President Obama announced on Monday that he will try to double the size of broadcasting bandwidth for wireless devices. He said this is a priority work and its utmost required for making it easy for iPhone and Blackberry users in Major American cities.
The users of Smartphone are increasing day by day and so is the congestion on the network during the peek business hours. Michael Calabrese, director of wireless future program at the New America Foundation said “If in five years, about 50 percent of wireless customers will be using a Smartphone with capability similar or better than today’s iPhone, that will require a 16 times increase in capacity. Currently they don’t have enough spectrum or enough access points for that, so they need to increase both.” Calabrese further said that because of iPhone, the telecom companies have terrible congestion problems.
Obama has given full support to this plan issued by federal Communications Commission to find excess bandwidth in the airwaves in both public and private sector. Obama’s top economic advisor in the White House gave a speech extolling the new policy which he said will be “fundamentally important for our competitiveness”. In this world the skilled workers are increasingly going mobile, the ideas are readily transmitted across the nations, and capital is even more mobile, so the ability of corporations to maintain their networks is highly demanded. Larry further said that “Digital infrastructure will be a key source of competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. There is no policy step more important for digital infrastructure than assuring that scarce spectrum is efficiently allocated.”
John Kneuer, called Obama’s announcement as a “Huge positive step”. John helped the former president George W. Bush develop the wireless broadband policies as head of the National telecommunications and Information Administration. Kneuer said “We continue to be the global leader in all information and computer technology. But it’s a good thing that we are not being complacent. I don’t think we have fallen behind and this is a new effort for us to catch up. This is just thoughtful good government stuff to keep on doing the good stuff we have been doing”
In a fact sheet released to reporters , White House said” the use of wireless technology is growing at a very robust pace, with AT&T, in part due to its iPhone roll-out, reporting a 5000 percent increase in wireless data traffic over the past three years”
The plan is to increase the wireless airwave by 500 MHz over the next decade and this would double the existing size of what wireless companies are now able to use. The administration will announce an report of how the federal government is using the wireless broadband spectrum by Oct 1 and announce “a Specific Plan and Timetable” for how it plans to reach the 500 MHz mark.
