# Grokking Spectrum

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2013-02-11

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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/7314ddd1372408d6880f5052d230291c.png)

One of the more important, more contentious, and more complicated tech policy issues is radio spectrum allocation. It’s an issue I don’t have a lot of background experience in but have been learning a lot about lately. It’s a hot topic right now because the FCC is about to hold incentive auctions to [transition some of our airwaves from TV use to broadband internet use](https://www.fcc.gov/incentiveauctions).  It also made the [front page of the Washington Post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/tech-telecom-giants-take-sides-as-fcc-proposes-large-public-wifi-networks/2013/02/03/eb27d3e0-698b-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html?hpid=z1) last week, which [caused a bunch of confusion about what’s going on](http://techliberation.com/2013/02/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-super-wi-fi-in-one-tweet/).  It’s all kind of hard to grok. To get my head wrapped around it, I’m reading through the New America Foundation’s excellent [Citizen’s Guide to the Airwaves](http://www.newamerica.net/files/airwaves.pdf) (published in 2003 but lays out the essential foundation afaict).  New America also has a website dedicated to the issue at [SpectrumPolicy.org](http://spectrumpolicy.org/). What I do know is that it’s important that we leverage our spectrum assets to enable as much innovation as possible.  Not only to improve our baseline internet connectivity ([which is really bad](http://visual.ly/internet-speeds-and-costs-around-world)), but to allow for lots of new uses of the spectrum that we might not anticipate (as happened with Wifi and Bluetooth in the unlicensed high frequency bands). **Update:** [Harold Feld tells us that we really could have long-distance nationwide wifi](http://tales-of-the-sausage-factory.wetmachine.com/cecilia-kang-is-right-there-really-could-be-a-free-national-wifi-network-of-networks/).

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/grokking-spectrum)*