Interesting commentary by Kevin Werbach for ZDNet news regarding 802.11 networks and lack of scarcity of the airwaves:

Here’s a cure for bandwidth blues

(Note: emphasis below cheerfully added!)

Bandwidth isn’t as scarce as you think. The cure for the broadband blues is right in
front of our faces, but we don’t see it because we’ve trained ourselves to look elsewhere. The
answer is something called open spectrum.

The concept is that wireless frequencies could be shared among many users rather than assigned
in exclusive licenses to individual companies. Smart devices subject to rules ensuring that no one
player could hog the airwaves would replace networks defined by governments and service
providers. Spectrum would be used more efficiently. Bandwidth would be cheaper and more
ubiquitous.

It’s a deeply subversive idea, just as the Internet was for networking and open source is for software
development. But it’s an idea whose time has come.

“We could have the greatest
wave of innovation since the
Internet…if we could unlock the
spectrum to explore the new
possibilities,” said David
Reed, formerly chief scientist
at Lotus and a researcher
involved in the original
development of the Internet.

All it would take to open the
floodgates for innovation are a
few government decisions to
make more wireless
spectrum available for
“unlicensed” services.
Unfortunately, the companies
that have paid for exclusive
spectrum licenses oppose
alternatives that would make
the airwaves shared and virtually free. They argue that unlicensed services would cause ruinous
interference–a “tragedy of the commons.” The real tragedy is that today’s spectrum owners are
preventing a commons that could benefit all.

No government has yet taken the open spectrum idea seriously. There’s new hope today, though,
thanks to the runaway success of 802.11b (WiFi) technology. It uses a small, congested sliver of
spectrum set aside for unlicensed use. WiFi was designed for the mundane purpose of replacing
Ethernet cables for connecting office PCs. Despite these limitations, WiFi is taking off as an
alternative mechanism for Internet access. There will be 10 million WiFi devices installed by the
end of this year, and 4,000 public wireless access points in locations such as airports and cafes.