In the real world, WiFi networks have to either be contained inside buildings or deployed outdoors with external antennas and wires piercing the walls of buildings.

WiFi signals don’t propagate over the same distances and at the same speeds as 3G signals because the transmit power is so much less.

Who do you think you’re fooling when you claim WiFi is a replacement for 3G? It’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard.

Anyway, where does this fear of interference come from? There is no hidden scheduler problem. Other networks are just noise and noise is irrelevant as long as you can maintain sufficient C/N. That’s the my whole point of scheduling vs. contention. So you end up with 5mi radius cells instead of 20mi radius cells. So what? In the high population markets where carriers make their bread, you end up with smaller cells sizes anyway just to deal with capacity issues. In areas where you don’t have capacity issues there is plenty of spectrum to go around and you can stop worrying about noise from other carriers and grow back your cells more to the limit of path balance.

If 700 MHz were made unlicensed how many people would actually deploy high-power base-stations? This is especially the case for sparsely populated areas without the customer base to support multiple commercial offerings. It’s not like equipment and tower space are free. The truth is that if 700MHz were unlicensed the only change would be in low population areas, where a business case could finally be made for offering service. In high population areas user density would necessitate small enough cells to diminish interference concerns. Couple that with the reality that very few parties have the wherewithal to build a ubiquitous network even in potentially lucrative markets and where is the problem?

We employ different technologies for MANs and WANs, and yes, they may employ scheduled access to resolve contention, but that’s only part of the problem. There is also the problem of how schedulers interact with each other, and how to defeat hidden scheduler problems. These are problems that WiFi doesn’t address because they’re extremely difficult.

So to simply wave them off and hide behind your faith in the ability of engineers to defeat fundamental laws of physics is to invite the regulators to behave in such a way that nobody gets to use the 700 Mhz bands for any use more sophisticating than opening a garage door.

But that may be what you want.

Until we know how to resolve them, it’s irresponsible to make this claim. I’ve been inventing protocols for wireless networks since 1990 and I don’t know how to do it, and neither do any of my colleagues in the research and standards community. You may as well be saying we don’t need to worry about Global Warming because some day the geeks will give us Cold Fusion.

Listen to the real wireless geeks, Om, not the uninformed, faith-based speculators.

And ignore the cynics here. We can make the technology workable. It won’t be perfect, but nothing ever is at first. What matters is the political will and the influence to make it happen. We’re getting more of the former–now all we need is the latter.

Google’s gambit was a start–now we need to build on that.

Many of the problems of unlicensed spectrum can indeed be solved economically for dense urban areas where the metro backhaul infrastructure has excess capacity (or where the population is willing to fund additional backhaul with tax dollars).

South Dakota and Colorado have two Senators also, and the FCC is required to represent the interests of all regions of the country. A licensed wholesale model may have worked (if the wholeseller could be forced to build out rural areas in a reasonable time frame, and you could figure out how to regulate the wholesale pricing), but recommending unlicensed shows an ignorance of rural and suburban economics.

4.6 Billion dollars is a huge, huge, huge amount until you think about it in terms of $16 for every Man, Woman and Child. The FCC is giving it away for ULTRA-Cheap.

Om is speaking about the dangers of increasing corporate governance over our lives by giving them even more spectrum.

The posters are talking about the technical ramifications of having it unlicensed.

I agree with Om on this , technical problems can always be engineered around. I would much rather have a public technical problem on my hands then being at the mercy of one private body.

What cannot be resolved is that once the spectrum is licensed to one of the big three – AT&T, VZ or Google, we are almost always are going to be at their mercy.

It is the choice between lesser of two evils, though I have faith in technologists’ ability to come up with viable solutions.

Sure, I am a little idealist about this, but it this whole saga is not very confidence inspiring.