FCC cancels upcoming meeting, will not vote on white space

By on Dec 14, 2008 at 9:55 AM
General December 14, 2008

FCC logo The FCC has announced that it has canceled its upcoming December 18th meeting. As part of that meeting, the FCC had planned to vote on the proposed auction of portions of the white space spectrum which would be used for free, nationwide wireless broadband. The white space initiative generated a firestorm of controversy that pitted T-Mobile, the National Association of Broadcasters and celebrities like Dolly Parton, Neil Diamond, and the Dixie Chicks against technology companies such as Google, Dell, Microsoft and Motorola. With the upcoming meeting now scuttled and a vote delayed indefinitely, the white space spectrum issue is dead in the water for the time being. It will now be in the hands of the incoming Obama administration to revive the issue or let it slowly drift away.

Read

Tags:
, , , , ,
3 Comments

Related Articles

  • Martin

    I don’t understand, I thought the White Space Coalition was trying to use UNLICENSED spectrum and a vote was already made that they were allowed to do it? Can someone help me out here???

  • http://www.dslreports.com Karl Bode

    You’ve got this wrong. They already voted to approve White Space broadband. This vote was about auctioning off spectrum in the AWS-3 (2155-2180 MHz) band, with the condition that whoever buys it must deploy at least 768kbps, smut-filtered wireless to 95% of the country in ten years time.

    T-Mobile and incumbent carriers lobbied against it because they don’t want the added competition, and they want that spectrum with no conditions attached.

  • Jdslim

    I wouldn’t say it is completely dead in the water. If I remember right, T-mobile didn’t have any issues with free broadband. They had concerns that this would cause interference with the 2100 band they use for 3G but with some simple modifications this interference could be avoided and with adequate testing to make sure that there isn’t any type of interference to T-mobiles 3G they will most likely back down.

    Now for the Dixie Chicks they are completely Anti-Bush and I don’t blame them so if this comes up again once Obama is in office who knows if they will still be so against how to use white space

blog comments powered by Disqus