With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) scheduled to unfold its National Broadband Plan before Congress next week, aiming at providing 100-megabit service to 100 million people by 2020, one of the most intriguing suggestions that the agency will reportedly put before Congress will be to “consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”

With an earlier proposal for free spectrum being rejected by Congress, there are speculations galore about the future of the new proposal – more so as there has thus far been no elucidation on where the spectrum will come from, and what will be the eligibility criteria for availing free broadband.

Since there have been no details provided by the FCC about its free spectrum proposal, it is being speculated that the suggestion probably seeks the setting aside of some spectrum for use by the underprivileged, disadvantaged or low-income users, either for free or at low rates.

Meanwhile, FCC’s free Internet access suggestion has not gone down too well with most of the country’s carriers and ISPs, chief among them being T-Mobile. As per the carrier, the proposed service will likely impede its AWS spectrum for which it shelled out over $4 billion.

However, while T-Mobile has reiterated the need of more testing of the band; M2Z Networks has said that the spectrum would not cause any interference.