Summer school

It won’t be long until Congress breaks for its August recess (are they there now?), only to return for a short spell before taking off for the rest of this presidential election year.
But the Federal Communications Commission and mobile-phone industry will be keeping their noses to the grindstone. And yes, there will be tests. Testing is all the rage on the wireless space these days. The FCC is lab testing wireless gear to determine whether wireless Internet products can operate in vacant TV channels – white spaces – without interfering with digital TV signals that’ll completely supersede analog broadcast transmissions next February. Worse and louder than any student bellyaching over exams, white-spaces testing has become a fierce free-for-all in which high-tech heavyweights have been forced to defend their embrace of white spaces commercial exploitation against an eclectic mix of broadcasters, wireless microphone, health care and professional football types.
Some of their interference concerns appear to be getting addressed, though broadcasters remain in the “No, hell no” camp. The NFL and ESPN offered to extend testing of white spaces devices – what they cleverly call WSDs (not to be confused with WMDs) – in the upcoming football season. It gives a whole new meaning to field testing, which could kick off in the third quarter before a possible FCC ruling in the fourth quarter. Memo to Microsoft, Google, Motorola, HP, Intel and others on the Team White Spaces: Be on your toes, Bill Belichick may be watching.
Cellphone operators – the telecom industry’s wildly successful overachievers – insist on testing because of fears that wireless Internet operations (some free of charge!) in the AWS-3 band could interfere with operations in AWS-1 spectrum that they spent billions on at an auction a couple years back.
All this handwringing over testing is more than an academic exercise for the FCC. It’s really heady stuff. Forever looming overhead is the commercial/public-safety interference mess given the sanitized moniker of 800 MHz rebanding. If the FCC and industry are lucky enough to sidestep another interminable interference imbroglio, there’s always the possibility of a massive wireless bankruptcy in one of the two great, work-in-progress experiments: AWS-3 and D Block. (Remember the other Ghost of FCC Past: NextWave Telecom).
So now, are you ready for some football?!