David P. Reed

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Position: Adjunct professor of media arts and sciences, MIT; HP Fellow, Hewlett-Packard Labs

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Issue: Radio spectrum allocation. The demand for wire- less communication, from cordless phones to Internet access, is growing faster than existing technologies can accommodate. Many feel Federal Communications Commission regulations are stifling innovation that could help.

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Personal Point of Impact: Leading researcher in next-generation radio networks; public advocate of changing spectrum regulations to allow experimentation with new radio technologies

Technology Review: Why is our use of radio causing problems?
David Reed: There's clearly a huge demand for wireless digital communications that is driving high growth rates of services and devices, from traditional cell phones to Wi-Fi devices to other new things. We've gone from the idea where radio is an expensive thing that you only want to use when absolutely necessary to the idea that it's a convenience item for interconnecting everything, so my mouse and my keyboard talk to my computer by radio. The flip side of that is, what if we start doing that more and more as it gets cheaper and cheaper? Does everything start interfering with everything else, and do we have to pick what's allowed to talk to what? That's the question: how do you meet this overwhelming demand and overwhelming possibility with a sensible way of scaling up the use of radio.

TR: "Radio" brings to mind what we turn on when we get into the car, where a station broadcasts at a certain frequency, and if someone else uses that frequency, then we can't get our music or talk show. Is that not how all radio technologies work?
Reed: Well, it's certainly not correct from the point of view of the technology. Long ago, when radio spectrum was wide open and we weren't able to do very good radios, we decided that the best and cheapest way to allow many radios to operate on the same channel was to divide the spectrum up according to the application. So we have bands that are assigned to broadcast AM radio, bands for television, for two-way communication, and all that. We didn't think at all technologically about that; dividing by frequency was easy to do given the technology of the day.

In the past 10 to 12 years, we've started to realize many, many technologies can effectively share the airwaves without necessarily causing each other to malfunction. But the regulations that we and other countries apply to radio transmission don't admit that those new approaches are even legitimate. To get a new technology approved, especially one that contradicts the original assumptions, is virtually impossible-an incredibly political problem with lots of vested interests in keeping things the same.