Features

Free the airwaves

The fact that Paris Mashile thinks WiMax is 4G is another excellent reason to deregulate, unlicense and privatise frequency spectrum.

01 November 2006

Paris Mashile recently gave a long and rambling speech that left listeners shaking their heads in amazement. Inasmuch as one could discern any coherence at all, the chairman of Icasa's talk at ITWeb's Mobile and Wireless 2006 event repeated a whole lot of nice vision, mission and goal type things. It was, by contrast, rather short on the actions, decisions and deadline type things that would achieve these worthy goals.

Mashile explained that the regulator intends to step back and allow competition to be the primary regulatory instrument, but then promptly launched into a confusing and disjointed list of micromanagement measures, price caps and licence regimes. There was no contradiction here, he assured us.

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