Silicon Valley seeks to revamp wireless industry

By Rachelle Younglai and Sinead Carew

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A start-up backed by Silicon Valley's power elite hopes to convince regulators to back a business plan that could scrap many restrictions on wireless networks and help Internet service providers like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. into the market.

At stake is a chunk of wireless spectrum so valuable that it is being touted as the last opportunity for a new player -- such as the start-up Frontline Wireless of Greensboro, North Carolina -- to enter the $100 billion U.S. wireless market.

Just over 100 megahertz of analog airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital signals. Of that, about a quarter is being set aside for public safety and another portion is slated to be auctioned off by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission later this year.

Frontline Wireless wants to buy some of the spectrum and use Internet technology and a new type of software-based radio system for a network that public safety workers could share with commercial groups as diverse as traditional cellular phone providers, Internet companies and even energy utilities.

The idea is to have commercial organizations that use the network to foot the bill to build a system also designed to overcome significant problems emergency workers had talking to each other in emergencies such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

"Our basic business plan is to guarantee roaming or national mobility to competitors. We are very much a story about jump-starting competition in an industry that is rapidly consolidating," said Reed Hundt, Frontline's vice chairman and a former FCC chairman.

The U.S. cellular market is dominated by four large companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile -- whose networks often do not cover sparsely populated areas and only support communication using devices that they have decided can run on their networks.

Frontline is proposing a system that can support multiple network technologies and can quickly reallocate how airwaves are shared among users, It wants to give customers more choice over devices while ensuring public safety workers get priority in emergencies.