed (2002), Ikeda (2002)); this is not the
case. Commons (and more generally sharing) can exist within an ownership regime; our recommended ownership regime with an easement for non-interfering uses establishes such a commons via the easement. Should it be necessary to have a commons for potentially interfering uses, the most obvious avenue is for the Federal government can purchase a block of spectrum (which it then owns) and open the band to general use under terms and conditions similar to Part 15 (for example). In fact, any state or local government can do the same thing, establishing a “park” in which users are completely free to use the spectrum without permission provided they follow the rules laid down by the owner of the “park.” This is perfectly analogous to public lands, such as National and State Parks, National and State Forests, and municipal parks. Further, private foundations could establish such “parks;” for example, there are many horticultural parks open to the public that are maintained by private foundations. Local neighborhood cooperatives could achieve the same end, possibly requiring a one-time or monthly fee for use. Similarly, private firms could establish such “parks,” charging a one-time or monthly fee for use. We would expect that manufacturers of mesh network devices, for example, may choose to “prime the pump” by establishing spectrum parks in various localities to increase their equipment sales.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.