Interfering with competition
In the middle of a very long trip some time ago, I leaned against a wall at LAX and plugged in my laptop. A wireless signal came up — it turned out that I was near the Continental lounge and they were providing open access. I was tired and frustrated enough that this seemed like a tremendous gift, a sign of civilization, a harbinger of eventual arrival in a place that wasn't an airport.
Now I know that if the airport had had its way, that signal might have been banned. Today the FCC said that landlords (including governmental landlords) can't keep renters from using wifi equipment on their premises. This is a good development for wifi generally.
The background: Massport, who runs Logan Airport, didn't like the idea of Continental (my friend at LAX) putting a wireless antenna in a closet in the Continental lounge. Continental fought back, pointing out that the FCC's Over-the-Air Reception Devices (OTARD) rules prohibit restrictions on property that impair the use of certain antennas, and protect leaseholders as well as property owners.
Massport claimed that their lease with Continental prohibited this kind of thing. (One wonders if the crackers were subject to approval too.) They came up with all sorts of arguments, but the key was that this nefarious closet antenna would “decrease [Massport's] revenues] — they wanted to run their own wireless service and charge for it. Refreshing frankness. Massport also claimed that the police would be using the “official” airport wireless backbone, and that Continental's action might cause interference to that backbone.
Interestingly, the Commission said that the safety exception to the OTARD rules address physical safety, not interference. So if radio emissions were too high, or antennas were likely to fall down in high winds or block fire exits, that might remove an antenna from the protection of the rule. But interference between unlicensed devices (the devices used by all the hotspots we love) wouldn't cause the antenna to be unprotected by the rule. The thing about being unlicensed is that you can't complain about interference from other unlicensed uses.
The FCC's opinion strongly refutes each of Massport's arguments, including pooh-poohing their takings claim and their notion that state governments should get to do whatever they want in lease agreements when it comes to antennas. As long as the signal sent by an antenna is (1) commercial, (2) non-broadcast, and (3) transmitted via wireless technology to and/or from a fixed customer location, the OTARD rule will protect the antenna. Because all upstream connections to the internet are commercial in some sense, that's an easy standard for a little wireless antenna to meet.
(I can't help saying that this standard gives rise to a remarkable FCC footnote on p.8: “[T]he Internet is used to conduct a variety of commercial activities, including on-line shopping, auctions, banking, and travel planning.” Go, team!)
This is a significant decision. It means that landlords (even if they're government instrumentalities) can't stop people from operating community wifi antennas on their leased premises. It means that mesh networks can't be outlawed by landlords on one pretense or another — as long as the antenna is being used to send and receive signals within the leaseholder's own property, it's covered. (The rules don't protect “hub or relay antennas used to transmit signals to and/or receive signals from multiple customer locations.”)
And my use in LAX is covered by another footnote (n.66): “To the extent Continental's antenna incidentally transmits signals outside of the leased premises, it is not transmitting them to 'customer locations,' because Continental does not have any 'customers' outside of its President's Club Lounge.” Even though I wasn't a customer, I was grateful.
[Thanks to Harold Feld for the news, and congratulations to him and to the Media Access Project for their role representing Masspirg, U.S. PIRG, The New America Foundation, Champaign Urbana Wireless Network, The National Hispanic Media Coalition, Hawaii Consumers, Freenetworks.org, Acorn Active Media, Marcus Spectrum Solutions, and Free Press]