M2Z has hundreds of millions of dollars poised to start building a national backbone: All they need is sweet, sweet spectrum. This new firm burst into broadband consciousness just two weeks ago when it filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asking for 20 MHz of spectrum with a 15-year license at no cost (2155-2175 MHz).

M2Z promises to use this spectrum provide free, advertising-supported 384 Kpbs/128 Kpbs Internet service to 95 percent of the U.S. population alongside premium offerings of about 3 Mbps. They promise to deploy immediately and guarantee to meet deployment targets over a 10 year period, starting with 33 percent coverage within three years of the license grant. 

What they offer in return is five percent of gross receipts for their premium service, which will run about 3 Mpbs.

I spoke to co-founder John Muleta, a former FCC bureau chief and executive at PSINet, and Michael Howse, co-founder and chief executive of PacketHop, a strategic partner for public safety with M2Z, about the need for M2Z in an era of increasing wireless options, the content filtering on their free service, and the technology that will drive their efforts.

Muleta said the motivation for this network was the lack of reach for Internet access. "The one universal truth is that there's market failure to provide people with a universal, affordable access," he said. While metro-scale networks using Wi-Fi are proliferating, Muleta said that what they're proposing restores Wi-Fi back to a local area networking technology, its designed purpose, by providing backhaul using technology designed for wide area purposes. "We are neither opposed to nor critique municipal systems; we think they'll be part of the mix," Muleta said. Muleta thought M2Z could make it substantially less difficult and expensive to deploy metro-scale Wi-Fi, in fact.

Howse noted that by having backhaul available everywhere in a licensed band it will be easier for Wi-Fi networks to provide high-bandwidth local communications. PacketHop offers mesh equipment, and Howse envisions offloading to peer-to-peer networks a good portion of traffic that now, by necessity, passes through metro-scale Wi-Fi nodes. "You're really decreasing the tax on some of the backhaul requirements by maintaining some of these local communications when they can be," said Howse.

Both Howse and Muleta emphasize how edge applications will be able to flourish on the M2Z network as they will be a mostly neutral, non-discriminatory host. Our fundamental goal is to "make transport a non-issue so that edge applications can deliver," Muleta said. They'll encourage manfacturers to produce consumer premises equipment (CPE) devices that couple their wireless standard for backhaul with Wi-Fi for local distribution. Their interest isn't limited to Wi-Fi, but that seems like the most logical first wave.

The M2Z approach is essentially a flavor of the 802.16-2005 standard (formerly 802.16e), which includes fixed, nomadic/portable, and mobile wireless connectivity. They'll use the OFDMA standard that's part of 802.16-2005 with beamforming through multiple antennas--what they call advanced antenna systems or AAS--and time division duplexing (TDD), which allows dynamic asymmetric network usage. With 20 MHz to play with, they could dedicate 1.25 MHz to the free service and still have three 5 MHz channels or one 5 MHz and one 10 MHz channel, based on current WiMax Forum generic profiles for service.

M2Z has received a fair amount of criticism over their promise to filter pornographic and related content over their free service. Muleta says this is a red herring. Muleta said that given that they will provide access to anyone eventually nearly anywhere in the U.S., they have significant liability concerns about allowing minors to have unfettered access, as this might put them afoul of state and federal laws--especially since they expect schools to take advantage of the free service. Muleta said their premium service will be unfiltered, unless requested, as they will have a billing relationship with premium customers that will allow age verification.

I tried to strike up a discussion of net neutrality, but Muleta, old FCC hand that he is, is focused more on the competitive aspects than the social and political ones; as a new provider, he wouldn't want formal neutrality requirements. From Muleta and Howse's descriptions, however, they don't plan to limit what devices can use the network, will not require certification or approval of third-party devices (the more, the better, Muleta says), nor discriminate on the basis of services used. This is a fair amount of neutrality, although the devil is in the details if they decide port blocking is part of filtering or that swarming is inappropriate. (Several users with the right kind of peer-to-peer software could pull down pieces of large files at the full network download level and combine them over Wi-Fi, for instance.)

In other words, it might not be a "stupid" network, but they're not making noises about how it might be smart, either. "Let lots of applications bloom," Muleta said, and both he and Howse emphasized the critical importance of edge applications, which is a very "stupid network" view. Neither wanted to talk much about voice over IP, because, they said, they don't want to limit the discussion to just that service.

One of Howse's key messages for this bandwidth chunk is that it can be an additional, unencumbered, prioritized, and free method for ubiquitous access for public safety (fire, police, emergency, and first responders). PacketHop already sells into that market, and M2Z promises to allow unlimited public safety users. They envision this as potentially secondary to the 4.9 GHz public safety band, but the characteristics of M2Z's network will be broader coverage.

The FCC has, in the past, allotted spectrum for particular purposes, but there's no way to predict whether they'll have any truck with this proposal; nor, if they agree with its terms, to know how many (if any) lawsuits will be filed by potential competitors in the cellular data and wireless broadband industries.

At this stage, everything is speculation. M2Z sees themselves as providing a vital service conforming to the goals of U.S. broadband initiatives, while filling a gap for small businesspeople who's other alternative is typically a wired T-1 line. By the time M2Z could deploy, it's possible that their impending entry into the market would have fundamentally transformed the nature of wireless services.

With Verizon Wireless sending out cancellation letters about non-typical bandwidth use in violation of their extremely restrictive policies of use--email, surfing, intranet apps--on their EVDO network, it's very easy to see how 20 MHz could provide unencumbered, nonrestrictive bandwidth that would be a giant threat to cell providers, wireless ISPs, and wireline T-1.