Limits Sought on Wireless Internet Access

[rod holcomb]

This article from NYTimes.com 

Limits Sought on Wireless Internet Access

December 17, 2002
By JOHN MARKOFF 

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16 - The Defense Department, arguing
that an increasingly popular form of wireless Internet
access could interfere with military radar, is seeking new
limits on the technology, which is seen as a rare bright
spot for the communications industry. 

Industry executives, including representatives from
Microsoft and Intel, met last week with Defense Department
officials to try to stave off that effort, which includes a
government proposal now before the global overseer of radio
frequencies. 

The military officials say the technical restrictions they
are seeking are necessary for national security. Industry
executives, however, say they would threaten expansion of
technology like the so-called WiFi systems being used for
wireless Internet in American airports, coffee shops, homes
and offices. 

WiFi use is increasingly heavy in major American
metropolitan areas, and similar systems are becoming
popular in Europe and Asia. As the technology is installed
in millions of portable computers and in antennas in many
areas, industry executives acknowledge that high-speed
wireless Internet access will soon crowd the radio
frequencies used by the military. But industry executives
say new types of frequency spectrum sharing techniques
could keep civilian users from interfering with radar
systems. 

The debate, which involves low-power radio emissions that
the Defense Department says may jam as many as 10 types of
radar systems in use by United States military forces,
presents a thorny policy issue for the Bush administration.

Even as the armed forces monitor United States air space
for signs of military or terrorist attacks and gear up for
a possible war with Iraq, the nation's technology companies
hope that the popularity of wireless Internet access will
help pull their industry out of its two-year slump. New
limits on that technology could help undermine the economic
recovery on which the administration is also pinning its
hopes. 

"Nobody, including the Pentagon, doubts that this is
important for consumers and industry," said Steven Price,
deputy assistant secretary of defense for radio spectrum
matters. "The problem comes when it degrades our military
capabilities." 

So far, though, there have been no reports of civilian
wireless Internet use interfering with military radar,
Edmond Thomas, chief of the office of engineering and
technology for the Federal Communications Commission, said.

Industry executives say that military uses can coexist with
the millions of smart wireless Internet devices that can
sense the nearby use of military radar and automatically
yield the right of way. These devices are in use in Europe
and will soon be used in the United States. 

But Pentagon officials say that the new digital
technologies are unproven and could interfere with various
types of military radar systems, whether ones used for
tracking storms, monitoring aircraft or guiding missiles
and other weapons. 

The Pentagon wants regulators to delay consideration of
opening an additional swath of radio frequencies in the
5-gigahertz band that is eagerly sought by American
technology companies and is already in civilian use
internationally. 

In this country, industry executives and some members of
Congress see new spectrum-sharing technologies as a way to
jump-start innovation and commerce. Last month, for
example, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California,
and her Republican colleague Senator George Allen of
Virginia, said that they would introduce a bill in the next
session of Congress to expand the radio spectrum available
for wireless Internet use. 

The military-industry debate also involves the merits of a
technical standard known as dynamic frequency selection,
which is being used by advanced wireless Internet radios
overseas to avoid interference. 

Military officials are asking the American industry, and
companies in other countries, to create and install even
more sensitive versions of dynamic frequency selection -
something that the companies say may cause the technology
to operate incorrectly. American executives say that the
military's demands may also curtail the capacity of
wireless Internet services and could even force a
complicated redesign of millions of computer communications
systems already in place or nearly ready for shipment. 

An estimated 16 million WiFi-enabled computers and other
devices are already in use in this country and overseas.
And in the coming year, Intel plans to put currently
designed WiFi technology on all of the microprocessor chips
it ships for tens of millions of desktop, laptop and
hand-held computing devices. 

"This is a hugely important issue to Intel," said Peter
Pitsch, Intel's communications policy director in
Washington. "I'm hopeful at the end of the day, the U. S.
government will accept a reasonable compromise." 

The dispute may also foreshadow a coming battle over the
airwaves as traditional broadcasters and communications
businesses like cellular companies confront a dazzling
array of new digital communications technologies that can
potentially use the spectrum far more efficiently by
permitting it to be shared by different types of users. 

The roots of the dispute lie in an effort that began during
the Clinton administration and which has continued at the
Federal Communications Commission under the current
administration, to permit civilian use of portions of the
airwaves without licenses. 

"The unlicensed spectrum is a hot-bed of entrepreneurial
activity and one of the few bright spots in our high-tech
economy," said Tom Kalil, the former deputy director of
President Bill Clinton's National Economic Council and an
early advocate of unlicensed spectrum of radio frequencies.
The Bush administration, he said, "should be trying to
increase the amount of spectrum for unlicensed devices, as
opposed to imposing new, retroactive restrictions right as
the market is taking off." 

Earlier this month, the United States presented the
Pentagon position at an international technical meeting in
Geneva of the World Administrative Radio Conference, the
body that oversees radio frequency allocations and
standards. 

European governments hotly disputed the United States
position at the meeting, but it was nonetheless included as
a footnote in the planning document that resulted. The
issues will be confronted directly, and perhaps decided, in
June at the World Administrative Radio Conference in
Geneva. 

Industry officials said that the Defense Department
position had little chance of gaining international
support. As a consequence, they said, the existing radio
bands would probably become more congested, and the
Pentagon would face even more sources of interference
internationally. 

There is a need for global coordination, executives
acknowledge, but they say the Defense Department is going
about it the wrong way. 

"The idea is to get the world on a single page, and Europe
is way ahead of the U. S. in understanding these
interference issues," said Rich Redelfs, president and
chief executive of Atheros, a Silicon Valley maker of chips
used for WiFi systems. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/technology/17WIRE.html?ex=1041150425&ei=1&en=4f45eaf2d2fec357

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