[icernet] Launching Telecoms II

[Arul Selvan]

Launching Telecoms II
Mar 13th 2003
 >From The Economist print edition


      New wireless technologies that render bandwidth irrelevant could
      kick-start a revolution in communications bigger than the internet


AMERICA recently had a chance to kick-start a whole new engine of 
technological innovation‹with business opportunities that could have 
dwarfed those generated by the internet a decade ago. Through political 
infighting, it muffed it. By voting in effect to maintain the status 
quo, rather than embark on reforms aimed ultimately at dismantling the 
country's antiquated regulations that govern the telephone network, the 
Federal Communications Commission has consigned the telecoms industry to 
further floundering.

Call the missed opportunity ³Telecoms II². Unlike its predecessor, this 
is all about freeing people from having to plug into telephone lines and 
cables‹and letting them have speedier data connections than they ever 
imagined. It all started with digital cell phones a decade ago, but has 
now exploded into a panoply of radio technologies‹from wireless LANs 
(local area networks) to smart antennae, ultrawide band transmission and 
mesh networks. Despite the parlous state of the telecoms sector, the 
pace at which start-ups offering the new WLL (wireless local loop) 
technology have been raising money shows that at least the market has 
faith in the future. Apart from providing an alternative over the ³last 
mile² to homes and offices at modest cost, WLL delivers internet access 
ten times faster than the speediest broadband connections the telephone 
companies or cable TV firms can offer (see article).



What could make Telecoms II the economic engine of the next decade is 
the way such networks are largely ³user financed² and deployed in an 
unplanned, ad hoc manner‹and thus free to grow exponentially if demand 
for them takes off. David Reed, a telecoms expert who helped design the 
internet, points to how, over the past year, the 802.11b (³Wi-Fi²) 
standard has created an entirely new market for wireless networks in the 
home and office‹without any form of government initiative and during the 
depth of telecom's worst recession. That is what can be done when 
manufacturers and users are set free to exploit just a tiny unlicensed 
chunk of the radio spectrum. But to make Telecoms II happen in a big 
way, regulators have to stop policing the radio spectrum as if it were 
some precious, scarce resource.

The problem is that the regulations governing the separation of 
broadcasting channels, to prevent neighbouring stations from interfering 
with one another, were established 70 years ago and reflect the 
technical limitations of the time. Today, instead of being a crude 
tunable circuit built of coils and condensers, a radio is more likely to 
be a piece of software burned into a DSP (digital signal processor) chip 
that can reconfigure itself on the fly‹hopping from channel to channel, 
thousands of times a second, while seeking gaps through which to send 
bursts of data. With frequency-hopping ³softradio², interference is 
irrelevant.

That means broadcasting channels can be crammed cheek by jowl, with no 
buffer zones between them. Also, when such adaptive digital radios are 
allowed to co-operate with one another, the network's capacity can 
actually increase‹rather than decrease, as was long believed‹with every 
new radio added. In short, with ³co-operative gain², there is no upper 
limit to the amount of information that can be transported. Thus, 
bandwidth‹as a measure of communication capacity‹is also irrelevant.


    Forget interference


Before such disruptive ideas can be used to unleash the next big wave of 
technological innovation, regulators have to rid themselves of obsolete 
notions about interference. Because of such fears, ³repeater 
stations²‹the key to co-operative gain‹have been largely barred from 
wireless networks. Another regulatory hangup is the way networks 
operating on different frequency bands‹say, Wi-Fi and mobile phones‹have 
been prevented from interconnecting.

But the biggest problem inhibiting Telecoms II is the habit of reserving 
various radio bands for specific services. Historically, that made sense 
when it was hugely expensive to build radios that could be tuned to more 
than a few adjacent bands. Today, digital radios that can dynamically 
jump all over the spectrum are to be had for the price of a microchip.

America has missed its chance to start the deregulatory ball rolling, 
first with the wired networks and then with the wireless ones. Now it is 
up to Asia and Europe to avoid making the same mistake.

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