A coalition of technology vendors, consumer groups and think tanks has banded together to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve wireless devices that would operate in currently unused television spectrum.

The Wireless Innovation Alliance, which launched a Web site on Wednesday, is an expansion of the vendor-centric White Spaces Coalition, a group that has been pushing for the use of so-called white-space spectrum for wireless broadband services.

The vendor coalition includes companies such as Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. At a press conference held here today, several other groups, including Free Press, the Media Access Project, TechNet, the Computing Technology Industry Association and Educause, said that they were joining in the white-space push. ...

At the Wireless Innovation Alliance's press conference, though, Blackburn urged the FCC not to "pick winners and losers" but to base its decision on objective tests of the proposed white-space devices. A lot of rural areas in western Tennessee have no broadband services, she noted, saying that adding such capabilities "is essential for economic development" in the region.

Asked if any other countries are using white-space spectrum for broadband devices, members of the alliance said that they weren't aware of any formal projects at this point.

Other countries are looking to the U.S., said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program, a policy development and lobbying initiative within the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. "The United States has led the world on unlicensed technologies from the get-go, and if we don't want to lose that leadership, we need to keep moving forward," Calabrese said. ...

The complete IDG News article can be found on the Computer World website, here.