It is appalling that the FCC allowed Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to acquire the new so-called "Educational Broadband Spectrum" (2.5GHz) from un-suspecting non-profits and strong armed these Boards of Trustees into long term lease deals of the spectrum for Clearwire’s new WiMax service.

These non-profits could have easily formed local public/private partnerships to build out both 3.65 and 2.5 GHz networks, established their core access plans and peripheral applications, and then lease all the space they wanted to service providers.

This asset could have been used to benefit the citizenry, local businesses, local governments, and communities as well as the non-profit licensee. But now all we can expect is for Sprint/Clearwire to blanket our cities and communities with coverage and compete to pull every dollar they can from those cities and communities.

Shame on these non-profits. The monies they could have generated through local public/private partnerships would have dwarfed the under-valued lease payments by Sprint and Clearwire… so in the long run they have done a huge disservice to their constituents, communities, and local governments.

This is an outrage... but as goes the money, so goes the FCC and the Educational Broadband Spectrum.

See:
http://www.freepress.net/node/40251
http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/325143
http://www.accessdelray.org/Broadband+Future.html