Broadband Future

It is quite clear that cities, municipalities, and communities within the United States have desired wireless infrastructures for their citizenry, businesses, tourists and local governments since broadband Wi-Fi (802.11) became tried and true in the marketplace.

Now industry leaders AirSpan, Alvarion, Aperto, Redline, and Solectek are readying for WiMax deployments utilizing 3.65GHz licensed, non-exclusive spectrum in the United States. This would allow municipalities and cities to fully exploit the tremendous advantages available through newer broadband wireless technologies in an extremely cost-effective manner.

At some point over the past 5 years or so almost all major MSA's (metropolitan service areas) within the U.S. have issued RFI's or RFP's initiating projects that would attempt to bring wireless infrastructures to their citizenry, local businesses, and government. City and county officials, network providers, and numerous proponents of these necessary components for our communities have worked tirelessly to bring these broadband wireless networks to fruition.

Kudos to Minneapolis and their staunch efforts with USI Wireless to not only come up with a working and scalable wireless network, but aggressively negotiating for substantial funding that would support local digital access, inclusion, literacy, and other community outreach programs.

Also, Brookline, MA and the level of excitement that was generated by local city officials, IT staff, public safety, and the overall commitment from the community to launch their wireless services.

However, these types of success stories are few and far between in the new U.S. broadband wireless arena and many of those RFI's and RFP's have found the circular file.

We only need to look as far as the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to understand why the United States has fallen behind in broadband wireless deployments (14th in the world). The FCC's lack of vision and direct support of large incumbent network operators and service providers have only tied the hands of local governments, and made it impossible for cash-starved cities and communities to realize the full benefits of developing and deploying broadband wireless infrastructures for their cities, municipalities, and communities.

Large incumbents in this marketplace have no specific plan or business case and have not invited public participation in their efforts on how to best identify the public need, deliver their services, and collaborate with communities and local governments to present a workable operating and revenue model that will enable cities, municipalities, and communities to define their own path towards their broadband future. The United States is an extremely internet savvy base, and they want their say in this matter.

It is a fact that there is no room for a middle man in the offering of core network access and services as evidenced by Earthlink's and ATT's retreat from the muni-wireless marketplace.

As a result municipalities have run into constant road blocks attributed to the limitations of viable solutions, created by the FCC, and their rule changes in the 2.5GHz EBS spectrum (formerly the ITFS) and the mediocrity that was the 700MHz auction held in January of 2008. All the FCC did was allow 'du-opolies' to be created during these processes representative of Sprint Nextel and Clearwire in the EBS spectrum arena and ATT and Verizon in the 700MHz spectrum arena.

This will all change with the advent of 3.65 GHz WiMax and will allow cities, municipalities, and communities to fully exploit the synergies available between their citizenry, businesses, constituents, and local government and their new high speed 3.65 GHz WiMax broadband wireless network.

The stakes have never been higher for local communities and municipalities exploring the broadband wireless opportunity and they should seize control of their broadband futures right now.

At the same time, the path to viable implementation remains complex, only due to the FCC's biased decision making that benefited large incumbent network