Here's the scoop on the "Broadband and Digital Future- Who is in Control" conference. Wish I could make it.
Access: Broadband and Digital Future- Who is in Control? (4/5/03)
Saturday, April 5, 2003
Stanford University
Jordan Hall in Main Quad building
Palo Alto, California
9:00AM - 6:00PM
Registration Fee - $15-$25
(Sliding scale)
Student $10
Schedule
(Speakers' organization for identification only)
9:00 - 9:30 Registration (Morning refreshments)
9:30 - 10:30 Welcome & Introduction
mic Mylen - Free Radio Berkeley
Steve Zeltzer - LaborNet, LaborTech
Walter Johnson - Secretary Treasurer/SF Labor Council
Keynote speakers
Mark Cooper - Consumer Federation of America
Peter B. Collins - Exec. Board/AFTRA
Ken Hamidi - Faceintel.com
10:30 - 11:20 Workshops I: (Room # to be announced)
1) Privatization and Municipalization of Telecommunications
Bruce Lusignan- Stanford University
Wes Brain - SEIU 503, Oregon Public Employees Union
2) Privacy, Spying and Censorship
Jeramie Scott - Coalition for Labor Justice, Stanford
Todd Davies - Stanford University
Peter Neumann - CPSR
Jake Appelbaum
11:30 - 12:20 Workshops II: (Room # to be announced)
1) Public Access Cable and Interconnect
Joseph Partansky - Concord Cable Access
Steve Zeltzer - LaborNet, Labor Video Project
David Miles - Skating Place / PPNSF
2) The "Digital Divide" and Discrimination
Art McGee - Project Change/ AntiRacismNet
mic Mylen - Free Radio Berkeley
Raj Jayadev - Silicon Valley DEBUG
12:30 - 1:20 Lunch (sandwiches and drink provided)
Videos
Music - Larry Shaw - solddowntheriver.org
1:30 - 2:20 Workshops III: (Room # to be announced)
1) Workers' Right in the New Technology
Joshua Sperry - CWA 9423
Karin Hart - CWA 9415
Raj Jayadev - Silicon Valley DEBUG
Peter B. Collins - Ex. Board/AFTRA
Carolyn Bowden - IATSE
2) Wireless Networks (Wi-Fi) and Micro Radio
John Parulis - brightpathvideo.com
mic Mylen / Stephen Dunifer - Free Radio Berkeley
Sarah Olsen - SF Liberation Radio
2:30 - 3:20 Workshops IV : (Room # to be announced)
1) Defending Access to Alternative Media
Jeff Pearlstein - Media Alliance
Sarah Olsen - SF Liberation Radio
Steve Zeltzer - LaborNet, Labor Video Project
Ken Hamidi - Faceintel.com
2) Global Internet Governance (ICANN, the WSIS, etc.)
Dorothy Kidd - University of San Francisco
Art McGee - Project Change/AntiRacismNet
Peter Neumann - CPSR
Karl Auerbach - ICANN
3) Open Source
Jake Appelbaum - appelbaum.net
(More speakers to be announced)
3:30 - 4:20 Workshops V : (Room # to be announced)
1) Cable Internet Access and Regulation
Dorothy Kidd - University of San Francisco
Mark Cooper - Consumer Federation of America
Jeff Pearlstein - Media Alliance
2) Labor Video and a Labor channel
Carl Bryant - NALC 214, Letter Carriers Today
Wes Brain - SEIU 503, Oregon Public Employees Union
John Anderson - Workers Independent News Service (WINS)
4:30 - 6:00 Report Back, Proposals
I've got eight hours of footage from yesterday's Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons conference.
There are a few more speakers today.
I don't know when I'm going to find time to get all of this up before I leave for Austin Friday, but I'll do my best. More likely, I will create a few "highlight reels." (Even that will take a while. There were many highlights.)
It was really an incredible group of people that Larry assembled in one room -- and it seems like we're really starting to get somewhere towards where this needs to go...
Spectrum Wants to Be Free
Never pay for phone, cable, or net access again
By Kevin Werbach for Wired.
