The Broadband Militia

A new breed of underground Internet entrepreneurs could end the recession. If only Washington would let them.

On a recent crisp sunny day in Manhattan, I strolled up to a faded wrought-iron bench in Tompkins Square Park, flipped open my new Sony Vaio laptop, and as I sipped a cappuccino, began downloading my email. While new messages zipped into my PC at speeds many times faster than a dial-up connection, I scanned the day's headlines on CNN.com, then clicked over to E*Trade to eye the market. In a handful of New York City's parks, coffeehouses, and other public areas, many are doing the same: getting online, surfing the Web, and checking email. And, like me, they're doing it wirelessly. What's more, they're avoiding the aggravations typically associated with getting high-speed Internet: no more waiting months for DSL providers to switch on service or for cable providers to upgrade your building. Wireless broadband is happening now, and best of all, it's free.

Sound too good to be true? It isn't. A few blocks away, someone is paying for our broadband access (the catchall term for high-speed, high-capacity Internet). A typical broadband connection pipes so much bandwidth into a customer's home---more than any one person really needs---that my benefactor is happy to share the excess with whomever cares to use it. He does this by beaming his standard DSL broadband signal through a "wireless base-station," a device about the size of a paperback novel with a stubby black antenna. Base stations are designed to send a broadband signal a few hundred feet, which would allow you to receive a wireless Internet connection in most of the rooms in your home. Recently, however, a growing number of broadband customers have discovered that they can boost the range of wireless signals several miles with homemade antennas fashioned from no more than an empty Pringles potato- chip can, or scraps of metal, wire, and tinfoil. Yet what started as a clever technique to share bandwidth with friends and neighbors has grown into a national grassroots movement called Free Wireless. Today, legions of tech-savvy hobbyists have formed what amounts to a "broadband militia" and they are spreading something that many people these days want but still can't get: cheap, fast access to the Internet.

Broadband isn't merely a neat high-tech option, like a CD burner, but a potentially transformative technology with the power to jumpstart the American economy. The stock market boom of the late 1990s was fueled in large part by the promise of a dazzling array of new applications that broadband would enable---everything from seamless video-conferencing and downloading movies-on-demand to online doctors' visits and court appearances. One reason tech stocks were bid up so high is that many of these applications were ready to be deployed and needed only universal broadband to do so, something everyone figured was imminent. Only it wasn't. Today, 90 percent of American households still don't have broadband (fewer than 10 million people do). Many believe that the key to ending the recession is spreading broadband to all those potential customers, which would give high-tech companies a delivery mechanism for their products and allow these new industries to take off.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is happening. After rising steadily for the last five years, the number of new broadband users has slowed. The good news is that the necessary foundation for universal broadband has already been put in place. In the last decade, investors spent $90 billion laying the fiber- optic cable networks that became the "backbone" which would bring broadband to the masses. The bad news is that today, 97 percent of it sits unused. That's because the telecommunications industry hasn't been able to bridge the gap between this fiber-optic backbone and people's homes at a price that the public is willing to pay. In fact, while the price of most technology falls, the price local phone companies charge for broadband is going up. Those price hikes are the natural result of the phone companies' monopoly, which has allowed them to squeeze out small competing Internet service providers, or ISPs (see "Disconnect," October 2001).

The cost and hassle of providing broadband to the residences and businesses of people who want it has become too big an obstacle. In order to get most forms of broadband from the backbone to your home, Baby Bells and cable companies have to upgrade their networking gear, swapping out older technology for equipment that can handle data traveling in two directions. And in neighborhoods that lack decent landlines it means laying wire from this new backbone to each individual customer at an expense of about $1,500 per home---a fee few Internet users are willing to pay. For broadband providers to foot the bill, they'd have to invest another $100 to $300 billion in infrastructure costs---impossible in today's depressed tech market and a sobering realization that's triggered an abrupt halt to broadband expansion. As ISPs go under, consumers are left with few choices for faster Internet service.

Fortunately, the recession is finally forcing Washington to pay attention. The Bush administration says that broadband expansion is a top economic priority. It assembled a high-level "tech-team" that has met dozens of times with executives and lobbyists to discuss broadband. In January, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle D-S.D.) included universal broadband access in the Democrats' economic-revival plan. Broadband got a further push a week later when the technology industry launched a major lobbying effort to establish a national goal of creating 100 million new broadband customers by 2010. As The Washington Post put it recently, "broadband is a new battle cry in Washington."

But there's a problem: There are many ways to deliver broadband to users, but Washington only hears about the ones touted by well-funded lobbyists for the phone, cable, and satellite companies, all of which are competing fiercely to become the preferred broadband technology and control and profit from the mass dissemination that everyone agrees will one day come about. None of these options, however, has a prayer of getting broadband to the masses quickly and cheaply. Worse, the big Internet providers are asking the Bush administration for vast tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to help them. The truth is that there's only one way to spread broadband cheaply and quickly: wirelessly. But that's the one method not being seriously discussed in Washington.