Game-changing week ahead for telecom industry

The FCC will tackle several key issues in the telecom industry next week, including the unlicensed use of television white spaces, Verizon's acquisition of Alltel and the merger of Clearwire with Sprint's WiMAX division.

The most closely watched vote during next week's meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 4, will undoubtedly be the commission's decision over whether to allow unlicensed use of television broadcast spectrum known as "white spaces." Several high-profile tech companies, including Google, Microsoft and Dell, having been lobbying the FCC to vote in favor of letting wireless data devices operate freely on the spectrum, much as laptops and smartphones can currently operate on unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum.

To hear many tech CEOs tell it, opening up white spaces will completely revolutionize the way network services are delivered to consumers and businesses in the United States, as the unlicensed broadcast spectrum will potentially open up a high-bandwidth wireless channel for Internet access. Dell CEO Michael Dell, for instance, said in a letter to FCC chairman Kevin Martin that opening up white spaces for unlicensed use would "trigger a boom in investment, job creation, and consumer demand in the high-tech sector, which has been the engine of our information economy" and would also generate "billions of dollars of much needed new investment support, R&D and deployment for this exciting new technology." 

Similarly, Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that permitting the unlicensed use of white spaces would "help unleash an entirely new wave of technological innovation, creating jobs and boosting our economy."

But beyond the hype, some analysts say it is too early to tell just what opening up white spaces will do for the wireless Internet market, let alone the struggling U.S. economy. Gartner analyst Tole Hart notes that while white space devices have operated well under FCC tests so far, they are still unproven in enterprise settings where QoS is more crucial than in the consumer market.

"When you're an enterprise, you want reliability in your technology," he says. "White space technology still needs to be proven out as far as voice quality, throughput and voice reliability are concerned."

However, both Hart and Nemertes analyst Mike Jude think white spaces have very high potential if the technology proves reliable. As Jude notes, television white space spectrum does a very good job of penetrating buildings and can send video signals over a very high bandwidth.

"If you take a technology like WiMAX and plug it into that spectrum, it would be able to do a lot of things such as fixed-mobile convergence and Wi-Fi integration," he says. "If you can imagine very pervasive mobile capabilities with fairly significant data rates, then that's what this suggests could be possible with unlicensed white space spectrum."

Additionally, Hart says, operating on unlicensed spectrum is a very inexpensive way to deliver Web services. If white space devices can receive high-speed data transmissions indoors while not interfering with pre-existing television signals, then he thinks they will be quite successful.