In an open spectrum world, wireless transmitters would be as ubiquitous as microprocessors: in televisions, cars, public spaces, handheld devices, everywhere. They would tune themselves to free spectrum and self-assemble into networks. Anyone could become a radio broadcaster reaching millions. Phone calls would rarely need to pass through central networks; they would be handed off and relayed across devices, for free or nearly so. Businesses would track far-flung assets in real time via embedded sensors. Big TV networks and cable operators would lose their hammerlock control over media distribution. Entrepreneurs would develop as yet undreamed of applications that we can't live without. It happens any time open platforms emerge - think eBay and Amazon.com...When spectrum licensing was established in the early 20th century, radios were primitive, as was the regulatory model used to govern them. To be heard, broadcasters needed an exclusive slice of spectrum. Today, however, digital technologies let many users occupy the same frequency at the same time. As the FCC's Powell points out, "Modern technology has fundamentally changed the nature and extent of spectrum use." Today's devices employ advanced digital signal processing and other techniques, and they're smart enough to coexist without interference.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/view.html
Spectrum Wants to Be Free
Never pay for phone, cable, or net access again
By Kevin Werbach
A revolution is brewing in wireless. In an industry speech in October, FCC chair Michael Powell expressed support for a radical idea called open spectrum that could transform the communications landscape as profoundly as the Internet ever did. If it works, you'll never pay for telephone, cable, or Net access again.
Open spectrum treats the airwaves as a commons, shared by all. It's the brainchild of engineers, activists, and scholars such as wireless gadfly Dewayne Hendricks, former Lotus chief scientist David Reed, and NYU law professor Yochai Benkler. The idea is that smart devices cooperating with one another function more effectively than huge proprietary communications networks. The commons can be created through distinct, unlicensed "parks" or through "underlay" technologies, such as ultrawideband, that are invisible to licensed users in the same band.
In an open spectrum world, wireless transmitters would be as ubiquitous as microprocessors: in televisions, cars, public spaces, handheld devices, everywhere. They would tune themselves to free spectrum and self-assemble into networks. Anyone could become a radio broadcaster reaching millions. Phone calls would rarely need to pass through central networks; they would be handed off and relayed across devices, for free or nearly so. Businesses would track far-flung assets in real time via embedded sensors. Big TV networks and cable operators would lose their hammerlock control over media distribution. Entrepreneurs would develop as yet undreamed of applications that we can't live without. It happens any time open platforms emerge - think eBay and Amazon.com.
The revolution has already started. Wi-Fi, a runaway success, uses a narrow slice of spectrum that is already "open." Wi-Fi is a shot across the bow, much the way the Arpanet served as a proving ground for the commercial Internet. As ever, Moore's law is on the side of the technology upstart. Radio waves resemble ripples on a pond rather than swimmers in a pool - they pass through one another. Distinguishing them can be difficult, but it's not beyond the talents of today's radio engineers.
When spectrum licensing was established in the early 20th century, radios were primitive, as was the regulatory model used to govern them. To be heard, broadcasters needed an exclusive slice of spectrum. Today, however, digital technologies let many users occupy the same frequency at the same time. As the FCC's Powell points out, "Modern technology has fundamentally changed the nature and extent of spectrum use." Today's devices employ advanced digital signal processing and other techniques, and they're smart enough to coexist without interference.
Wi-Fi's success is attracting capital and encouraging research into the open spectrum idea. Last year, over the bitter opposition of entrenched spectrum holders, the FCC granted limited approval for ultrawideband. Within the next year, half of all laptops used at work are expected to have wireless connections. And within four years, Intel hopes to incorporate transmitters into all of its processor chips.
Standing in the way of open spectrum are incumbent licensees, government agencies nervous about interference, and economists entranced by the airwave auction market.
Yet the spectrum auction markets are not free markets. Each buyer gains what is, in effect, a little monopoly - which, in the aggregate, stifles communications progress just as well as one big monopoly.
Governments have long treated the airwaves like real estate to be handed out to favored operators or auctioned for huge sums. And like real estate, spectrum makes people do stupid things. The English auctions for third-generation mobile phone licenses in 2000 left the winners choked with debt. In the US, the battle over bankrupt NextWave's licenses and the hyped transition to digital TV are multibillion-dollar fiascoes.
