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public spectrum
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Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 19:03:27 -0700 From: jwarren@well.com (Jim Warren) Subject: this is crucial! needs support! please circulate ASAP
Hi all -- (blind cc'ed to various friends and contacts)
I'm sending this specifically to you because most of you know me and I think it's really that important. Apologies to those who will receive another copy via my GovAccess list.
Many of you control listservs - or otherwise have a wide range of online contacts.
PLEASE! - splatter this as wide and far as possible, as fast as possible.
It involves a MAJOR DEADLINE -- JULY 10th!!!
Thanks.
--jim
=3D=3D=3D=3D
GovAccess.154-CRUCIAL!!!: Free, high-speed regional telecomm!
This is one of the most important public policy items I have ever posted!
This can be a real Declaration of Independence for the 21st Century.
This is one of the most important battles that citizens, community organizations, educators, local government officials and newspapers (if they plan to continue to exist beyond newsprint) will fight in this decade, against government-granted monopolies and regulation-protected cartels!
I have been trying to find time to write about this ever since Dewayne Hendricks told me about it about a month ago. Bill Frezza's done it; done it well; and Interactive Age has just published it. [below]
=46olks, if we, the People, can successfully lobby-the-hell outa Congress, the White House and the FCC - right now! - "mere" American citizens and otherwise-deadmeat consumers can bypass the upcoming monopolistic regional telecommunications and cable cartels and their for-certain gouge'em-deep rate increases that will occur as soon as the current secret-deal Telecommunications Deform Act passes and next year's elections are safely behind the Washington Beltway's deal-makers.
IF WE ACT NOW - and persevere - we can have the economical, technological viable option of completely bypassing local-loop telecomm monopolies of the telcos, cable operators and other big-bucks telecomm giants.
=46REE voice and data communications for residential, educational, business, community, city, county, rural and mobile voice and data-communications.
ALL OF US can have FREE metropolitan-area voice, data and compressed-video communications - point-to-point, and for that matter, point-to-multipoint (i.e., everyone becomes a broadcaster, but only to those whom they permit to receive!).
But we must act now - because the TELECOMM GIANTS DON'T WANT THIS!
ONLY massive public pressure can overcome their massive lobbying megabucks.
The idea is simple:
Have the FCC declare a tiny portion of what was once understood to be the public's broadcast spectrum to be - in fact - PUBLIC SPECTRUM (a range of frequencies available for free public use). The formal petition has ALREADY BEEN FILED with the FCC. The rule-making PROCESS HAS ALREADY BEGUN; public comments have already been solicited.
Open that public spectrum to FREE use by EVERYONE, subject to NO restrictions at all except (1) broadcast power that will limit range to, typically, about 15 to 30 miles, and (2) require use of a given frequency for only a very brief time - seconds or even milliseconds (assumes use of well-developed, nonproprietary "spread spectrum" techniques, where an ongoing communication takes place on one frequency for tiny time, then moves to another frequency, then another and so on; the most efficient use and sharing of broadcast spectrum that is possible!).
24-megabits per second - that's 3 megabytes per second!
NO phone bills!
NO corporate owners!
NO wires - just a teeny weeny antenna. At most.
NO fees - just a one-time purchase of cheap home, office, car or beltloop transcievers, and whatever you wish to plug into them ... phones, data modems, video cameras, temperature monitors, etc.
NO operator licensing - just type-licensed transceivers, exactly the same as police, cabbie and CB-band radios.
NO eves-droppers - since the spreading algorithms can be infinately and dynamically varied (and communications can be further scrambled, to boot).
NO censorship needed - since content is inherently "scrambled".
METROPOLITAN area range (far beyond a single cell-phone site).
REAL content competition - not the fake "competition" of government-created, government-licensed, government-protected conduit and content corporate cartels.
Pollution-free, environmentally-sound, wire-free regional electronic public parks.
WRITE AND FAX NOW - to the FCC and to your Congress-critters and the Clinton White House that has been so busy selling the public's spectrum to the few who can afford it. Or ... obediently wait and watch the cartels raise our rates.
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What Do We Want? Nonproprietary, Free Bandwidth! When Do We Want It? Now!
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 15:47:10 -0700
To: jwarren@well.com
=46rom: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail)
If you want to repost it [the following] be my guest. But if you do, please preface it with a note that it is from the July 3rd issue of Interactive Age Magazine and at the end add the following:
COPYRIGHT CMP PUBLICATIONS JULY 1995.
