Community Wireless: Overview of Current Policy Debates

updated January 10, 2007 

Low-cost, high-speed, community-based wireless broadband networks are cropping up across the country -- revolutionizing public communications, spurring economic development, and bridging the digital divide. They blanket entire towns, cities and counties in rural and urban areas and serve as mobile communications systems for public safety agencies in communities nationwide. While the vast majority of these broadband providers are small commercial Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), a growing number are sponsored by local governments and nonprofit community groups.

There are several issues pending at the FCC and in Congress that hold great implications for the success or failure of community wireless networks. The following key debates are discussed in this Policy Backgrounder:

1. Open Spectrum - What all community wireless networks -- commercial (WISP), municipal and community nonprofit -- have in common is the unlicensed spectrum they use to transmit signals. Expanding unlicensed spectrum in low frequencies would serve as “rocket fuel” for community wireless networks and the expansion of low-cost broadband access to all Americans.

2. Municipal Wireless - The authority of municipal and other local government entities to establish wireless broadband networks for public access is under attack at the state and federal levels. Despite the lack of competition in wired broadband offerings and the plethora of social and economic benefits provided by community wireless, powerful incumbent telecommunications corporations are lobbying to make municipal wireless offerings illegal.

3. Network Neutrality - Establishing multiple broadband paths to the home by fostering community wireless broadband networks on unlicensed spectrum would serve to fend off plans by incumbent wireline broadband providers to control the quality and choice of content available to consumers over the Internet.

To view the complete document, please see the attached PDF.

Attachments

• Community Wireless Policy Debates Backgrounder - January 2007 Update (PDF, 7pp.)