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The future of wireless and wireless broadband was the subject of a Friday midday panel at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today. The panel was moderated by Om Malik of GigaOm (and for a few more days part of Business 2.0, and featured Clint McClellan of Qualcomm; Juergen Urbanski of FON, “a wifi peer-to-peer grassroots community movement”; Pierre de Vries, a fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC who used to work on wireless technologies at Microsoft; and Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless.

Lo, whose company makes wireless products that work within the home, said the problem with wifi is that it doesn’t reach very far and has coverage and consistency problems. “To try to use wifi to support multimedia is something that people used to laugh at. We faced that problem when we started out. But now we actually have a wide installed based of carriers that are actually using our wifi products to distribute IP TV, streaming video between the home gateway and the set-top box andn home television,” she said. “That’s really important to consumers. Who doesn’t want to watch TV anywhere, not just when you’re traveling but within your home? The place where you have your cable plug is not necessarily where you want to place your TV. Getting your entertainment any place, anywhere, both on home TVs and mobile devices, is the next big thing, I believe. You should be able to watch all the things you’ve recorded when you are waiting for your train or at the coffee shop. I think that’s within a year to two years on the horizon.”

And it looks like this kind of thing will only become easier. “Wifi today is tens of feet,” De Vries pointed out. “But this hunderds of feet distance that will enable people to crweate neighborhood meshes, those thigns will be enmableded with unlicensed spectrum” as television moves toward figital transmission and frees up more space on the spectrum.

Urbanski of FON described the wifi landscape today and how FON could make a difference. Open your computer in any big city and you will see 10-15 or 20-25 wifi hotspots in range. But most of those are private or commercial. Coverage, he said, is universal, but access is not. “The idea behind FON is to create a secure, trusted way to invite people in the vicinity of your home wifi hotspot to use your bandfwidth, which is typically not nearly at capacity,” he said.

The service consists of Linux-based authentication software that sits on the wifi router and enables people to roam for free worldwide. FON so far has 53,000 members around the world. Those who are not peers can roam for a fee of $2-3 per day, he said. “We’re changing the economics of wifi, not requiring any special equipment, just piggybacking on existing paid-for wifi connections. To make it work, people either download the software, or you can actually buy a router from us at a subsidized price, assuming you then connect it to the network.”

“Let’s realize that there is a lot of coverage today,” he said. “A lot of infrastucture is built out. It really brings wifi into the reach of the consumer, either because it is free or it is extremely affordable and accessible.”

But Malik pointed out that many ISPs require you not to share bandwith. Urbanski said FON is in talks with many major ISPs, because he maintains that the service would actually help increase their subscriber numbers and revenue. “There’s a loit of itnerest on the sidfe of the ISPs and we haven’t had any negative reaction so far on the part oif ISPs.”

Qualcomm’s McClellan, though, pointed out the value of buying spectrum as technology and processing power increase. “There’s a blessing and ca urse with unlicensed specrtrum,” he said. The Blessing is that you can get in there and start a business. The curse is that anyone can get in there and start a business.” McClellan said that Moore’s Law and other evolutions in technology would shortly transform the landscape. “There are sub-$50 phones in India that are 3G phones,” he said. If you fast-forward Moore’s law, then the cellular incumbents have a great advantage. Verizon, Cingular and Sprint are sitting on very valuable spectrum as those technologies come down in price.” (This is also the kind of technological evolution that will make future 3pointD applications and devices possible, please note.)

Malik pointed out that one group not represented on the panel was the end-user. “There is a lot of pain for the user to adopt [new] technologies. It is a bit of a painful process,” he said. Malik wanted to know what needed to be done to make users’ lives easier. “Will the phone companies start thinking about the end users, who are paying so much money?”

“Prices will come down, capacities will increase,” McClellan said. Lo of Ruckus said, “I think coverage is not where carriers are going to make money. I think carriers are going to make money in services. If you are just counting on people to pay for the pipe, that’s not good business. Wifi is a great tool together with other technologies, but I think users get frustrated about reliability. With your cell phones, if you can’t get coverage or if you drop a call, it took us many years to get used to it. We have gottten used to having a conversation cut off, but if you are watching the World Cup final and your service gets disconnedcted because the connection is not reliable, that would be very frustrating.”

“What FON is doing is very admirable,” she continued, “but if that wifi device is not reliable, ultimately the users will get frustrated and turned off. Wifi is great for data and voice, things that are non-mission-critical, but it has some ways to go to get its robustness up to par.”

De Vries spoke about the re-intermediation of the Web through protocols like RSS. “One way to solve the problem is for someone to invent RSN, or Real Simple Networking,” he said, “a protocol to allow a user to identify what the options are. Although one thing that would have to be solved would be profit sharing. What would be in it for the networks to make this stuff available?”