The problem here is not the market, but the outdated real-estate metaphor. Yet, if spectrum was seen as a commons that could be shared by all, then builders of wireless devices would rush to fill it, unleashing market forces to everyone's benefit. It's already happened with Wi-Fi: A billion-dollar industry emerged overnight with no protection against interference. And Wi-Fi is only the beginning.
Independent analyst Kevin Werbach (kevin@werbach.com) is the former FCC counsel for new technology policy.
Here's a great article by Sarah Lai Stirland for the Seattle Times that explains the truth about the amazing consumer benefits of wireless and the fallacy of spectrum scarcity:
Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology
(via BoingBoing)
The core of this idea is the belief that, if the rules are tweaked the right way, technology companies in the next five years will have brought to market the equipment that will make the notion of electromagnetic-spectrum scarcity, a fundamental issue of telecom economics, seem quaint.Equipment makers would create devices that would intelligently navigate through the congested airwaves — the so-called spectrum — to avoid virtual traffic jams and allow everyone from broadcasters to kids with handheld devices to use the spectrum. Consumers and tinkerers could come up with their own ideas for new applications that would run on these devices, much as they have on the Internet. In turn, the growing number of applications and tools would drive equipment demand, fostering growth of this wireless version of the Internet.
Several chip-making companies are developing products that would power this sort of equipment. They expect to see the first products on the market in the next couple of years.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134564261_btspectrum28.html
Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology
By Sarah Lai Stirland
Special to The Seattle Times
WorldCom is bankrupt. AT&T is dismantling itself. And numerous telecommunications start-ups poised to compete in the broadband revolution are dead.
In light of telecom's death spiral, the prognosis for endless bandwidth and ubiquitous networked computing looks dire.
But a growing group of lawyers, engineers and telecommunications analysts believes that it has the solution needed to finance, develop and ultimately restore the broadband vision: The solution lies with you, the consumer. All we need is a little help from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The core of this idea is the belief that, if the rules are tweaked the right way, technology companies in the next five years will have brought to market the equipment that will make the notion of electromagnetic-spectrum scarcity, a fundamental issue of telecom economics, seem quaint.
Equipment makers would create devices that would intelligently navigate through the congested airwaves — the so-called spectrum — to avoid virtual traffic jams and allow everyone from broadcasters to kids with handheld devices to use the spectrum. Consumers and tinkerers could come up with their own ideas for new applications that would run on these devices, much as they have on the Internet. In turn, the growing number of applications and tools would drive equipment demand, fostering growth of this wireless version of the Internet.
Several chip-making companies are developing products that would power this sort of equipment. They expect to see the first products on the market in the next couple of years.
The group wants the FCC to significantly modify and limit the way it uses auctions to allocate spectrum, while encouraging the spectrum's current occupants to share. The current auctions give winning bidders exclusive rights to portions of the spectrum.
In an ideal world, the FCC would treat the airwaves like a highway system nobody owns and enforce rules governing how people use its lanes without crashing into each other, the group says. And in cases where this isn't possible, the FCC would allow people to drive across other people's "property" as long as they keep a low profile and don't do any damage.
Given this freedom, inventors and entrepreneurs would invent new vehicles and new ways of using the highway, the thinking goes. Consumers would finance the development of the airwaves by buying the devices that suit them best and abiding by the rules of the road that prevent nasty accidents.
But to make this vision a reality, the devices need a slice of the spectrum that would form a virtual park or an airwaves commons where equipment makers and others could experiment. In addition, common protocols — industry standards that allow devices to understand each others' communications — and rules are needed to prevent accidents and to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.
Users also would need to adopt a common understanding of rights and responsibilities to quell potential disputes, prevent potential damage from airwave interference and minimize opportunities for litigation.
Outlining the vision
Discussions within a group calling itself the Open Spectrum Ad Hoc Consortium have resulted in a number of detailed outlines of this vision and how it would work. Among its members are such influential luminaries as New York University School of Law professor Yochai Benkler, Internet law visionary Larry Lessig and the Internet pioneer David Reed.
