IT Curmudgeon

Senators John Kerry (Massachusetts), Bill Nelson (Florida), Roger Wicker (Mississippi) and Olivia Snowe (Maine) recently co-introduced the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act.

This act is designed to prevent waste of the valuable frequencies used for the many kinds of communications in the United States by forcing the government to create a map of all the currently used frequencies. Other countries tend to use the same frequencies that we do, and in the same way, because it is advantageous to adhere to international technological standards.

This bill is backed by a number of different organizations for different reasons, so the outcome may be clouded by competing interests. The telecommunications companies want to buy frequencies at auctions and use them as assets in their for-profit networks.

Others, notably Google and other groups believe that at least some of the airwaves should be managed but free for use by citizens, for free public access broadband and other applications.

It's surprising that a bill needs to be introduced to require the government to keep records and publish information on spectrum utilization. The radio frequencies are resources that generate a lot of revenue for the taxpayers, and it would seem logical that they might have some idea which ones are being used. Isn't that what the Government Accounting Office (GAO) is all about?

The frequencies that are to be inventoried are "300 Megahertz to 3.5 Gigahertz". This leaves a lot of ground undocumented, presumably because the frequencies outside these wavelengths are for non-civilian uses.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this bill. It is likely that it will pass, and the public will see which wavelengths are being used, and which are not. That's when the food fight is likely to begin among citizen advocates and special interest groups.