Daily Socotra

21 September 2006

Full Spectrum

I walked out of Union Station completely unaware of the sticking point. The vast marble bulk of the train station was behind me, tourists jamming the concourse the runs between the Metro and the real trains. The Phoenix Park Hotel, home of the Dubliner bar, was on my right.

Fish and Chips and a Guinness, I thought. Maybe I could just disappear for the afternoon, go back to the office around quitting time, mumble something about the hearing and go home. It was just the sort of day to be on the cusp of things.

The first coolness of the season was in the air and breezy. I like the dark wood at the Dubliner, even if it was hooked up with the Marxists in the troubles, and the fresh-faced young Irishmen behind the bar were here to cool off for a bit.

When it is warm, it is nice to sit out at the sidewalk tables, and think of Marxism with nostalgia. Straight ahead, or turn right?

I weighed my options, thinking that I should slow down and enjoy the city, before the Iranians get The Bomb. There was more saber rattling going on in New York, with a high-level delegation of the black hole of the Islamic Republic's leadership in town for the opening of the UN General Assembly. President Ahmadinejad was speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in lieu of any meaningful discussion with the American government.

I don't know how you negotiate with people who see the world in such starkly different terms. I do not have a good feeling about this next coming crisis, and think it might be useful to be living upwind of likely target areas.

In the end, the light changed and my iron professionalism kept me going toward the dome of the Capitol, and the Senate Russell Building. There was a hearing that sounded like it might explain why Senator Stevens, R-AK, was so interested in the white space between the television channels. There is money, of course, since that is what everything is about, but I did not understand what his angle was, and who was going to be showered with riches. I hoped to one of them, of course, but was realistic enough to know that by the time there are hearings and legislation, someone else has been working the problem for years, and the division of the spoils is pre-ordained.

Walking up toward the building I saw that the fortification of Capitol Hill was continuing. Anti-vehicle barriers are in place on the streets, which were once open to traffic. Walls with deep footings are now encircling the entire perimeter of the Congressional enclave.

I found a side door to the Russell Building years ago where there were no tourists. Security was crisp and efficient, and I walked to the elevators quickly and took the first car to the second floor and the Senate Commerce Committee hearing room, Russell 253. If I had gone left, I could have walked down to Majority Leader Frist's office, and asked how he was doing on the immigration bill that had us so excited in the Spring.

Apparently the millions of illegals already in the US had become a sticking point. There was implacable resistance in the House to the Senate proposal to normalizing their status, and the perverse (if perfectly logical) result was that the Congress was going to do nothing at all.

I had been meaning to ask why the great debate had come down to a compromise proposal to build another few hundred miles of fortifications along the border, slightly thicker than the ones around the Capitol.

“Let's focus on a problem the American people understand,'' is what the Majority Leader told the reporters “and that is, we have hundreds of thousands of people coming across our border every year into our country.”

I certainly could understand that, and was grateful that he put the matter in such simple terms for me.

There was really nothing I could contribute to that discussion, and decided to stay the course. I approached the long check-in table with one of the young staffers, and inside there was a long table with sandwiches and sodas. Who said there was no such thing as a free lunch?

You need an attraction for a technical hearing. This one had the daunting title of “Removing Barriers to Rural and Municipal Wireless Broadband Communications.” In this context, barriers are wrong, and taking them down was going to create all sorts of new opportunities. The question was about who was going to benefit.

The people who were going to testify were experts, and there is only a handful of people who wake up in the morning worried about the allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum. I am not one of them, so permit me to give you a shorthand of the issue.

The Government has eminent domain over the physical properties of the universe. Odd but true. The properties of the way the radio spectrum travel make certain bands unique. We once used the Extremely Low Frequency waves to penetrate the earth and communicate with ballistic missile submarines deep under the waves, just in case we had to tell them about doomsday.

Medium and High frequency bands are excellent for their ability to pass through walls and buildings, and were most desirable for broadcasting analogue television signals from high-power antennae. That is where the money collides with the physics. In order to provide the best signal to consumers, the Federal Communications Commission apportioned discrete channels to the broadcast industry, and provided vacant channels alongside to prevent interference.

The technology has changed. We get television from cable and satellite these days, and everything is going from analogue to digital. But because the spectrum that is being vacated is potentially so valuable for new applications, those that have been granted monopoly use of the universe are fierce in their determination to keep it.

It is all explained much more elegantly in the white paper that Mr. Pierre de Vries, Former Senior Director of Advanced Technology Policy, Microsoft Corp, and five other representatives of state, local and academic advocacy groups provided the Committee. He is a slim and elegant man, who apparently understands these things.

These groups advocate using the "white space" that exists in the existing television space. Based on their testimony, it appears that even in dense urban markets there is plenty of unoccupied spectrum that the broadcasters are sitting on. I chewed on my tuna sandwich and my eyes widened. The way things had been allocated to guarantee clear television reception meant that nationwide, only 23% of the allocated spectrum is in use. Three quarters of it is vacant. The way is open for a Gold Rush in new unlicensed technologies to start operating in the three-quarters of the High Frequency spectrum.

This could mean billions of dollars in new opportunities, and all it would take is a new public law.

That is the point that has attracted the interest of Senator Stevens. If the continental US only is using a quarter of the spectrum for all the television stations, his home state of Alaska has precisely one- the unfortunately named Regional Alaska Network, or RATNET, which broadcasts segments of NBC, CBC, and ABC.

As far as the Senator is concerned, that makes Alaska a place where the entire spectrum is available to do just about anything. Broadband access to the wilderness! Every remote fishing village completely wired to the web!

The bill moving through the Senate is called Title VI, or “Access to TV White Space.” Its provisions would permit unlicensed use of vacant spectrum by State and Local entities, and has broad-based bi-partisan support. That includes sponsors Stevens, George Allen (R-VA), John Sununu (R-NH), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and John Kerry (D-MA).

Since it is one of those things that only a handful of people understand, prospects for passage appear good. The things we understand will have to wait until after the election.