When is open access not open access? That’s easy: When it’s being promoted by the FCC. Or more specifically by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who earlier this week floated the rules he'd like to set for the upcoming auction of prime UHF spectrum.
This spectrum, soon to be vacated by broadcasters, could be used to develop a high-speed wireless network that would be open to innovative devices and services—unlike existing cellular networks, which are tightly controlled by their owners. In a breathless story in Tuesday’s USA Today, Martin was quoted as saying he wants a “truly open broadband network -- one that will open the door to a lot of innovative services for consumers."
That same day, an article on Dow Jones Newswire painted Martin’s proposed auction rules -- leaked by an unidentified “Federal Communications Commission official” -- as a win for the tech sector and a bold challenge to the likes of AT&T and Verizon.
On closer inspection, however, it appears that Martin’s proposal is just the opposite.
Though few people have actually seen Martin's draft rules, they reportedly include several key provisions that make it unlikely an open network would ever actually be built. For example, they are said to allow the winner to offer retail service only. That might force the auction winner to open its network to unapproved devices, but it wouldn’t actually force competition. So we’d end up with something like wireline broadband today: Users could hook up any device they wanted to, but they’d still be limited to only a couple of service providers.
A couple of more obscure provisions make it unlikely we’d see even that much progress. Rather than offer a single nationwide block of spectrum, the draft rules divide the country up into six large regions. Should a would-be competitor -- Google, for example -- attempt to piece together a national footprint, one of the incumbent telcos could block it simply by buying one region. Worse yet, there’s apparently little in the rules that would require the auction winner to actually build out a network. That means there would be nothing to prevent an incumbent telco from buying the spectrum and warehousing it, just to keep idea of open access safely locked up where it belongs.
Still, it’s not over yet. Will the full commission go along with Martin’s plan? Will Google make a play for the spectrum? Will Frontline Wireless, the open-access startup backed by VC giant John Doerr, Google angel investor Ram Shriram, and Netscape veteran James Barksdale, muster a bid? Stay tuned.
