The myth of interference

Internet architect David Reed explains how bad science created the broadcast industry.

By David Weinberger

Mar 12, 2003 | There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

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Spectrum as color seems like an ungainly metaphor on which to hang a sweeping policy change with such important social and economic implications. But Reed will tell you it's not a metaphor at all. Spectrum is color. It's the literal, honest-to-Feynman truth.

David Reed is many things, but crackpot is not one of them. He was a professor of computer science at MIT, then chief scientist at Software Arts during its VisiCalc days, and then the chief scientist at Lotus during its 1-2-3 days. But he is probably best known as a coauthor of the paper that got the Internet's architecture right: "End-to-End Arguments in System Design."

Or you may recognize him as the author of what's come to be known as Reed's Law -- which says the true value of a network isn't determined by the number of individual nodes it connects (Metcalfe's Law) but by the far higher number of groups it enables. But I have to confess that I'm biased when it comes to David Reed. I first encountered him in person three years ago at a tiny conference when he deftly pulled me out of a hole I was digging for myself in front of an audience of my betters. Since then, I've watched him be bottomlessly knowledgeable on a technical mailing list and patiently helpful as a source for various articles I've worked on.

It doesn't take much to get Reed to hold forth on his strong, well-articulated political and social beliefs. But when it comes to spectrum, he speaks most passionately as a scientist. "Photons, whether they are light photons, radio photons, or gamma-ray photons, simply do not interfere with one another," he explains. "They pass through one another."

Reed uses the example of a pinhole camera, or camera obscura: If a room is sealed against light except for one pinhole, an image of the outside will be projected against the opposite wall. "If photons interfered with one another as they squeezed through that tiny hole, we wouldn't get a clear image on that back wall," Reed says.

If you whine that it's completely counterintuitive that a wave could squeeze through a pinhole and "reorganize" itself on the other side, Reed nods happily and then piles on: "If photons can pass through one another, then they aren't actually occupying space at all, since the definition of 'occupying' is 'displacing.' So, yes, it's counterintuitive. It's quantum mechanics."

Surprisingly, the spectrum-as-color metaphor turns out to be not nearly as confounding to what's left of common sense. "Radio and light are the same thing and follow the same laws," Reed says. "They're distinguished by what we call frequency." Frequency, he explains, is really just the energy level of the photons. The human eye detects different frequencies as different colors. So, in licensing frequencies to broadcasters, we are literally regulating colors. Crayola may own the names of the colors it's invented, and Pantone may own the standard numbers by which digital designers refer to colors, but only the FCC can give you an exclusive license to a color itself.

Next Page: Frequency-hopping our way to unlimited bandwidth for everyone

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