Ghost busters

What a tome: 312 pages, including appendices. Why, already the number of printed copies of the Federal Communications Commission’s 700 MHz decision would keep Dunder-Mifflin afloat a little longer.
But what would you expect? The Martin FCC-eagerly egged on by Cyren Call, Frontline Wireless, Google and others-is blazing new trails in two areas: an unprecedented commercial/public-safety broadband wireless network; and limited open access-wireless Carterfone-on one-third of the 62 megahertz of spectrum up for auction in mid-January, a compromise measure roundly criticized by open-Internet vigilantes and mobile-phone industry status quo-ers alike.
But other factors may have contributed to the 700 MHz ruling’s ungainly girth. First, FCC lawyers were obliged to make detailed legal analysis supporting the novel, controversial measures as well as less-spectacular regulatory actions just as apt to be challenged in federal appeals court. Less obvious, but hauntingly hovering over the FCC is the Ghost of NextWave Past and the FCC’s humiliating defeat at the Supreme Court. That was four-and-a-half years ago, but it must seem like only yesterday for the FCC.
If it’s not in the forefront thoughts of federal regulators who crafted the 700 MHz ruling, then it most certainly is having a devil of a time in their subconscious. How can it not be? A paradoxically perfect storm has been created whereby the 700 MHz ruling and companion auction could either advance the mobile Internet and public-safety communications to new heights or spark a litigious wildfire that burns endlessly.
It’s easy to forget, but 700 MHz machinations at the FCC, in capital markets and in corporate boardrooms are playing out in a veritable alternate universe of time and space-all premised on the digital TV return of the spectrum at issue by Feb. 17, 2009. Moreover, for most of the universe, next year’s auction will play out in one big black hole, with the results deferred until the dust settles.
But that’s a temporary thing. The bigger unknowns-whether the commercial/public-safety experiment works, whether limited open access is tangibly defined in the market, whether the long-awaited beach-front spectrum will be tied up in court for years, etc.-could keep us in suspense far longer.