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The biggest obstacle to amateur radio being used for this purpose is licensing. Everyone who operates a transmitter on this theoretical network would need to be licensed. It might be possible for your kids or wife to use the system if you are present (third party traffic), but that's no good when you're not around.

I'll reiterate that no encrypted connections would be tolerated, but if you send your music in MIDI form, some people would consider that acceptable. As far as "commercial stuff goes," recent rulings have suggested that everything except the actual sale may be conducted online; some clubs run "Swap n' Shops," etc.

Yes, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. No, do not take this as gospel; I have study books from various years that contradict each other. Amateur radio frequencies likely won't be up for grabs anytime soon; they are used for emergency management and are partially regulated by the International Telecomuncations Union.

For more information on Internet and ham radio, visit ampr.org. Everything 44.*.*.* online has been an amateur radio station since the 1970's. Note that most of these (to be legal) do not allow you access to their systems. That could qualify as unauthorized operation of a radio tranmitter on their part.

And if you want to know how over 350 amateur radio operators worked over 5000 man-hours helping in the aftermath of September 11th, go here.

This one's not new, but rather is one of the "special" TLDs, alongside .gov, .edu, and .mil. Its used for International Organizations, such as the United Nations.

These satellite channels are coordinated and agreed upon by the WRC (kind of like the UN of radio frequency coordination).

WorldSpace has a cool PC card that plugs into your laptop. That will probably be the device the hackers start with for pirate decoding boxes for the US - as the frequency bands are the same.

No need to get all hyper by thinking about spooks following you around.
For those who actually read the article, it mentions the ENUM adresses are based on a variant of the DNS system where the adress ends in x.e164.arpa. Cute... and the IETF has something to do with that.

E.164 sound a bit like V.90 doesn't it? Thats because they were named by the same body, the ITU.

If you don't trust the US Gov, will you at least surf over to the IETF or the ITU's website and get the specs and make your own opinion?

The International Telecommunication Union has put out a press release on the new ITU-T V.92 standard. This should breathe new life into the modem industry and POTS-based telecommunications in general. It's worth a read to get up to speed on what V.92 brings to the table.

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The International Telecommunication Union has put out a press release on the new ITU-T V.92 standard. This should breathe new life into the modem industry and POTS-based telecommunications in general. It's worth a read to get up to speed on what V.92 brings to the table.

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Everyone, up to and including the UN Development Programme, is telling them that the quickest way to catch up with developed nations is to get wired into the Net. (See link.So they have more useful applications in mind than swapping MP3s.

I'd love to see those buffalo-based mobile PCs though. (^_^)

Is there really no copyright law or are they just not enforced?

Also the only statistics (Acrobat document) I found give a number of 100,000 people with Internet access for Nigeria, 10,000 would be for Mali

I want to register www.sex.int and sell it for millions of dollars!

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In reguards to radio band, no, there isn't much left, it's a squeze right now, and there isn't really much left for transfering giga-bytes of data. Using convential, non-compressed means, a 10-mbit data channel, you use up, 10megahertz, and it scales 1:1 from there on. With data compression, you can get more, and multiplexing can help, but you can see the start of a problem.

(This is going to be a bit long winded)
The next problem is that differrent frequencies have different characteristics, 500-1700khz am radio, can be used to broadcast over long distances in a direct path, and objects don't tend to make too much of a difference, but nearly every piece of electrical equiptment does.
Next is 1.7-30mhz, shortwave radio, can cover massive distances, if the ionosphere bounces it back, and is why I can listen to radio netherlands in australia without much more than an antennae sticking out of my radio.
Now we get to 30-300Mhz, these frequencies can get some weird effects, the low end, on good days, can make it a few hundred km's, but in most cases, good local communication for up to about 200km, this convers the vhf tv range (0-12 in au).
Next is 300-900, similar to 30-300, but shorter range, and effected by buildings more, many services use this range because there is more bandwidth available to them, at the cost of distance and useability, uhf tv exists around here (21-69 in au).
Next is 900-3000Mhz, where we encounter 3 cell phone bands (analogue/cdma, gsm & gsm 1.8ghz), and some other traffic, such as some sattelite reciever downlinks (from dish too box), point to point links start around here, MDS services (wireless cable), home networking, microwave ovens (~2.5Ghz), and much more. This is about the only feasable area to open mobile computing channels, but there is the problem of transmissions of on these frequencies causing damage to the human body (if it is proven so).
Next is around the 3-30Ghz range, which has some satellite up/downlinks, more point to point links, and not many mobile/portable links, due to the line of sight limitations of this range.
After 30Ghz is a few point to point transmissions, and it gets harder and harder to transmit at higher frequencies, since the smallest objects can cause interference (eg. fog/mist, birds, trees), and lower power transmission can have the same effect as higher power at lower frequencies (2.5ghz) to objects like organic material, or metals. Up around these higher frequencies, is where it is easily possible to make some type of emp gun, they are very dirrectional, and can irradiate things well, and only good shielding can work well, but that needs to be completly shielded, not just sealed (plastic does not stop radio waves).

