Riding the tiger

AT THE INTERSECTION of two disruptive technologies lies the Bermuda Triangle of the Digital Age. Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless communications) and Weblogs (the untethered journalism of the immediate) are comingling to produce an intoxicating blend of chaos and innovation.

The Wi-Fi/Weblog axis has been increasingly visible in recent months at conferences and trade shows. At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference two weeks ago and again last week at the Vortex 2002 networking confab, 802.11-enabled laptops chattered quietly in the background as attendees caught up on e-mail, sent pithy instant messages to one another, and, in the case of the O’Reilly conference, posted a running transcript/commentary on key sessions to a variety of Weblogs.

Vortex required a nondisclosure agreement for the media, to encourage an atmosphere more conducive to frank exchanges between business executives, lobbyists, and other players in the networking community. In this time of downsizing and surviving, conferences are valued as much for carbon-based networking in the halls and across the dinner table as for the keynotes and panels.

Weblogs turn that conversation into a virtual reception, where the concerns of the day bubble up via trusted repositories of links: Dave Winer’s Scripting News ( https://www.scripting.com ), Doc Searls ( https://doc.weblogs.com ), Wes Felter’s Hack the Planet ( https://wmf.editthispage.com ), my brother Dan Gillmor’s eJournal , and InfoWorld’s Jon Udell ( https://radio.weblogs.com/0100887 ) to name but a few.

Winer represents a growing trend, where technologists write both code and commentary. Increasingly, you’ll find journalists performing labors of love, none more carefully tended than Glenn Fleishman’s 802.11b Networking News ( https://80211b.weblogger.com ). As Wi-Fi expands virally across Starbucks, airports, conferences, and ad-hoc, Pringle-connected electronic villages, Fleishman’s site is a required refueling pit stop.

Wi-Fi and Weblogs share characteristics of another disruptive technology: peer-to-peer. 802.11 clients can be configured as peer devices; companies such as Mesh Networks envision blanketing cities and highways with a peer network to provide continuous 802.11 presence. Wi-Fi fans tout this vision as disruptively competitive with 2.5G (2.5 generation) and 3G wireless services, still mired in a welter of conflicting standards and fractured market share.

Weblogs are effectively journals of record, with a self-regulating mechanism that encourages shared information, promotes knowledge, and discards hidden agendas as untrustworthy.

Weblogs, like Wi-Fi, appear intimidating at first to institutions; much has been made of the threat to journalism as we know it. Those of us who have been saved many times over by smart editors from unmasking ourselves as pedantic know-it-alls resist the notion that Weblogs are the unfiltered, unfettered direct route to enlightenment some tout them to be.

Disruptive doesn’t mean destructive; the emerging communications models are not so much replacing as evolving from the previous generations. That’s why Robert Pepper, Chief of the office of plans and policy at the Federal Communications Commission uses the word “morph” a lot.

That’s right, the FCC. The same guys who outlawed George Carlin’s seven dirty words are now the protectors of our wireless freedoms. Pepper doesn’t have a Weblog (yet), and the Vortex NDA precluded real-time coverage of his keynote speech, but his message on stage and later over lunch is that the FCC’s goal is ubiquitous broadband availability and minimal regulation built on the Internet’s open, end-to-end tradition.

With the X-Files moving from the home to big screen, conspiracy buffs will have to keep looking for new fodder. Pepper says everything you know is wrong. The common wisdom is that the 1996 Telecom Act failed, the United States is behind Europe and Japan, and there’s not enough wireless Internet.

In fact, residential cable telephony more than doubled to 1.7 million customers in the last year, cable and DSL service availability should reach more than 90 percent by the end of 2002, and Wi-Fi usage is exploding. I ask Pepper how Wi-Fi adoption is challenging the wireless providers. “There are a variety of players that, in the development of Wi-Fi, didn’t understand what it could do, and they weren’t watching it as it happened.”

“But it’s too late,” Pepper says matter-of-factly. “You go to the CTIA [Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association] trade show. Last year, they were all opposing Wi-Fi. They thought it was going to cannibalize 2.5 or 3G. This year they featured Sky Dayton [CEO of the Boingo Wi-Fi wireless Internet service]. And they were talking about figuring out ways to use Wi-Fi and their mobile phones together.”

Pepper is a holdover from not only the Clinton era but Bush senior. “Now all of a sudden the wireless guys are saying ‘Wait a second. We’re trying to get 3G out there, right? And Wi-Fi is selling one-and-a-half million units a month? If there’s a way to link our thing to that, right, we want to do it.’ That’s like grabbing the tail of the tiger. So they’re beginning to think in the other way — if they’re not going to kill it, they want to ride it.”

The secret to the FCC’s spectrum policy is flexibility, the voluntary reallocation of technologies across licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Or as Pepper puts it: “To be able to develop new services, new applications without having to come back to Father Government and ask ‘May I?’ ”