Philip,
As a Network Engineer, I seriously doubt the claim that there is better mobile phone coverage in Wales that there is in Boston. Most of Massachussetts is covered in GSM just as well as Wales is. Please see this website http://www.gsmcoverage.co.uk/coverage.html and compare the coverage maps for yourself. In the US, there is cellular coverage using nine different licenses in each market using Analog (AMPS), CDMA (IS-95), TDMA (IS-136), and ESMR (iDEN) I would venture to say that in Boston, there are more cellular options than in Wales and all these options are available at a lower price to the consumer.

It is true that most of Europe is covered with GSM. This is mainly because most of Europe is covered with people and in other places, the government has mandated it (to the cost of the subcriber). The United States on the other hand, is relatively sparsely populated and does not have Government regulations mandating that every sheep farm, desert, or corn patch be covered. Also in the United States, the Federal Government does not tell corporations how to do their business. Therefore they don’t mandate which standards or protocols are to be used. They let the carriers and ultimately market decide which is better through which company provides the best service. If you really needed complete nationwide coverage, you would have bought an Iridium phone. The company went out of business because such complete coverage was not needed here, or you were not willing to pay the $3000 for the phone and the $3-$5 per minute call charges. The lesson here is that ubiquitous covergage costs money.

The government built roads from coast to coast and justified their role in paying for it as reasons for the national defense, not for building the economy. President Eisnehower enacted the law “National Defense Highway System” in 1956. Of course, these roads are now what we call Interstates.

You obviously recognize the value of the wired internet and the wireless or mobile internet. And you are correct in that politicians are more interested in solving threats to our security and safety than interfering in the doings of telecommunications companies and individuals. Newspapers tend to cover the shocking news. But, I must admit that T-Mobile has gotten quite a lot of coverage with their 802.11 Hotspot networks in over 2,300 Starbuck Stores, A dozen or so Airports, 130 American Airlines, United and Delta Clubs, 400 Border Stores and soon to come thousands of Kinkos stores. One thing that you miss here, Phil, is that most of the country is already covered for Wireless Internet. The entire T-Mobile GSM system is capable of carrying data using GPRS. http://www.t-mobile.com/tmobile_internet/ Other companies are covering the US with another protocol called 1XRTT. Unfortunately, this 2.5G or 3 G ubiquitous coverage is not affordable to most people at $1 per megabyte. T-Mobile and other carriers note the need for delivering wireless Internet at high data rates (Broadband generally means >200Kbps) and for less costs. However, high data rates come with a trade-off called Shannon’s law. You can’t have coverage and high data rates at the same time due to noise. Many of these companies are gambling that wireless Internet is not required in all corners of the country and are deploying the systems where people are most likely to use them.

I’m not sure if I agree that per capita, American citizens pay some of the highest taxes on the planet. What I will agree with is that American citizens get some of the lowest returns on their tax dollar investments. Much of tax spending takes money away from citizens who can spend their dollars towards projects that are needed. I really don’t need the Government to collect taxes from everyone so that we can have wireless Internet coverage for a couple of sheep farmers in North Dakota, or every wilderness area in the country. It simply does not make economic sense.

802.11 infrastructure is not exactly ridiculously cheap either. To outfit an airport with 802.11 costs millions of dollars of infrastructure and require thousands of dollars for every monthly charges for backhaul, maintenance and equipment upgrates. While in your home, it is cheap to deploy 802.11 by connecting it up to your cable or DSL, commercial deployment of 802.11 requires more infrastructure such as conduit, interduct, fiber-optic networks, miles of CAT-5 cable, switches, routers, and plenum-rated power-over ethernet capable access points. Commercial grade equipment is much more reliable and consequently comes with a higher price tag.

One of the big problems that 802.11 carriers still are facing is this notion that everyone wants their cut of the pie. City, County and State governments don’t get revenues from taxes anymore, so they look at the corporations to fill the gap. This is what I see as neo-feudalism. For example, many municipalities want huge Minimum Annual Guarantees, free infrastructure, free training, gifts to the under priviledged and large portions of any profit that remain. If there is no profit left to do the project, the carriers won’t be interested in providing the service. If a municipality really wants 802.11 to be made available to their citizens, they need to eliminate the trade barriers rather than expecting everything for free from the corporations.

