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Good Morning,
The Berkman Center is pleased to share a working paper from Harvard
Law School Professor and Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director Yochai
Benkler on "Unlicensed Wireless vs. Licensed Spectrum: Evidence
from Market Adoption."
Find the abstract below and download the full working paper here:
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/7211>
The paper reviews evidence from eight wireless markets: mobile
broadband; wireless healthcare; smart grid communications; inventory
management; access control; mobile payments; fleet management; and
secondary markets in spectrum. Yochai Benkler finds that markets are
adopting unlicensed wireless strategies in mission-critical
applications, in many cases more so than they are building on
licensed strategies. Eighty percent of wireless healthcare; seventy
percent of smart grid communications; and forty to ninety percent
of mobile broadband data to smartphones and tablets use unlicensed
strategies. Unlicensed technologies are entirely dominant in
inventory management and access control. For mobile payments,
current major applications use unlicensed, and early implementations
of mobile phone payments suggest there is no particular benefit to
licensed strategies in this space. Fleet management is the one area
where licensed technologies are predominant. However, UPS, owner of
the second largest commercial fleet in the U.S., has implemented its
fleet management system purely with unlicensed wireless, suggesting
that even here unlicensed may develop attractive alternatives. By
contrast to these dynamic markets, secondary markets in licensed
spectrum have been anemic.
Market evidence suggests that unlicensed wireless strategies are
becoming the primary approach for implementing wireless
communications technology. As Congress and the FCC seek ways to
transition away from older technologies, the paper recommends that
they should adopt policies explicitly designed to assure that
unlicensed wireless innovation has at least as much room to grow as
licensed wireless approaches.
Comments on the paper can be sent to <yochai_benkler@harvard.edu>.
Benkler also writes on "Selling Our Wireless Future" on the
Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yochai-benkler/selling-our-wireless-futu_b_1034889.html
We welcome you to share this research with colleagues, students,
friends, and others that may be interested.
Best,
Amar Ashar
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard University