New Limits Considered in Airwaves
By EDWARD WYATT September 25, 2012
WASHINGTON - From East Hampton to Malibu, the only limit on how much beachfront property one can own is usually however much one can afford.
Not so in the air across the continent, where the Federal Communications Commission has long set limits on how much of the airwaves one company can control.
Now, pushed by small and medium-size telecommunications companies, the government plans to begin setting new rules to govern how much of the airwaves, or spectrum, a single carrier can hold. A big goal for those small companies, which compete with the behemoths Verizon and AT&T, is a measure that would give greater importance to so-called beachfront spectrum.
Those are the highly sought-after airwaves that travel farther between antennas and pass more easily through buildings, making them especially attractive in urban areas where the largest, most profitable clusters of mobile device users congregate.
It may sound esoteric, but the issue is known to every cellphone user who has experienced a dropped call or a smartphone browser stuck endlessly loading a Web page. After years of limiting companies to no more than one-third of the available airwaves in a given territory, the F.C.C. on Friday will begin the rule-making process on whether new technologies require limits to be redrawn, recalibrated or perhaps removed.
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