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 14:14:23 -0700 To: jwarren@well.com (Jim Warren)
From "Interactive Age" July 3, 1995
Where the I-way meets the skyway
By Bill Frezza [via dewayne@warpspeed.com (Dewayne Hendricks)]
The visionaries at Apple Computer Inc. are at it again, pushing the envelope of technology, regulatory policy and business development.
While Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates focuses on the here and now of elbowing into the online business, Apple has fast-forwarded to a kinder, gentler future where free spirits wirelessly surf the Web and the unstructured, self-organizing chaos of the Internet is extended to the rigid disposition of the airwaves.
Weaving together the politically popular themes of international competitiveness, enhanced educational opportunities, free market solutions for the info have-nots, health-care reform, quality leisure time and hard core mobile computing, Apple's recent petition to the FCC for an unlicensed "NII band" is this summer's best read. Check it out at
http://www.apple.com/documents/fcc.html
[Better still, use http://www.warpspeed.com/ , explained below. --j= im]
What they're asking for is simple enough: 300 megahertz of prime real estate up at 5 gigahertz, enough to accommodate high density 24-megabit-per-second connections in a fluid mix of local and wide area networking. This amounts to about $40 billion worth of spectrum, if you go by the size of the checks the phone companies wrote for Personal Communications Services (PCS) frequencies. And, oh yeah, they don't want it for themselves. They want it made available free to all comers, subject only to interference--reducing technical standards. No auctions, no license fees, no regulations on what it's used for, and no airtime charges.
Does this renew your faith in chutzpa or what?
It's certainly a different model than either the newfangled auction approach or the tired old lobbyist-take-all system. Think of it as spectrum homesteading, a uniquely American experiment in don't-fence-me-in, anti-industrial policy.
Before you scoff, remember that Apple has been down this path before. It first petitioned the FCC for Data-PCS frequencies for nomadic computing back in 1991. This resulted in the allocation of a juicy 20 MHz slice smack in the middle of the aforementioned PCS bands. Unfortunately for the PC industry, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory when the entrenched telephony interests shanghaied the band in pursuit of a home for cordless PBXs. (A chagrined FCC later tossed the computer folks some crumbs at 2.4 GHz).
The petition proposes spectrum sharing by fixed and mobile users on a completely ad-hoc basis. This "spectrum etiquette" is a brilliant blend of good science and free market ingenuity. Spectrum etiquette imposes no centralized control and assumes no traffic prioritization.
Rather, it is a low level media access scheme similar to the rules we follow for private conversations at crowded cocktail parties. You can speak =46rench, German, or Chinese - whatever you please - as long as you exclude bozos that stand up on chairs and give loud and long-winded speeches. Beyond that, anything goes.
But beware of the lobbyist-loaded coterie that frustrated Apple's plans last time. Flying under the WINForum banner, the telephony interests are angling for the same spectrum with a rival petition. Their technical approach, however, asserts the primacy of circuit-switched voice, necessitating a hierarchical architecture with choke points and centralized control.
Haven't they hogged enough bandwidth? They call their system SUPERNet. I think SUCKERNet fits a lot better. The Europeans developing HIPERLAN didn't buy their jive, so now they're trying to peddle it here.
And they may succeed unless the Washington-averse PC industry files supporting comments before July 25.
[=3D=3D=3DIMPORTANT ACTION ITEM!=3D=3D=3D]
Drop a letter or postcard referencing petition RM-8653 to: Office of the Secretary Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Washington DC 20554
or send e-mail to jlovette@apple.com and offer your help.
Apple's decision to position this as the NII band is perhaps their best hope, part of a savvy constituency shopping game. But posturing aside, if this dream comes true what we'll really get is an entrepreneurs band. Not the kind of fake entrepreneurs with half a billion dollar war chests, or some bogus designated entity front organization. But real entrepreneurs that hock their cars, quit their day jobs and go for the glory. The kind of people that founded Apple and created the PC industry in the first place.
So good luck intrepid infobahn warriors. May your vision become our reality. I can barely squirt 8 kilobits per second out of my antenna today. With 24 mbps to horse around with and no physical connections to trace, who knows what mischief we can cause?
Bill Frezza is president at Wireless Computing Associates and co-founder of the online forum DigitaLiberty. You can reach him at frezza@radiomail.net .
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
=46eedback with Speed that Only the Net Can Provide - COMMENT DEADLINE IS= JULY 10!
[Dewayne Hendricks has been deeply involved in wireless datacomm for years, and has spent several years trudging around Washington's endless bureaucratic circles and serving on various industry committees, that eventually got pre-empted by the telecomm giants. He's walked the walk; it's time for thousands of us to join him! --jim]
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 16:50:52 -0700
To: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail)
At 15:47 7/4/95, Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) wrote: >Jim, > >If you want to repost it be my guest. ...