The owner of the electromagnetic spectrum for the most part in the United States is the Government. Much of it is leased out to corporations and individuals in the form of licenses. Licenses cost lots of money. In Europe, 3G licenses cost about $24,000 per subscriber. PCS licenses int he US were a bit more reasonable but nevertheless significant. These costs for 3G, UMTS, GSM, and GPRS are all being passed on to the consumer in the form of high cell phone bills. GPRS might not have cost $1 per megabyte if it were not for the high costs of licenses, permitting for putting up cell towers, costs to support the FCC itself… and so on. 3G may never happen here in the United States due to the high license costs and huge infrastructure costs. Governments clearly have the ability to tax and regulate their economy to complete collapse.

I must however disagree with your notion of a wireless neo-feudalism. The beauty of 802.11 is that the spectrum is license free. This is what keeps the costs down to the subscriber. As a matter of fact, it’s the very Robin Hood notion that you are proposing of collecting taxes from the rich corporations and giving streaming video and free paging everyone (even if it’s just the poor drug dealers on the other side of the digital divide) that runs up the costs of delivering services to subscribers. It’s a noble sounding ideal, but these “entitlements” have to be paid for in the end by the consumer.

If a consumer needs a pager, then he should get one. If a real-estate lady needs Wireless Internet for her business, by all means, let her get GPRS or take her customers to Starbucks and use the Hotspot service there. But it should not be the Government’s business to collect taxes so that everyone gets ubiquitous Internet throughout the whole country.

Wi-Fi is relatively free of wireless neo-feudalism and should be kept that way. In fact, one way the government can further de-regulate Wi-Fi and encourage it is to provide more unlicensed spectrum. Some of this is already being done. See Revision of Parts 2 and 15 of the Commission’s Rules to Permit Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) devices in the 5 GHz band (ET Docket No. 03-122) at http://www.fcc.gov. However, 5.6-5.7 GHz band is not very good for backhaul due to its short range.

The huge, wast empty space of VHF and UHF broadcast television channels that are currently empty between active channels could be used to provide competition by allowing wireless backhaul to deliver the last mile. These bands are much more suited to penetrate buildings and dense vegetation. Backhaul on the empty TV channels would provide much needed competition against the wireline telcos that still have a monopoly on their cable infrastructure – T1s and DSL service. It’s this very infrastructure that has contributes to the high monthly re-occurring costs of a Wi-Fi system.

Most recently, the homeland defense is requiring police departments to deploy wireless internet in all the citites nearly at all the traffic lights. The purpose is twofold. The digital video cameras on top of the light poles need backhaul and the policemen need access to crime informationd databases. See http://business.cisco.com/prod/tree.taf%3Fasset_id=83103&ID=92783&ListID=44753&ParentID=92781&public_view=true&kbns=1.html If municipalities were really interested in helping to make Wi-Fi ubiquitous, they would let carriers ride their 802.11 networks for additional revenues. Cisco 1200 access points for example, can support both one public network and up to 15 other networks on SSIDs that are not broadcast.

Konrad Roeder
Co-Author of Wi-Fi Handbook : Building 802.11b Wireless Networks — Konrad Roeder, Frank D., Jr. Ohrtman; Paperback ISBN 0071412514

Any “credible plan for a future in which such an infrastructure might exist” might not be that easy to come up with due to the pace in which these wireless technologies are evolving! The mere fact that Wi-Fi (802.11) seems to superior compared to status quo or to what one was used to serves as well as evidence for this as the fact that already so called 4G-technologies are not only being developt, but already working, thus basically rendering the expensive bought frequency licenses of European telecom carriers possibly a bit useless (there aren’t any anticipated multimedia applications up to date working anyway). This is a well-known phenomena in the world of IT (e.g. the comparison of a PC 10 years old with a current one). This 4G-technologies promise to combine the transfer rates of Wi-Fi with the mobile coverage of current wireless telephone networks.

As this field is a work-in-progress there also aren’t any de facto standards to build upon yet or means to determine which is the right way for a standardizing or coordinating autorithy in a sufficiently lasting way (at least for 4G) ? Further, just setting up such Wi-Fi stations everywhere would not create by itself a working whole solution. For one, because of the spotty coverage and low range of this technology, but also because there arise many implementation issues which probably would contribute the real work load and challenge (Skimmed over an article suggesting this point of view).

Aside of this, the FCC (or whichever government body) is a bureaucracy, thus too slow for this pace. Another point is, that due to the advent of powerful computing for radio solutions the old way of dividing and handling the spectrum (as finite, stated in comment above already) seems at least questionable and the issue might just be to free the spectrum up for the new digital way.

