With the advent of smartphones such as the iPhone and the Blackberry, usage of broadband mobile has exploded. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough spectrum of airwaves to accommodate all the new users. The cellphone companies are allotted a certain slice of the finite airwaves that exist, and that allotment is not keeping up with demand. Television stations, the Pentagon and WiFi already use quite a bit of bandwidth for their signals -- and they don't want to share. So the cell phone companies are demanding that the government turn over a bigger slice of the spectrum to their industry.
Now wireless phone companies fear they're in danger of running out of room, leaving congested networks that frustrate users and slow innovation. So the wireless companies want the government to give them bigger slices of airwaves — even if other users have to give up rights to theirs.
"Spectrum is the equivalent of our highways," says Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group. "That's how we move our traffic. And the volume of that traffic is increasing so dramatically that we need more lanes. We need more highways."
That won't happen without a fight. Wireless companies are eyeing some frequencies used by TV broadcasters, satellite-communications companies and federal agencies such as the Pentagon. Already, some of those groups are pushing back.
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CTIA, the industry group, is asking the government to make an additional 800 megahertz of the airwaves available for wireless companies to license over the next six years. That would be a huge expansion from the industry's current slice of roughly 500 megahertz. The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to make more frequencies available for commercial use, but has just 50 megahertz in the pipeline.
The two main trends that are driving up demand are 1) mobile video and online gaming, which uses up a huge amount of bandwidth and 2) consumers' increasing use of wireless Internet connections as they dump their landlines. There are 48 million mobile broadband subscriptions in the U.S. right now. That is expected to grow to 150 million by 2014.
Jamie Hedlund, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Consumer Electronics Association, says that wireless broadband isn't as fast as a wired connection and the connections will get slower as more and more people use them. The experience just isn't the same, he says, because the capacity just isn't there yet.
