Get Wireless

by Catharine Lo | Wired Magazine | Issue 5.04 | Apr 1997

"Spectrum is the real estate on which the wealth of the 21st century will be built. Here's your map."

"Air. You need to know about air. Not for breathing, but for something almost as elemental - for communicating. The airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum - this truly is the next frontier of the Digital Revolution."

"We've done wires. We've got wires buried and strung around most of the globe. There may be plenty of work left in filling out that wired infrastructure, beefing up bandwidth, upgrading to fiber optics, and laying the last few feet into every room of every home. Yet the real action is happening not on the ground, but in the air. That's where the true leaps in connectivity will come."

"In the 20th-century analog world, you needed separate devices for separate communication functions, and you needed to transmit the signals on exclusive channels. Only radios picked up broadcast radio signals. Only TVs picked up television signals. In the 21st-century digital world, data, sound, and video will have been reduced to the same binary bits, which can be picked up by a variety of devices and transmitted in any order over similar territory in the spectrum. This technological change has sent a chain reaction reverberating through the world of wireless communications."

"Digitization expands the amount of space available in the spectrum in two ways. Internally, it allows more layers of information to be transmitted simultaneously - and more efficiently - in the same frequencies we used before. Externally, advances in digital technology promise to push the boundaries into parts of the spectrum once considered useless. However, along with the new space come new applications and services that push up demand. The more space we gain, the more crowded we get."

"The problem in the United States boils down to this: we're still trapped in an analog world. Everyone thought in terms of analog devices when the spectrum was doled out. Now we're watching the first big digital projects being launched and facing up to the idea that everything eventually will go digital. The federal government has slowly begun to react. Congress finally passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to supersede legislation devised in 1934. And the Federal Communications Commission began to put parts of the spectrum up for public auction. More radical reallocation of the airwaves may come soon."

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Wired 5.04 : Get Wireless