Besides this, for such issues the Western model has in the past very often showed the superiority of the company-approach vs. the state approach. Just like the state doesn’t build cars or provide electricity, it might be that organical growth and the capability of companies to adapt to countless details encountered in reality (including when things – as quite often – turn out to be different than expected) are what matter here.

From my remote point of view thus the best approach would be – especially for people associated with universities or universities themselves – to somehow interlink with such promising companies which deploy into this area of future communication either by supporting their students founding such companies (seems to hard at a first glance) or by cooperating in research (sharing the brains of their students) with such companies already in the area, which might in turn provide a “real environment” for students and be prospective future employers, too.

When these technologies become truly available to the people it might indeed be a revolution: Just the application of seeing (quality real time video) and talking easily everywhere with anyone besides and virtual corporation software might render the need for physical offices and people to gather at one physical location a thing of the past to a degree unprecedented (esp. in combination with future gadgets, like laser eye projectors worn like sun glasses; or long-battery-life very powerful computers in mobile phone size). But surely it is also – like every technology – a two-edged sword. But I still have to recognize the other edge of it.

There are very good reasons why cellular coverage is better in Europe than in the US:
1. Europe is a heck of a lot smaller. The area that any individual service provider has to cover is relatively small. Service providers in the United States have an enormous territory to cover, and have generally done it–have you looked at the map of analog coverage in the US? Even digital is starting to cover most of the areas that 70-80% of the nation’s population lives in.
2. European telecomm companies were (and in many cases still are) government-run monopolies. Just like the old Civil Aeronautics Board, which used to mandate flights to every Congressman’s home district, lots of areas are served, but at an unjustifiable cost. If you really need cell phone service in the middle of the Nevada desert, pony up for a satellite phone–they’re getting cheaper all the time. Providing 100% coverage is just another example of what one is willing to pay–just like with software systems. Perfect reliability and quality are often technically possible, but at enormous cost.
3. Local telephone service is often metered–many PTTs in Europe have only recently offered (if they do at all) flat-rate pricing. As a result, the uptake for cellular was faster than in the US, where cellular is only now becoming a price-competitive substitute for landlines. In Japan as well, the uptake for cell phone service is so high in part because fewer people have personal computers than in the US–to use any internet services at all, consumers had to buy cellular phones.
4. Cellular service has network-effect like qualities: there is a critical mass of towers and cell phone users required before it becomes a mass market (and therefore profitable) phenomenon. It has taken American companies longer to achieve this, in part because of the reasons listed above (more territory to cover, must make business sense because they’re not government-run, etc.) It is only within the last few years that some major cable companies–which have been around since the late 1970s–have shown positive net incomes, after literally decades of investment (they’ve been cash-flow positive for longer, obviously). And cable-companies have local monopolies which cell-phone companies don’t.

Your solution (a government-sponsored 802.11 hotspot on every light- or telephone-pole) is presently unworkable:
1. How is the traffic backhauled? There are t-1 lines (at least) to every remote base station in the cellular networks–who will string a line to each (or each N’th, if the APs forward each other’s traffic) AP? (The high-bandwidth communications lines run underground). If one goes down? One would need redundant backhaul connections to make this reliable. And are light poles or telephone poles even close enough together that the “cells” would overlap? There are also “coloring” problems to consider–how do you make sure APs don’t clobber their neighbor’s channel (on a huge scale)? This is an issue inside buildings, not to mention across miles of open terrain.

2. How much does each access point cost? You can’t just throw a Linksys AP on a pole and hope for the best, if you want the network to work at all. Equipment that goes in the “outside plant” of the telephone companies is developed to extremely rigorous mechanical and environmental standards (this stuff has to live through winters in Fargo and summers in Phoenix, without needing constant servicing). Telephone companies have built thousands of “huts” and “cabinets” out in the field, and equipment that goes in them must be able to withstand ridiculous extremes. And wireless APs would be a tougher problem, as they can’t be buried underground or housed in a protective bunker–they must be fully exposed.

3. Who maintains the APs and the backhaul equipment? Each major telco spends literally billions every year buying new equipment and paying staff to operate and maintain existing equipment. They run extensive test labs. As above, “Five 9s of reliability” is really expensive to support. Coverage without reliability is worthless. Not to mention the upgrades. Swapping a radio on every lightpole in America would cost a bundle (sure, one could use a software-defined radio and various other phy- and mac-layer technologies to abstract this away, but that would increase the per-chip and thus the per-AP cost quite a bit over today’s low-cost APs).

