The flowering of wireless is enormously exciting. Mobile phones now, ubiquitous Net access soon and after that, knowing where everything is all the time. Nobody can deny that radio is busy changing the world even more drastically than it did the first time around. It means us nerds are losing our secrets, though. Once upon a time, only about ten people in the country knew what a gigahertz was -- and half of them lacked the social skills to tell anyone. Now you can't take a walk down a country road without finding two wireless LAN makers at fisticuffs as they argue furiously about 2.4GHz versus 5GHz. And everyone everywhere seems to want spectrum space as quickly as it becomes available.
Why is it taking so long? Ask your friendly local radio ham to take you for a spin through the airwaves one evening, and you'll find that most of it is empty. That's true even in London, where huge chunks of valuable wireless real estate sit idle -- they're allocated to the military for no good reason; dead channels to prevent interference to distant TV transmitters; services with national frequencies but sparse local use; or part of international agreements that are no longer appropriate. Or then there are the hundreds of taxis, courier services, breakdown services and so on, all handed out frequencies in the days before the mobile phone made two-way radios something of an anachronism. Yet a lot of the new developments in this country depend on analogue switch-off, where existing services are turned off to free up the spectrum -- whether or not the frequencies are actually needed. This means making hundreds of millions of radios and televisions -- some of which you own -- obsolete overnight. Don't like it? Tough. (There are even hints that amateur radio frequencies will fall, which will of course be the end of civilization as we know it. Trust me on this).
That there are plenty of frequencies already being auctioned off might seem to indicate analogue closedown isn't necessary. But talk to people who want to roll out broadband wireless Internet access, and they'll do nothing but complain: the frequencies on offer are no good, too expensive, not capable of being shared. Despite the Radiocommunications Agency offering chunk after chunk of spectrum, it's never good enough. BT, bless 'em, was offered a licence at 2GHz, but rejected it because "there wasn't enough bandwidth." So now the broad open spaces of 3.4GHz are available, is BT happy? No, of course not. It wants 2GHz back again, "because it's much cheaper" (balderdash. There are about three components different between a 2GHz and a 3.4GHz radio), but is now complaining that "people it can't talk about" won't let the band go. That these "people" are most likely BT itself in Secret Squirrel garb is neither here nor there in the schizoid world of British telecommunications. But without the right frequencies, there's no commercial sense to wireless broadband, or so they say. Hence analogue switch-off.
