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State of the Web: Why the FCC’s ‘free super Wi-Fi’ plan is probably too good to be true

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On Monday, the Washington Post generated some chainsaw-level buzz with a report stating that the Federal Communications Commission has plans to rollout free “super Wi-Fi” across the U.S. that could be “so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.” Sounds good, right? Right – sadly, it’s probably too good to be true. Here’s why.

What is super Wi-Fi?

The name “super Wi-Fi” is really just a marketing term for one type of signal the could be transmitted over what’s known as “white space spectrum.” White space is the unused portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that exists between television channels – the channels that don’t carry “Jeopardy!” or any other shows.



What’s the FCC’s plan?


What’s standing the the FCC’s way?


What this means is that a vast amount of lobbying money is being used to convince lawmakers in Washington to block the FCC’s plan, which must be approved by Congress through the passage of legislation. And it doesn’t help that the sale of the unused white space spectrum could result in billions of dollars being poured into the federal government’s coffers.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful forces on the other side. In the private sector, the primary supporters of the FCC’s plan are Google and Microsoft, who are part of a lobbying group known as the Wireless Innovation Alliance (WIA), which also includes the New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, Dell, and others. But for almost the last decade, the FCC’s camp has failed to make much headway.


Even if the FCC’s plan goes through, and the unused white-space spectrum becomes available, that doesn’t mean we would instantly have free super Wi-Fi. Why? Because some entity would have to build that network, and that takes a lot of time, and a lot of money.

As Paul Waldman notes in The American Prospect, it’s entirely possible that a company like Google would choose to build out a free super Wi-Fi network, which would allow it to serve advertisements to even more people. But at the moment, that’s just speculation, and remains a big “if.”

In addition to the fact that no super Wi-Fi network exists, there’s no guarantee that such a network would be any good. If you’ve ever tried to use standard Wi-Fi at an event with a large amount of people, you know how slow and unreliable the service can become. Now imagine that that network is serving your entire city, and you can understand just how congested free public Wi-Fi would be, especially in densely populated areas.

So what am I to take away from all this?


There are currently no legislative efforts on the table to push this plan forward. But when there is, contact your representatives in Congress and tell them, “Let the white space be free.”

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