"To take advantage of the fantastic potential of open spectrum, we must change our spectrum policies. With few exceptions, existing laws and regulations are rooted in historical anachronisms," writes Kevin Werbach, a technology consultant and a member of the group, in a policy paper published recently.
Hundreds of other stakeholders have filed comments with the FCC on the issue of spectrum management, an issue the commission is rethinking. In June, FCC Chairman Michael Powell created a task force to examine the issue, and it is scheduled to release a report with recommendations this week.
But the open-spectrum advocates have found a powerful ally in Microsoft, which has launched a full-fledged lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., to promote the idea.
In a July letter to the FCC, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Craig Mundie outlined a rationale for developing wireless broadband networks that sounded remarkably like the one the open-spectrum consortium espouses.
"Such networks can develop in unlicensed spectrum — using technologies, network architectures and financing models that are different than those used by existing networks," he wrote. "One of the most important and often overlooked consequences of the creation of unlicensed bands was the tapping of an entirely new source of capital to build networks: the financial resources of the users themselves."
Microsoft has hired the Washington, D.C.- based law firm of Harris Wiltshire & Grannis to lobby Congress and government agencies. In addition, Pierre De Vries, Microsoft's director of advanced product development, has been involved in explaining the company's viewpoint on the issue in workshops at the FCC this summer.
While the fast-growing Wi-Fi technology — which connects computers to the Internet through high-speed wireless networks — has developed in the unlicensed portion of the spectrum, De Vries also sees the need for the FCC to establish rules and enforce etiquette in this band.
"There are an increasing number of stories where people in an apartment, for example, build a data network and a neighbor buys a baby monitor or a cordless phone, which works in the same piece of spectrum, but without taking into account that there are other radios in the spectrum," he said.
"So when the cordless phone is in use, the data network doesn't work very well."
Just a utopia?
As popular as the idea of a spectrum commons is in some circles, others write it off as an engineer's utopia. Still others have called for a more market-oriented approach, but they disagree when defining a market approach.
Gerald Faulhaber and David Farber, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, advocate a "big-bang" approach in which the FCC would hold a single auction for all of the available spectrum and then allow secondary trading of those rights.
NYU's Benkler, among others, cautions against this approach. He warns that giving people permanent property rights could put the FCC in a regulatory straitjacket that would prevent it from backing away from failed policy experiments.
Meanwhile, the FCC has moved cautiously in the past year to change its regulations to allow for the development of new technologies, such as ultrawideband and software-defined radios.
Sony, Microsoft and other companies are interested in ultrawideband for its ability to help consumers zap bandwidth-greedy content such as video around gadgets in the home.
But any move by the FCC faces a thicket of political opposition and criticism from companies holding licenses, as well as other spectrum occupants.
They worry that new applications could interfere with their existing uses of the spectrum.
"Every time the FCC tries to move forward on policy, the current stakeholders have a lot to lose if the system changes, so that slows things down," says Stagg Newman, a former FCC chief technologist, now a senior telecommunications expert at McKinsey in Washington, D.C.
While many in the community laud the vision of the open-spectrum revolutionaries, they also believe it's something that won't be implemented soon.
"If we were starting with a clean slate and clean spectrum, with no historical baggage, sure we would go build things that way, but the challenge facing us is how do we get from here to there?" says Vanu Bose, founder of Vanu, a Boston-based software-defined radio start-up.
Nevertheless, during the spectrum-policy workshops this summer, FCC Chairman Powell and Commissioner Michael Copps supported spectrum sharing, unlicensed bands and urgent reform. While acknowledging the likely political obstacles, Powell noted that Wi-Fi's explosion in popularity has significantly changed the political equation.
"Wireless is not a foreign thing to consumers," he said.
"It's becoming an indispensable thing to the average consumer and that changes minds and that changes policy. I think that's really, really important."
Sarah Lai Stirland writes frequently about public policy and technology. She can be reached at sarah@sarahstirland.com.
David Reed has posted his usual brilliant and thoughtful analysis of Open Spectrum in a single comprehensive and wonderfully-footnoted document for the FCC. Thanks!