This seems to be a classic example of “it’s easy until you have to build it.” If you’re willing to cough up the extra dough in the form of taxes to pay for this, you might as well just get a satellite phone and a modem card and live with it. If you really need to blog from a truly remote area, don’t expect it to be free.

I’ve got the solution – get your local congresscritter to sponsor the “National Defense Wireless Infrastructure Act”. Our Boys In Uniform need to be able to communicate in our cities when the heathen devils attack! It worked for highways, it worked for GPS, why not this?

Mixer taps – put the plug in the basin, and it will mix in there. Surely you’re not wasting water by using the taps with the plug out?

(Just echoing the “don’t mix rural with backward” point of a previous poster. And defending my country.)

I’ve made it up to Edinburgh by now, more or less in continuous GSM coverage. On the US tax question… I was talking about the absolute dollar amounts. The federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. collectively spend a very large percentage of the GDP (40 percent?), in the same ballpark as European countries. Combined with the fact that per-capita GDP has been so high in the U.S. (though maybe that’s partly because it was overstated due to the artificially inflated dollar), it seems reasonable to conclude that Americans are near the top in paying taxes. We obviously believe that the government should take responsibility for ensuring that a certain amount of infrastructure gets built (e.g., roads, which are incredibly expensive). So my point was “The government has all of our money and a mandate to create infrastructure; why isn’t there any useful wireless Internet infrastructure or any credible plan for a future in which such an infrastructure might exist?”

I beg to differ with much of what you say in this editorial, but I will focus on only the following: “True free marketeers will argue that it is better to charge road users every time they set their tires on pavement and this may indeed be the case in our congested cities. But most of the time the cost to society of an additional car on the road is too small to bother collecting and the road generates economic growth for all, thus justifying the role of government in paying for it.”

Let me begin with your most egregious example of backwards logic: “…justifying the role of government in paying for it.” In fact, the people pay for roads as part of the consent of the governed. No government can pay for anything unless it first raises revenue, i.e., via outright taxation, or via some other legal mechanism, e.g., by selling municipal bonds. Secondly, building and maintaining roads is funded by a variety of Federal, State, and local taxes, fees, etc. No street-legal vehicle may be operated on these roads without paying certain fees and taxes in advance or without paying more taxes at every fillup and at regular intervals. You stand reason on its head to presume that society doesn’t collect for every vehicle, every mile, every time in several ways, or that police don’t stop vehicles bearing expired tags. Thirdly, you folishly equate “society” and “government” with our Federal Government. This is sloppy journalism at best; at worst young skulls full of mush go away thinking that it’s the Federal Government’s job to raise the funds and take care of the problems. In my opinion, that’s wrong: The Federal Government should be collecting relevant taxes and fees and funding only about 10% of the roads, etc., and the states and citizens should be working hard to keep that percentage ever small. You would do well to reread and prehaps quote from the Federalist Papers to avoid such sloppiness. For example, from Federalist # 32: “It is, indeed, possible that a tax might be laid on a particular article by a State which might render it INEXPEDIENT that thus a further tax should be laid on the same article by the Union; but it would not imply a constitutional inability to impose a further tax. The quantity of the imposition, the expediency or inexpediency of an increase on either side, would be mutually questions of prudence; but there would be involved no direct contradiction of power.”

That is, with regard to Federally mandated highways (”post roads” in the Constitution), other roads, and streets, each level of government may tax vehicle owners and operators for the use of these roads, etc. with considerable jurisdictional overlap as each level feels is necessary and prudent, without violating the Constitution. Federal highway funds are collected, consolidated and then doled out to regions and localities, often with political favors in mind, but that does not invalidate the consitutionality of the process. If said taxes, etc. or their manner of disbursement becomes unnecessary and imprudent, political opponents will certainly make that known. The political process then takes care of such disputes under the umbrella of the Constitution. For example, congested cities and even those not-so-congested may charge extra taxes and fees to help pay for roads over and above the funds that what the state has allocated. In other words, most of the time cities and towns consider what they need to do, but it is merely a happenstance that most don’t impose special local taxes. If I were in charge, it would be just the opposite. That is, nowadays the Federal Goverment collects most of the funds and doles them back out to states and localities. This appraoch is not unconstitutional in itself, but we as a nation were very imprudent to let ourselves become trapped by trickle-down government funding. The overarching reason is that no one can run away from outrageous Federal taxes. Where are you going to go? Canada, Mexico? Further? It’s ridiculous to even consider it. However, practically any motorist can afford to drive a few miles to get to a lower local taxing area. Thus, local and, to some extent, state goverments would have to watch over their shoulders before they impose higher taxes on a highly mobile populace. Instead, the ever increasing federalization of our nation has let competition in government become almost an oxymoron.

