The Federal Communications Commission announced a plan last week to auction off a portion of the public airwaves for Free WiFi usage. The costs of the broadband access would reportedly be offset by advertising over the network and subscriptions to faster service. The initiative comes on the heels of an FCC report which found such a plan would not interfere with other signals across the spectrum.

While many local governments across the nation have attempted to provide free wireless access to their citizens, their efforts have been continually stymied by major players across the cable and telecommunications industry who, not surprisingly, see such public services as a threat to their Internet Service Provider businesses. It’s time for this to stop. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries governments and private philanthropists realized the need for an equality of access to information throughout our society in order to secure a viable democracy. This realization lead to the introduction of library systems throughout the United States to provide the public with that information, for free.

Today the same challenge exists in ensuring access to the greatest information tool of our time, the Internet. In Baltimore, the city where I now reside, an estimated 40% of residents do not have access to the internet in their homes, a statistic which clearly reflects the large economic disparities here. Providing free broadband in a densely populated area such as this would do so much to help improve the lives of people who are longing for a way out of their circumstances but simply don’t have the means to do so.

You can takepart by contacting the FCC and pushing for increased free access to the Internet across the country.

LINKS:

Wired: Epicenter: Free WiFi? That’s so 22nd Century.

Information Week: FCC paves way for free WiFi

PC World: Could free nationwide WiFi really work?