Feds Drag on Freeing Mobile Spectrum

Two years after promising to free bandwidth for mobile communications, the federal government has done nothing

WASHINGTON--The federal government is slinking away from a promise by President Obama to free up badly-needed radio spectrum for mobile users and the already over-taxed networks that serve them.

Just months after the publication of the National Broadband Plan in early 2010, the president issued a memorandum ordering the FCC and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to "make available a total of 500 MHz of Federal and nonfederal spectrum over the next 10 years" for mobile users.

The goal was to clear unused or underutilized spectrum the FCC could then auction off for use by an exploding mobile ecosystem.

Yet two years later, despite frequent assurances that progress is being made to head off a "spectrum crisis," almost no new frequencies have been offered for commercial use by either agency.

Comments

[Sanjuro Tsubaki]

Cnet comments seems to be made up of Obamabots who think that their glorious leader is under attack when the author is really aiming at the PCAST "public-private partnership" bullshit and all the time and money that federal bureaucracies will use up transitioning to new technologies. Yeah, I'm sure another commission will develop that breakthrough technology that will make everything work. Sometimes it doesn't work that way. Experimentation on this scale is called CAPITALISM, ever heard of it? And no, the RFC's that created the internet were NOT written by a presidential commission. Ethernet wasn't either. But it's especially insulting for the fed to complain about the difficulty of adjusting when less well-funded, less omnipotent private organizations do it all of the time, often under duress.