Currently, the Department of Defense and a handful of other government agencies use those frequencies for fixed microwave communications. Those communications will be relocated to a more obscure (and less lucrative) end of the spectrum at a cost estimated to be US$936 million. While that seems like a hefty price to pay, the US government expects to more than cover its costs from auctioning off the newly freed-up spectrum to cellular and other wireless providers. The last big spectrum sale resulted in a US$2 billion windfall for the federal government.

Making enough of the spectrum available for wireless communications has become increasingly important as currently available frequencies have become crowded. One possibility touted recently has been that of opening up the far end of the spectrum (e.g., 60GHz) for some wireless applications. The 57-64GHz band is currently exempt from licensing, which means that technologies operating in these high-frequency areas would be unimpeded by other uses. The drawback, however, is that communications at that end of the spectrum are strictly line of sight.

The sale 1710-1755MHz spectrum, along with the soon-to-be-auctioned 2110-2155MHz bandwidth, reflects the US government's determination to free up as much of the spectrum as possible for next-generation wireless services. One extremely lucrative chunk of the spectrum is that used by analog television. Plans originally called for analog TV transmissions to cease by the end of 2006, freeing up the 700MHz area. However, the transition to digital TV has gone slower than anticipated. Just last month, Congress officially extended the deadline to February 2009. Part of the proceeds from the auction of that 700MHz bandwidth (expected to be in the US$5 billion to US$10 billion neighborhood) will be used to buy converter boxes for households that still receive plain-old over-the-air signals.

Once all this bandwidth is in the hands of communications corporations, consumers should have more options for broadband communications. Current high-speed wireless broadband options aren't all that compelling when it comes to speed. Intel has been touting its 802.16e WiMAX as an alternative, but plans to begin offering WiMAX service in 2005 largely fizzled. Instead of 50km-wide networks with 70Mbps speed, we saw a much-less-impressive launch of 1.5Mbps/256Kbps WiMAX service from BellSouth. Hopefully the upcoming spectrum auctions will lead to faster, more impressive wireless broadband services.