According to The Washington Post, the FCC has unveiled a proposal to blanket much of the nation in long-range WiFi that will extend to locations that traditional broadband can’t reach.
The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.
The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.
The report from The Post doesn’t specify the spectrum that the FCC wishes to utilize to accomplish this, but I can only assume, based on the features they describe, that it would utilize the spectrum that was left blank after broadcasters dropped analog signals in favor of digital signals. And while some of that white space was licensed to the private sector, they haven’t done anything with it.
Naturally, telecom giants will ardently oppose this new proposal from the FCC. They make billions of dollars every year by fleecing Americans through their mobile data plans. But if mobile networks are “more robust” than what the FCC is proposing, as industry-employed experts claim, they should have nothing to fear, right? Let the best network win!
Personally I view national public WiFi as inevitable, but it will take time to get there, and it will not arrive without a series of conservative-backed bills to liberate their constituents from the tyranny of free, abundant airtime. National WiFi certainly sounds far more menacing than modern, energy-efficient light-bulbs.
Google and Microsoft both support the FCC’s proposal.