News of free government Wi-Fi neither news nor true

On the Monday following the Super Bowl Americans found out they had another treat coming: Free Wi-Fi would blanket the land. Or so readers of the Washington Post might imagine if they'd read tech blogger Cecilia Kang's piece, "Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public Wi-Fi networks." Within a day, many other outlets had picked it up with even more emphatic headlines, such as Mashable's "Government Wants to Create Free Public 'Super Wi-Fi'."

But by the following day, a few writers, notably Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin, pointed out that the story lay somewhere between wildly skewed and outright false.

Kang had built the story around a minor development: the FCC opened a comment period on the plan to offer incentive auctions of freed-up TV spectrum. This spectrum, as Speed Matters and many others have reported, will be available for mobile access, including a portion for unlicensed use (e.g. Wi-Fi). It wasn't really news.

But this is about setting aside unlicensed spectrum for public use, not about the FCC or any other federal agency building a national network and then operating it without cost to the users.

It may be true that some telecoms oppose the unlicensed spectrum set-aside, but again, this isn't news. As DSLReports concluded, "The initiative isn't new, it has been fighting for survival for nearly a decade, and it still has a long and ugly political gauntlet to run before it can even begin to disrupt the existing telecom apple cart."

Speed Matters supports the spectrum auction sale, including reserving part of the spectrum for Wi-Fi. But we also note that most wireless companies already offload a lot of their traffic onto Wi-Fi, so this future development wouldn't be anything new. And it certainly isn't free national Wi-Fi, however appealing that may be.

Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks (Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2013)

Government Wants to Create Free Public 'Super Wi-Fi (Mashable, Feb. 4, 2013)

No, free Wi-Fi isn't coming to every US city (Ars Technica, Feb. 4, 2013)

Spectrum auction moves closer (Speed Matters, Sep. 28, 2012)

New FCC 'Super Wi-Fi' Initiative Not Really New (DSL Reports, Feb. 4, 2013)