Posted 08/22/08 at 08:07:37 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Kevin Martin, chairman of Federal Communications Commission, is doing his best to sell his free, porn-free internet dream. The plan is – if you were on an intergalactic voyage all this while - to auction AWS-3 spectrum to a company willing to provide nationwide wireless broadband internet for free and sans pornographic content. “More and more people expect and demand to have access to the Internet and new wireless technologies,” Martin apprised USA Today about the increasingly insatiable thirst for broadband.

He rests his case on the absolute necessity of broadband and compares it to copper lines as the most prominent means of communication. His plan hasn’t gone down well with T-Mobile which believes that wireless services in the AWS-3 spectrum will interfere with its own services in the AWS-1 range. But Martin tried to allay such fears by telling USA Today that engineers are busy finding a solution.

There is certainly a case for free wireless broadband if one considers the abject rate of broadband penetration in the U.S with only 38% of rural America enjoying broadband, according to a report by Communications Workers of America. Furthermore, the percentage of broadband homes is only 25% amongst households with annual incomes of $20,000 or below.

What the MPC Readers Are Saying: But T-Mobile is not the only one frowning. Many people, including a few MPC readers, don’t like the porn-free part of the proposal. “I would rather see nationwide free internet fail completely than to see our government actively "filtering" the net. Leave net censorship to the Chinese,” wrote a charged up MPC reader; and “porn drives innovation,” according to another. 

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Internet, fcc, t-mobile, Kevin Martin, AWS-3, free wireless broadband, no porn, porn-free, aws-1

Posted 08/14/08 at 10:02:28 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Two Congressmen (Democrats) have come out in support of the proposed auction of spectrum in the Advanced Wireless Services 3 region. The spectrum can only be used for providing porn-free wireless broadband throughout the country sans any access fees, according to the proposal. The two Democrats, Edward Markey (D-MA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) professed their support for the proposal in a letter they sent to Federal Communications Commission’s chairman Kevin Martin.

They admonished the detractors of the proposal for objecting to the AWS-3 spectrum auction. The two Congressmen don’t believe that the TDD technology that will be used for the Pan-American wireless broadband network will jeopardize services in the AWS-1 region. T-Mobile had objected to any auction in the 2155-2180 MHz spectrum range as it holds AWS-1 spectrum. The duo also supports the proposed auction as it is worried about U.S loosing the broadband-penetration wars to other countries.

Free Wireless broadband certainly seems a step in the right direction. However, the question is whether suppression of pornographic material would encroach upon the right to freedom of speech.

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free, fcc, hardware, pornography, AWS-3, MOBILE BROADBAND