Congress Wants Federal Government To Sell 1755-1780 MHz Spectrum Band

GovTechGuy writes "With next year's reverse auction of TV spectrum not expected to sate the wireless industry's growing demand for mobile broadband, lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration to auction the 1755-1780 MHz band, which is considered especially desirable for mobile phone use. However, the Pentagon and other federal agencies are already using those airwaves for everything from flying drones and surveillance to satellites and air combat training. They say it would take ten years and $18 billion just to vacate the band so it can be sold."

Screw that.

[Lumpy]

Make it public airwaves and give it to the ham radio operators. It's time they gave back some spectrum to us that has been stolen over the years.

Re:Lobbyists

[runeghost]

Bingo. I know the mainstream media is useless, but on places like slashdot, it would be nice if people would stop pretending that congresscritters are anything but sock-puppets for their corporate owners.

I hate this policy

[scribble73]

I hate this policy, of selling our public bandwidth to private corporations. I just hate it.

Airwaves are public. The Government should not be selling property that belongs to all of us. Leasing or licensing bandwidth for some specific period of time is one thing, but transferring ownership is another. We should not "privatize" this.

I am dismayed to see so many politicians and technical types just accepting actions like this, without any policy discussions taking place -- beyond closed-door meetings at the FCC, which are not shared with the public.

tt77

Headline is wrong

[erroneus]

It should read:

Congressional 'contributors' want federal government to sell 1755-1780 MHz Spectrum band

Figures

[guttentag]

lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration to auction the 1755-1780 MHz band

I figured it was only a matter of time before Congress pushed to sell off 1776 to the highest bidder. They've been pushing to sell off the Post Office's business for the last 6 years by forcing a financially sound organization into insolvency (see paragraph 3 here [wikipedia.org]). Why not sell off American Independence [wikipedia.org] itself and Common Sense [wikipedia.org] while they're at it? It's like we gave the keys to our house to service employees and they're auctioning off the contents to lobbyists through the front door to the highest bidder, keeping the profits for themselves.