If you have a WiFi at home and in your office, you can carry your computer back and forth and the radio transmitter and receiver in the computer will connect to whichever network is available at the moment. Same if you take your laptop to Starbucks.

Why doesn’t your cell phone work that way? If you have a contract with T-Mobile and it works fine in your apartment, you may go to Starbucks and find you have no reception, even though everyone else there is happily chatting away on their phones. If they have Verizon and Verizon has a good signal at the Starbucks, they may not be able to use their phones if they come visit you at your home. The only recourse under these circumstances is to cancel one contract and take out another — hardly something to be done so you can make a call from Starbucks — or even more absurdly, to carry two phones. Why can’t someone make a phone that just latches onto whatever cellular service is available locally, and works out the billing in some seamless way?

Because of the way the radio spectrum is split up among the cell phone companies. It’s a regulatory, not a technical problem.

And Google is out to fix it. The company has filed a patent on technology that would work in the obviously right way, and it has asked the FCC to change the way the spectrum is allocated to make the necessary blocks of spectrum available.

This story is very much along the lines of Chapter 8, where we plead for deregulation that would stimulate innovation and vastly greater efficiencies in the way the spectrum is used. What we have is lockdown of the spectrum by a few incumbent stakeholders, who will, no doubt, raise all kinds of bogus technical claims about the problems with Google’s proposal in order to protect them from competition.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Radio and television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.