New Limits Considered in Airwaves

The Federal Communications Commission has long set limits on how much of the airwaves one company can control. Now, pushed by small and medium-size telecommunications companies, the government plans to begin setting new rules to govern how much of the airwaves, or spectrum, a single carrier can hold.

A big goal for those small companies, which compete with the behemoths Verizon and AT&T, is a measure that would give greater importance to so-called beachfront spectrum. Those are the highly sought-after airwaves that travel farther between antennas and pass more easily through buildings, making them especially attractive in urban areas where the largest, most profitable clusters of mobile device users congregate. After years of limiting companies to no more than one-third of the available airwaves in a given territory, the FCC on Sept 28 will begin the rule-making process on whether new technologies require limits to be redrawn, recalibrated or perhaps removed.