The same strategy should apply to telecommunications and most other facts of our life. If it does not, we generally find that we have been herded into a common pen like a bunch of sheep and shorn of all that the long-knife Federal shearers can reach, and that we have no recourse. You may think that it is radical of me that something as pervasive and widespread as telecommunications should be taxed and then funded primarily on a local level, then a state level, and finally only a small percentage at the Federal level. However, this must be so, and in all otherways possible as well, or there is essentially no competition and little incentive to improve. A large measure of the genius of the Constitution was to foster fair competition among the states and localities to provide such incentives. However, writers like you who see only an endless set of Federal roads that connect cities filled with local yokels too dumb to tax local vehicles based upon local use only sread and perpetuate the notion that fostering competition in government is too hard, too tough, and too divisive. Believe me, about 90% of all mileage is for local travel or fairly close to home, e.g.,commuting relatively short distances,driving within the same state, so there is no rational basis for the Federal Government to get the lion’s share of the fuel and other taxes and then tricle them down. The only basis for this approach in any form of taxation is that Washington is too remote, besides being too hard, and too tough to beat. I remember the time in the ’80’s that farmers drove tractors to Washington to protest some changes to farm subsidies. That’s a different issue, but even back then I knew that the bureaucrats and lawmakers could just wait them out and thus easily win. We can only effectively reduce taxes and make government more efficient and responsive if the majority of the funds are collected and disbursed locally. It then falls upon the state and federal governments, respectively to help fill in the gaps. Otherwise we will all become wage slaves siupporting an ever bloated bureaucracy and clientele of special interests that can aford to lobby year-round. Government then becomes less and less responsive to the people, let alone cost-effective.

This has been a recurring theme in some of your writing in the past, if I remember correctly. I support it whole-heartedly. Even a staunch fiscal conservative like me sees the benefit of, say, adding an 802.ll hub to every few electrical poles within a city. Granted, approaching the expanses of nothingness in some parts of the US might not be feasible, but including wireless in everything that is remotely urban would generate wealth (and tax revenue) far beyond the infrastructure investment.

As far as the tax rates go, I am assuming Philip means the tax rates world-wide. The US has low income taxes compared to Europe, but not compared to the world as a whole, as far as I know. Citizens of many countries would starve if they had to pay 30% out in taxes. It’s only thanks to the immense wealth in the first-world that we can afford to pay it.

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How do you alter the accounting method to reflect these hidden costs? There are strong vested interests in keeping them hidden.
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An accounting method is not reality, it is an accounting method. Enron can’t stay profitable merely by reporting profits – there has to be real profits. Likewise, America can not remain economically viable by leaving environmental costs off the books for 200 years, as you imply. The fact that the American economy is still strong suggests that your case for externalized environmental costs is somewhat weaker than you think. Assume that by externalizing environmetal costs you push the payment date 30 years into the future. That means we are right now paying the environmental debts of 1973 – and we suffer no meltdown because of it. Likewise, in 2033 we’ll be paying the environtmental debts of today – and we will perhaps do a fine job paying those debts. In the end, environmental debts become just like any other form of debt – a limit on growth, but not a catastrophic one.

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Having different standards is acceptable, even desirable – if you are the only superpower and the largest consumer society on the face of the planet – with an aim to keep your public numb with useless information
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Given the wealth of media options now available, each company needs to give consumers exactly what they want, or the company suffers loss and eventual bankruptcy. What’s offered to the public on the radio may not be things that I like, but it is clearly what the public likes. I’ve got a ton of friends who are devotees of one radio station or another.

I can not even resort to cheap stereotypes here – like an ignorant public listens to radio, while intellectuals like myself prefer to read weblogs because they are deeper. The truth is more interesting – some of my most intellectual friends are devoted to the various “alternative” radio stations in this town.