Bush Condemns Free National Wi-Fi

Riiighht. Because the phone companies are such shining examples of this so called "free" market.

As much as I'd love free national wifi, (And I do think its a great idea) I've got no illusions about it being high quaily enough to carry voice calls for a long time.

There will always be space for the traditional carriers to provide high quality wired connections. The truly ironic thing is that this will force them to actually compete with something, so the great big socialist internet project will make the telecom markets more free!

Because it means the end of the telecommunications industry. Cellphones that use Skype would mean free national telephone calls to everyone. But it's exactly this kind of progress that can get us eventually out of this depression.

Why has no one pointed out that implementing WiFi on wireless frequencies that aren't the b/g 2.4GHz or the a 5GHz won't work with any existing WiFi devices?

Basically, this is a free, new wireless data service that requires new equipment purposes (should it go through). It would also be a service with near no bandwidth. Wireless is a shared resource. That's one of the reasons its slower than hard lines. If I was the only user on AT&T's HSDPA tower nearest me, I could easily pull data speeds better than my cable connection, but that isn't the case. I'm broadcasting to the tower and the tower is broadcasting to me - even though it really isn't a broadcast, but a single connection. If we're talking about taking a small amount of spectrum to set this up, it won't even be 700k. 100k would be lucky, dial-up speeds or lower the likely.

In terms of providing "free" access to schools, etc. it really isn't free since it requires new equipment. In fact, it's really expensive.

I'd argue that the FCC should do the same thing they did with the Google open access auction. Put a reserve price on the auction. If no carrier is willing to pay $5bn for it with the restriction that they offer free wireless to everyone on 25% of the spectrum, then it's re-auctioned without the restriction.

Oh, and for the article's author, when you say something like 'It used to be that public resources like land and radio spectrum were leased to private companies by the government so that the "people" could profit from their use,' you need to realize that we do profit from companies paying lots of money in licensing fees since that's government revenue that doesn't need to come from my pocket and it's a win as long as companies don't overcharge for the product.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez Condemns Free National Wi-Fi

There; fixed that for you.