Again, very nice article Bill. I pulled it off the IA website and sent a copy to Jim Lovette of Apple ... He called me to discuss the story after he read it and together we have the following comments:- Jim and I would [prefer that people use] the URL for my website instead of Apple's. We wanted to have the petition up for public access on the Internet at a non-Apple site ...
http://www.warpspeed.com/- Jim is preparing a lot of additional content on this issue that we were going to post on my website in the coming weeks. That's another reason why we wanted the URL to be for my site so that people could have access to this additional material. There was/is no plan to post this new material on the Apple site.- In your story, you refer to comments being due at the FCC by July 25th. The correct date is the 10th. Reply comments are due on the 25th and there is a major procedural difference between the two dates as far as the FCC is concerned. Reply comments are supposed to address issues raised by the comments that are filed. No real harm done, but we thought we'd mention it.
My website has been hit quite a bit since I put the Apple NII petition up. Here is the stats that I generated today:
Warp Speed Imagineering World-Wide Web Access Statistics
Generated by: WebStat 2.3.4 Last updated: Tue Jul 4 14:09:55 1995
Summary for Period: Jun 12 1995 to Jul 4 1995
=46iles Transmitted During Summary Period 1742 Bytes Transmitted During Summary Period 23623110 Average Files Transmitted Daily 75 Average Bytes Transmitted Daily 1027092
Total Transfers by Client Domain
Number of Number of Percent of Percent o= f Domain Name Files Sent Bytes Sent Files Sent Bytes Sen= t --------------------------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------=
---
Adv. Proj. Research Agency 1 90008 0.06 0.38 Australia 7 273073 0.40 1.16 Canada 5 94073 0.29 0.40 Chile 6 90184 0.34 0.38 Estonia 7 91367 0.40 0.39 =46inland 1 952 0.06 0.0= 0 =46rance 13 45669 0.75 0.1= 9 Germany 8 127770 0.46 0.54 Hong Kong 1 1183 0.06 0.01 Japan 9 9082 0.52 0.04 Netherlands 12 275217 0.69 1.17 Network 158 2242657 9.07 9.49 Switzerland 8 182289 0.46 0.77 United Kingdom 14 103712 0.80 0.44 United States of America 14 104744 0.80 0.44 US Commercial 1024 13606872 58.78 57.60 US Educational 189 3088826 10.85 13.08 US Government 3 3121 0.17 0.01 US Military 15 282155 0.86 1.19 US Organization 14 100594 0.80 0.43 @=81 5 90184 0.29 0.3= 8 [unresolved] 228 2719378 13.09 11.51
----------------------------
Jim and I have no idea how many comments are going to be filed with the FCC on this matter. To date, we have gotten very few queries on the issue. Lots have people have access the petition, but there has been no followup discussion, etc.
Alas, if this doesn't change and a fair number of comments are filed in favor of this concept, then it will die an early death.
Asking for 300 MHz of spectrum to be turned over to the public for its own use, without an auction, was a pretty gutsy move on Apple's part I believe. It continues in the tradition of the original Data-PCS petition they submitted to the FCC four years ago. At that time, no one really thought that the Commission would respond favorably to such a bold move on the part of the computer industry. Well, they did and the spectrum allocation for Data-PCS is history. Problem is, I don't think that in this case, without major public support, lightning will strike twice in the same place.
Thanks again, -- Dewayne
---
Dewayne Hendricks, WA8DZP ! CIS: 75210,10 AppleLink: D6547 Warp Speed Imagineering ! Internet: dewayne@warpspeed.com 43730 Vista Del Mar ! Packet Radio: WA8DZP @ K3MC.#NOCAL.CA.USA.NOAM =46remont, CA 94539-3204 ! AOL: HENDRICKS =46ax: (510) 770-9854 ! WWW: http://www.warpspeed.com/
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"Some folks have been saying recently, that the real message is not so much content, at this point, but: 'What do we want? BANDWIDTH! When do we want it? NOW!!' 500,000 people on the Capitol steps should do it." -- Richard Civille, Washington Director, Center for Civic Networking nii_agenda mailing-list post, 02/23/94
Mo' as it Is.
--jim Jim Warren, GovAccess list-owner/editor (jwarren@well.com) Advocate & columnist, MicroTimes, Government Technology, BoardWatch, etc. 345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062; voice/415-851-7075; fax/<# upon request>
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