Chair ComSoc Award Committee Andreas Molisch, your blogger, ComSoc President Vijay Bhargava

At the December 2013 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), you blogger was awarded the IEEE Communications Society Award for Public Service in the Field of Telecommunications. This award is given for “major contribution to the public welfare through work in the field of telecommunications”.

The citation for the award read “For pioneering spectrum policy initiatives that created modern unlicensed spectrum bands for applications that have changed our world."

As you can see comparing the above photo with the below 1985 video of FCC’s adoption of the ISM band rules that are the basis of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and various other unlicensed services, your blogger hasn’t changed much in the past 28 years.



Thanks to IEEE ComSoc for this great honor, awarded last year to Dr. Veena Rawat, formerly of Industry Canada - FCC’s great counterpart to the North. Among Dr. Rawat’s many major accomplishments was the timely introduction of Canadian policies that paralleled the FCC’s ISM band rules at a time when FCC was still having misgivings about what it had done.

UPDATE

As if on queue, Chmn. Wheeler said in a speech the day after this was posted:

One of the FCC’s great success stories was the creation of unlicensed uses in the 2.4 GHz band in the 1980s. Who would have imagined that WiFi, Bluetooth, and other innovations would result?

Tags: Unlicensed policy