Wireless Future Project

Archives: Wireless Future Project Articles and Op-Eds

Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future

  • By
  • Brendan I. Koerner,
  • New America Foundation
December 31, 2003 |

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas.

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To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?

  • By
  • Nicholas Thompson,
  • New America Foundation
October 12, 2003 |

In the fall of 2000, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had not yet earned any powerful enemies, at least so far as they were aware. They were just two obscure Swedish entrepreneurs who had worked with three Estonian programmers to write a file-sharing application called Kazaa. At the time, the free program was merely one of Napster's several weak stepsisters, lumped together in news reports with the likes of Snarfzilla and ToadNode.

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Up in the Air

  • By
  • Michael Calabrese,
  • New America Foundation
September 1, 2003 |

Each economic era has a resource that drives wealth creation. In the agricultural era it was land. In the industrial era it was energy. Today it may be the airwaves, also known as the radio-frequency spectrum -- the most valuable resource of the emerging information economy. Economists estimate that in the United States alone the commercial value of access to it could be more than $750 billion.

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A Private Windfall for Public Property

  • By
  • Michael Calabrese,
  • New America Foundation
  • and Norman Ornstein
August 12, 2003 |

We're no fans of the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to relax ownership requirements for TV stations and newspapers, but it would be a shame if the battle between FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Congress on this issue distracted attention from another harmful move being contemplated by the commission.

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Your Cellphone is a Homing Device

  • By
  • Brendan I. Koerner,
  • New America Foundation
July 1, 2003 |

If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important perk should you ever find your hand pinned beneath an immovable boulder in rural Utah, as Aron Ralston did recently.

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Hollywood and Whine

  • By
  • Brendan I. Koerner,
  • New America Foundation
February 1, 2003 |

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

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Sky Dayton's Long Road to Internet Nirvana

  • By
  • Brendan I. Koerner,
  • New America Foundation
October 1, 2002 |

Fresh from a morning surf off the coast of Malibu, the maharishi of the wireless Internet shows up at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons sporting a rumpled T-shirt and Mayan sandals. It's an outfit more popular among aging head shop owners than youthful tech moguls, but Sky Dylan Dayton likes to live up to his Age of Aquarius name.

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Fill Potholes on America's Info Highway

  • By
  • Karen Kornbluh,
  • New America Foundation
June 13, 2002 |

The Bush administration has largely ignored the nation's $700-billion telecommunications industry's free fall, a costly mistake for the U.S. economy. Stock prices are down 75%, and telecom companies are expected to reduce their capital spending for the second year in a row.

President Bush should use today's White House high-tech industry forum to announce a national broadband strategy.

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Book Review of David Bollier's Silent Theft

  • By
  • Peter McGrath,
  • New America Foundation
June 10, 2002 |

It's almost human nature: if you're allowed the use of something for enough time, you begin to think you have a right to it, even that you own it. Take broadcast television. Its signals travel by means of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically that segment known colloquially as the airwaves. The spectrum is a fact of the physical universe. Capital didn't create it. It can't be improved by way of adding value. It's inherently a public resource.

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FCC Lets the Telecom Giants Steal from You

  • By
  • J.H. Snider,
  • New America Foundation
April 7, 2002 |

As Congress finalizes its budget resolution for next year, there is one item you won't see: the taking, via eminent domain, of tens of billions of dollars worth of your airwaves rights.

You know what eminent domain is. The government comes and takes away your property for the sake of the "greater good." Usually, citizens fight such takings of their property kicking and screaming. And even if they lose, at least individuals have a constitutional right to compensation.

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