When spectrum auctions fail

For some microwave links, cooperation beats competition as a way to share the air. Most people think that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ended U.S. involvement in the Pacific theater of World War II. In fact, the state of war with Japan persisted, in a technical sense, until September 1951, when the formal peace treaty was signed. "Making peace is like repairing the many strands of an intercontinental cable," President Truman said at the time. "Each strand must be spliced separately and patiently, until the full flow of communication has been restored." Thanks to some then-new technology, more than 30 million U.S. viewers witnessed Truman compare peacemaking with cable mending during the very first TV broadcast aired from coast to coast. Electrical engineers watching the event might have appreciated the irony: You see, the new technique for linking far-flung TV stations had just made lengthy cables obsolete. Engineers at AT&T instead used a network of microwave transmitters to beam TV signals from point to point across the country.