AP: President to double the available wireless communications spectrum over next 10 years

By on Jun 28, 2010 at 10:05 AM
News June 28, 2010

Obama-Auction

The AP reports that U.S. President Barack Obama will “double the available amount of wireless communications spectrum over the next 10 years in an effort to keep up with the ever-growing demand for high-speed video and data transmission to cell phones, laptops and other mobile devices.” The plan, which will call for the auctioning off of 500 MHz of federally owned spectrum, will be put into a Presidential Memorandum to be signed today. The White House, in an official statement said: “This initiative will catalyze private sector investment, contribute to economic growth and help to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.” The AP went onto report that revenue generated from the auction would go to “public safety, infrastructure investments and deficit reduction.”

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  • FriarNurgle

    Skynet needs more bandwidth

    • Jordan

      Yes, I heard RFID chips require a 15mbs bandwith to fully overide your soul.

  • kathi17

    Another thing that is needed is broadband and cellphone reception in rural areas of the country. Many areas don’t have either.

    • FriarNurgle

      Do we really want this for rural areas? The awesome hardworking farmers of America would never get any work done. We’d bloody starve or at the least have much less corn products in everything we consume. Plus I heard the cows go mad and start eating people when dosed with urban levels of wireless radiation.

      • kathi17

        LMAO! I live in Maine, so we probably wouldn’t be eating lobster either!

  • Hollaman

    This is great, but this should happen faster…

  • Patrick

    Google and vzw have pulled out there checkbooks.

  • http://www.aberdeen.com Hyoun Park

    Doubling spectrum in 10 years? That’s nowhere near enough considering that the US isn’t even close to 100% saturation of mobile devices yet, mobile video is in its infancy, and machine to machine signalling is just starting as well. We need more like 10x spectrum over the next 5 years.

  • Robojerk

    Seems pretty obvious that the US cell companies will need to add a lot more bandwidth.

    Unfortunately I have a feeling we’ll be screwed again. The government will give the cell companies money (our tax dollars) then the cell companies will start charging more for the increased bandwidth.

    I’m happy we’ll get the bump in bandwidth but not how then financials will be handled.

    • T

      Clearly you don’t understand how the financials are handled… the government SELLS the license to use the spectrum. Companies PAY to acquire it and then PAY to utilize it. T-Mobile spent 4.2 billion to acquire its nationwide AWS license. Verizon spent 1.3 billion on its Northeast AWS license alone. AWS (1700/2100) brought in 14 billion dollars. The 700 MHZ auction brought in 20 billion dollars.

      So…. how exactly are we getting screwed?

  • http://www.bgr.com/ Michael Bettiol

    Please keep all comments on topic and relevant to the story at hand, or else we’re going to have to shut down comments on this post.

    There’s absolutely no reason to talk about things such as the oil spill when dealing with wireless spectrum.

  • Sharquawnda@SprintPOS

    They should allocate some spectrum to the carriers that hold little to no spectrum below 1000MHz. Verizon and AT&T have had this advantage for too long

  • Chris Beiser

    Is it just me, or is “will create hundreds of thousands of jobs” perhaps overstating the effect of a technological advance that basically helps people watch more porn on the go?

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