Subject: [NEXTEL-1] FCC's Muleta sees sizzling future for broadband wireless

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2004 10:08:34 -0500

FCC's Muleta sees sizzling future for broadband wireless
By: Al Senia America's Network Weekly

March 1, 2004

Viable vision or wild pipedream?
That was the question some attendees at the Broadband Wireless World 2004 conference in San Diego were asking themselves after the FCC's John Muleta, chief of the wireless telecommunications bureau, wrapped up his keynote address last week.

Muleta, appointed to his post in Jan. 2003 by FCC chairman Michael Powell, got the conference buzzing with a decidedly upbeat prediction that 100 million U.S. homes (and 150-to-200 million subscribers) would be hooked into broadband wireless during the next six years. Expressing a sentiment dear to the heart of Powell, Muleta noted that continued deregulation, less government interference and free market forces would combine to unleash the broadband floodgates by decade's end.

"I think it's possible," Muleta said. "I think we can get there very quickly. There's a new dawn of opportunity for broadband wireless. The key is to get all the parts working together."

Those parts include an affordable ($40 monthly) access fee; reliable and ubiquitous IP-based Internet service; and seamless interaction between platforms and applications.

While that might seem fanciful to those conference attendees struggling mightily to keep their cell phones working past three consecutive freeway exits, Muleta told his audience that in fact the FCC and the telecom industry had pretty much already laid the groundwork for this vision in the 1990s with its PCS licensing system. That PCS model, Muleta noted, was a shining light in the decade-long "regulatory wilderness" because it provided for lots of competitors and the flexibility for the auction winners to "move their licenses among themselves" which helped service providers make a profit.

"This model has worked," Muleta added. "We just need to apply it to this series of broadband wireless bands."

Muleta sees a grand window of opportunity opening when the FCC holds its auction of the 2.5 Ghz band licenses because it will double the amount of spectrum available for wireless Internet services. He says the FCC has learned from past mistakes and will provide maximum flexibility to users of spectrum. While expressing some concern that the hardware and software to fully capitalize on this opportunity may be lacking, Muleta believes free market forces will ultimately prevail.

That could mean we will all be walking around with a PDA-like, Internet-based, personal entertainment center by decade's end. Muleta believes it could also translate into "a real threat to the cable modem and DSL duopoly." Of course, with predicting the future being at best an inexact science, it could also simply result in another futile exercise in high-tech hype.

http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=86994

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