FCC proposes public Wi-Fi networks




The new Wi-Fi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate to another vehicle a mile away or a patient's heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.


"For a casual user of the Web, perhaps this could replace carrier service," said Jeffrey Silva, an analyst at the Medley Global Advisors research firm. "Because it is more plentiful and there is no price tag, it could have a real appeal to some people."


"Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers," Genachowski said in a an emailed statement.

Some companies and local cities are already moving in this direction. Google is providing free Wi-Fi to the public in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and parts of Silicon Valley.



The FCC's plan is part of a broader strategy to re-purpose entire swaths of the nation's airwaves to accomplish a number of goals, including bolstering cellular networks and creating a dedicated channel for emergency responders.


That sentiment echoes arguments made by companies such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Intel and Qualcomm that wrote in a letter to FCC staff late last month that the government should focus its attention on selling the airwaves to businesses.


Intel, whose chips are used in many of the devices that operate on cellular networks, fears that the new Wi-Fi service would crowd the airwaves. The company said it would rather the FCC use the airwaves from television stations to bolster high-speed cellular networks, known as 4G.

"We think that that spectrum would be most useful to the larger society and to broadband deployment if it were licensed," said Peter Pitsch, the executive director of communications for Intel. "As unlicensed, there would be a disincentive to invest in expensive networking equipment and provide users with optimal quality of service."

Cisco and other telecommunications equipment firms told the FCC that it needs to test the airwaves more for potential interference.

"Cisco strongly urges the commission to firmly retreat from the notion that it can predict, or should predict . . . how the unlicensed guard bands might be used," the networking giant wrote.



"We want our policy to be more end-user-centric and not carrier-centric. That's where there is a difference in opinion" with carriers and their partners, said a senior FCC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal is still being considered by the five-member panel.

The lobbying from the cellular industry motivated longtime rivals Google and Microsoft to join forces to support the FCC's proposal. Both companies would benefit from a boom in new devices that could access the free Wi-Fi networks.

These companies want corporations to multiply the number of computers, robots, devices and other machines that are able to connect to the Internet, analysts said. They want cars that drive themselves to have more robust Internet access.

More public Wi-Fi, they say, will spur the use of "millions of devices that will compose the coming Internet of things," the firms wrote in their comment to the FCC last week.

"What this does for the first time is bring the prospect of cheap broadband, but like any proposal it has to get through a political process first," said Harold Feld, a vice president at the public interest group Public Knowledge.

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