Comments for FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force on Spectrum Policy.
Now let's hope somebody over there is paying attention. (Michael Powell? Are you listening?)
I argue in this note that the foundation of a sound economic and regulatory approach to managing radio communications in the US and worldwide cannot and should not ignore fundamental advances in the understanding of communications technology that have been developed in the last few decades. Those advances are just beginning to reach the point where they can be fruitfully applied in the marketplace, at a time when the need for a huge increase in communications traffic is beginning to surge.
It will be crucial for the continued growth and leadership of the US economy, and for its security as well, to embrace these new technologies, and follow them where they lead, in spite of the potential negative impact that these technologies may have on traditional telecommunications business models. There is a “new frontier” being opened up by the interaction of digital communications technology, internetworking architectures, and distributed, inexpensive general purpose computing devices. This new frontier cannot be addressed by a model that awards the telecommunications operators exclusive rights (such as “spectrum property rights”) that can be used to “capture” the value yet to be produced by innovators in underlying technologies[1] or applications.
My argument is based on a simple but crucially important technical fact: the useful economic value in a communications system architecture does not inhere in some abstract “ether” that can be allocated by dividing it into disjoint frequency bands and coverage areas...
I argue in this note that the foundation of a sound economic and regulatory approach to managing radio communications in the US and worldwide cannot and should not ignore fundamental advances in the understanding of communications technology that have been developed in the last few decades. Those advances are just beginning to reach the point where they can be fruitfully applied in the marketplace, at a time when the need for a huge increase in communications traffic is beginning to surge.
It will be crucial for the continued growth and leadership of the US economy, and for its security as well, to embrace these new technologies, and follow them where they lead, in spite of the potential negative impact that these technologies may have on traditional telecommunications business models. There is a “new frontier” being opened up by the interaction of digital communications technology, internetworking architectures, and distributed, inexpensive general purpose computing devices. This new frontier cannot be addressed by a model that awards the telecommunications operators exclusive rights (such as “spectrum property rights”) that can be used to “capture” the value yet to be produced by innovators in underlying technologies[1] or applications.
My argument is based on a simple but crucially important technical fact: the useful economic value in a communications system architecture does not inhere in some abstract “ether” that can be allocated by dividing it into disjoint frequency bands and coverage areas.[2] Instead it is created largely by the system design choices – the choice of data switching architecture, information coding scheme, modulation scheme, antenna placement, etc.
The most important observation about the impact of systems architecture on economic value is this: there exist networked architectures whose utility increases with the density of independent terminals (terminals are end-points, such as cellular telephones, TV sets, wireless mobile PDAs, consumer electronic devices in the home, etc.) Network architectures provide tremendous gain in communications efficiency on a systems basis – I call this cooperation gain, because it arises out of cooperative strategies among the various terminals and other elements in a networked system. (It should be emphasized that cooperation gain is not available to non-networked systems at all). Cooperation gain is discussed below...
[1] New technologies such as spread spectrum, smart antennas, ultrawideband radio, and software-defined radios create more capacity that cannot be known accurately until there has been broad practical experience and an industrial learning curve that reduces their costs. The FCC has consistently tried to base regulation on accurate forward looking prediction of the economic value of new technologies and new services, but those predictions have been consistently wrong. That isn’t surprising given that the value is established decades later.
[2] The confusion that led pre-20th century physicists to postulate a “luminiferous ether” which carried radio and light waves has persisted in the economic approaches that attempt to manage communications capacity as if it were an “ether”. Just as Einstein pointed out, counterintuitively to most, that there need be no “ether” in formulating Relativity Theory, recent results in multiuser information theory show that counter to the intuition of spectrum economists, there is no “information capacity” in spectrum independent of the system using it.
Posted by Lisa at 10:03 AM
I just found SATN.org, a blog David Reed describes as: "...a place where I, Bob Frankston, and Dan Bricklin have decided to put a joint weblog and pointers to a collection of current essays. Think of it as a stream of consciousness site - and an experiment in exploiting the group forming properties of the Blogging world." (Thanks, Josh)
