An obscure battle over wireless airwaves comes to Trojan football

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When the University of Southern California football team plays Stanford at the Coliseum, it won't be hard to find Trojan fans with their game face on, or even with the team's colors plastered all over their mugs. But a camera-toting squad from an advocacy group called WifiForward will be asking people at the stadium to show something else: their "What? No Wi-Fi?" face.

With its "Save Our Wi-Fi" campaign, WifiForward -- a coalition of giant Internet companies, device makers, cable TV operators and others that have invested heavily in Wi-Fi technology -- is trying to make a point to federal policymakers: that the advanced version of Wi-Fi needs more airwaves, and that the ones it's using today shouldn't be taken over by other technologies that hog the bandwidth. Among other potential threats, the group is concerned about a high-speed data technology called LTE-U, which uses 4G mobile data protocols to transmit over the same 5 Ghz spectrum that higher-speed versions of Wi-Fi use.


An obscure battle over wireless airwaves comes to Trojan football