The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is pleased to announce the publication of Open Wireless vs. Licensed Spectrum: Evidence from Market Adoption, authored by Yochai Benkler, and published in the latest issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. The paper can be downloaded directly here (PDF).
The paper reviews evidence from eight wireless markets: mobile
broadband; wireless healthcare; smart grid communications; inventory
management; access control; mobile payments; fleet management; and
secondary markets in spectrum.
Benkler finds that markets are adopting unlicensed wireless strategies
in mission-critical applications, in many cases more so than they are
building on licensed strategies. If the 1990s saw what was called "the
Negroponte Switch" of video from air to wire, and telephony from wire to air, the present and near future are seeing an even more fundamental
switch. Where a decade ago most of our wireless capacity was delivered
over exclusive control approaches-both command and control and auctioned exclusivity--complemented by special-purpose shared spectrum use, today we are moving to a wireless infrastructure whose core relies on shared, open wireless approaches, complemented by exclusive control approaches
for special, latency-intolerant, high-speed mobile applications. The
scope of the latter will contract further if regulation catches up to
technological reality, and opens up more bands to open wireless
innovation, with greater operational flexibility and an emphasis on
interoperability
This final version of the paper uses more updated market data than the 2011 working paper, adds case study analysis of failures or anemic cases of open wireless
allocations, the U-PCS, WMTS, ITS, and 3.65GHz bands (suggesting
valuable lessons for future design of open wireless allocations), and
adds an extensive literature review and rebuttal to some of the major
academic critiques of open wireless approaches.