White-Space Race

While Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been prepping for Barack Obama's economic summit, co-founder Larry Page appeared yesterday with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, hawking the new possibilities of "white spaces," or unused parts of the television spectrum. Now that the FCC has agreed to let wireless devices use the spectrum, Page declared at a San Jose, Calif., conference, wireless broadband could provide cheaper, faster, and more reliable Internet access around the country, putting WiFi to shame. Of course, he added, Google expects to boost its search-ad revenue by up to 30 percent with the new technology. But that's not the point, he swears. "I think the debate is, ‘Is this going to be really useful, or really, really, really useful?' " Page said, according to PC World.

Not everyone agreed, namely the television networks, rock musicians, and Broadway producers who lobbied the FCC to kill the new rules. They worry that that use of the blank bits of the spectrum will interfere with television broadcasts and even wireless-microphone broadcasts in live performances; even Dolly Parton, who is about to unveil a new Broadway musical based on the movie 9 to 5, got into the act. Despite the new euphoria in the tech world, InformationWeek's Alexander Wolfe worries that a new army of cheap wireless products would make it next to impossible for the FCC to track down shoddy devices that bleed into nearby wavelengths and screw up broadcasts.

Despite this, Wolfe sighs, there's not much you can do; what Google wants, Google gets. "One can't really fight the likes of Google and Microsoft, who are hell-bent on gaining access to any and all available spectrum to promulgate Internet services into places better left electromagnetically fallow," he writes. "All I'm saying is, the specter of unlicensed interference doesn't sit well with those who were fiddling around with electronics before the PC came along and deluded digital types into believing that the analog world has been tamed."