Kevin Werbach describes the astonishment of policy-makers when he drops the WiFi bomb on them: 1.5 million 802.11b cards sold every month. Meanwhile, in DC, they're pushing ahead with a plan to provide municipal lighting by filling standards with gas that glows when you hit it with 2.4GHz radio — a plan that will saturate the city with radio waves that drown out 802.11b.
For the past day, I've been at a small workshop on spectrum policy hosted by the Aspen Institute. Aspen regularly assembles key figures from the government, private sector and academia to frame emerging communications and Internet policy issues. This one was interesting. I was there to advocate open spectrum and unlicensed wireless technologies, like 802.11/WiFi. It was heartening to see the level of awareness about WiFi among the lawyers, economists, lobbyists and policy-makers. They realize something important is going on here. Still, most of them were shocked when I mentioned there are now 1.5 million WiFi cards being sold every month.
