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A whole year wasted -but WiFi gets the go-ahead at last

A year ago The Government was told that it was daft to prohibit commercial use of Bluetooth and WiFi "hot spot" services. This week, it has published - what? A report saying that Bluetooth and WiFi hot spots are probably OK.

Are we pleased? Of course! - but the real question is why it took a whole year to answer a simple question to which the obvious answer was: "They're OK."

It took a year, because the Government made sure it would take a year. What it did, to make the question hard, was to ask Professor Martin Cave to report into it. But not just into the straightforward issue of wireless hotspots - no! - that would have been too quick, too easy. Instead, the report was to look into the entire issue of radio spectrum management in the UK.

Of course, spectrum management needs reviewing; and Professor Cave's report seems spot on: "[in the past] particular bands of spectrum have been allocated by international agreement to specified purposes; national governments have then assigned the spectrum through an administrative process to particular firms," he writes in his report. He continues: "Guided by many of the responses which I have received, particularly from commercial organisations, I have concluded that this system is no longer sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of the twenty-first century."

He's spot on; it isn't. The invention of spread-spectrum devices changes everything, and the system of assigning spectrum is antiquated. And his review was urgently needed.

But why did we need a whole year of analysis of the whole systems of spectrum analysis, just to tell us that WiFi hotspots should be allowed to operate commercially?

The short answer: we didn't.

The issue of "licence exempt" spectrum assignment was an anomaly. It can be dealt with - and it will be dealt with - by a simple "statutory instrument" - that is, the Minister for Trade and Industry already has reserve powers to change regulations on this subject. It could have been sorted out in a month, last Spring. And you're entitled to ask: "Why wasn't it?"

The answer is simple enough: the Government and the taxpayer are in collusion to make a windfall from the third generation of mobile phones, in terms of the huge licence fees - prepayable - for universal mobile telephone service (UMTS) franchises.

As has been pointed out here, before, the Government's negoatiating position in this was very strong. There was no alternative. Nobody, from BT to Hutchison, who wanted a 3G licence, could say: "Oh, no, that's far too much. If it's going to those levels, we'll circumvent the whole bidding process and install a metro wireless network based on WLAN technology."

It was pay up, or get out.

In the end, who knows? - it may turn out that UMTS networks are a gold mine, and that the only way of getting any benefit for the tax payer is the up-front model. If that turns out to be the case, then the Government has been extremely canny, and we will all praise them for saving the ordinary salaried worker from having to fork out.

But my own feeling, is that widespread wireless communications, capable of supporting the infrastructure of the future, are the equivalent of a public resource as vital as the police, the fire service, and the ambulance service. I think that if the taxpayer had to find the extra money, it would be money well spent.

And I feel that there is now a serious risk that this UMTS tax will have the same effect as the infamous Window Tax of 1696. It was meant to raise money by taxing the rich; only rich people had houses with lots of windows. Instead, it led to the bricking up of thousands of windows all over the country.

I'll be really, really pissed off if the result of the UMTS tax is that thousands of wireless broadband windows get bricked up.