Politics is keeping ISPs from building a broadband Internet for those who are out of reach of wires.

Wireless is being touted as reaching the 50 million to 100 million people who cannot be connected by wires. The  GSM Association, a group based in London that represents mobile operators, says that most of the disconnected live in Eastern Europe, but tens of thousands also live in rural Britain, France and Germany.

However, since 2000 and 2001, when the first frequency licenses for high-speed mobile service were sold in government auctions, most E.U. countries have refrained from selling new licenses. With such tight control over the frequencies it makes it impossible for smaller operators to serve parts of Europe where bigger operators are unwilling to invest.

Tom Phillips, GSM's director of government affairs said that the switchover from analog to digital television broadcasting is giving Europe a rare opportunity to break the bottleneck and get on the same wavelength, at least in wireless broadband. Some of the ISPs think it is a chance to get a high-quality bandwidth across the E.U., but they have some uphill work ahead of them.

Private and government-owned broadcasters, which want to keep the UHF bandwidth for high-definition TV, are blocking redeployment in Germany, Spain and Italy. In Spain and Italy, regulators have rededicated the UHF bandwidth to broadcasting, not broadband.

In Germany, where the country has a complicated but precise system of awarding licenses, it requires so many agencies to agree that no one ever does.

More here.