FCC Allots Airways for Wireless Use

Federal regulators on Thursday set aside additional airwaves for the wireless industry to provide high-speed mobile Internet access and other advanced services.

The unanimous vote by the Federal Communications Commission follows a compromise reached with the Pentagon last summer, which agreed to relinquish control over about 90 megahertz of spectrum that the military had been using for satellite and aircraft operations. As the number of wireless phone subscribers has ballooned to more than 137 million, the wireless carriers have pressed the government to allocate more airwaves for commercial uses.

Over the coming months, the FCC will draft rules for using the new airwaves and then auction the spectrum off to commercial wireless users by 2004.

The burgeoning market for advanced mobile services -- known as third-generation wireless, or “3G” -- represents a crucial challenge for the Bush administration, which must balance the wireless industry’s voracious appetite for new spectrum with strategic and national security concerns.

The world’s nearly 500 million wireless subscribers are projected to nearly triple to 1.3 billion in 2005, creating a $561-billion market in high-speed wireless Internet devices.

Although existing mobile phones can provide wireless Internet access, the process is slow and cumbersome. By contrast, advanced mobile services being introduced by carriers such as Sprint PCS Group and Verizon Wireless Inc. promise to nearly quadruple current transmission speeds. That will allow users to download music, surf the Internet faster and even get instantaneous navigational information such as the location of nearby restaurants or gas stations.

In a separate but related action, the FCC on Thursday began a sweeping examination of the government’s management of the nation’s airwaves in hopes of making more spectrum available for wireless devices.