In the future, to fit all the wireless transmissions that people will want to make, we will need too either come up with some really fancy ideas, or invent a new level of communications, or just wait until we get to home or the office to keep in contact.
And on the subject of an international frequency band regulator, there is the International Telecommunications Union, these are the people that keep most of the world standard, and sane when it comes to radio frequency allocation.

Oh, and long live experimentation in Amateur (Ham) Radio! :)

Virtually all countries send representatives to finalize plans for global RF allocation. This allows manufacturers worldwide to be able to design equipment that is more likely to work worldwide. For example, FM radio generally occupies the 88-108 MHz band, although there is some variation as to channel centers. This allows mfgs to design and build RF tuner ciruits optimized for just that band.

As an example of when happens when you DON'T adhere to the ITU WRC plans: Satellite C-band is set at 5.9-6.4 GHz up, 3.7-4.2 GHz down. India decided they didn't like that and went with their own C-band frequency plan -- 6.7-7.0 up and 4.5-4.8 down. Guess what? It's a real pain in the ass to find RF gear that works in India -- any vendor who want to do business in India has to re-engineer their RF cirucits to work at the the India bands.

Of course, India decided they were a big enough market that they could get away with it, and to some extent they have -- INSAT gear exists. But it's more expensive.

WHICH defeats the whole point -- global standards so manufacturers can design one set of RF circuits. Resulting in larger economies of scale and lower prices.

Such an organization already exists, it's the International Telecommunication Union.

"The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within which governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services."

From hunting around a bit it appears that the International Telecommunication Union is responsible for international issues on radio frequencies, they are part of the UN. The downer for their web site, is that you have to pay to access the publications!

So, one can make cell sizes so small that only your personal devices matter (which means you get essentially the whole spectrum to yourself), and the relays in the cells can communicate wirelessly via non-interfering directional signals. Or, to put it differently, if you settle on a cell size, you can get as many bits across total as the number of cells you have multiplied by the capacity of the frequency bands you allocate.

Cell sizes can also be limited by other propagation properties. An extreme example of that is IR (as in your IR remote control). From a security point of view and from the point of view of sharing frequencies, that can actually be desirable.

As for an international FCC, the frequency bands used by personal devices do not travel far, so they don't need to be regulated internationally to prevent interference. But the ITU is an important international regulatory agency.

And more specifically, the ITU holds a World Radiocommunication Conference quite frequently. The last such conference just ended on June 2. The web page for WRC 200 can be found here. The decisions made here will be used as a basis for many of the upcoming 3G systems that are being talked about all over the place these days, among other things.
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The radio spectrum is a natural resource, nobody owns it.

Bands are a synthetic thing, what you actually want to know is how much bandwidth you can use. Essentially, we don't run out if we manage it well. The best way to manage it we know of so far is by using cellular techniques, which allow you to re-use the same spectrum every few miles, to connect wireless devices to the wired Internet. When spectrum gets tight, you build more cells, closer together, and reuse spectrum within smaller areas.

Where is the ceiling? Currently, it is defined by how high a frequency you can build an effective radio for. We can get into the milimeter waves, extremely high frequencies which theoreticaly contain much more bandwidth than we are using today. Current equipment for these frequencies is very primitive and tends to be wasteful of bandwidth, that will improve. Eventually we hit a ceiling defined by how well very-high-frequency radio propogates through objects - if it won't go through walls or windows, etc., its use may be limited to in-building use. There are also new technologies like spread-spectrum and ultrawideband that may allow us some additional frequency reuse.

The way the FCC is currently managing spectrum could be improved. They tried auctioning license rights off, and are still doing it, and this has resulted in 5 redundant bands for cellular phones, with about the same thing going on in each of those bands. If they'd worked out a way to better share the costs of the cellular infrastructure between vendors, we could have been doing the same thing in one band, building more cells as usage increased instead of adding more frequencies. .

Thanks

Bruce (K6BP)

First, VLF is not very useful for any kind of "modern" usage. Keep in mind that the BPS of a signal can't (without some tricks) exceed the hertz of the signal, and 30 BPS is a bit pokey (if you're sending telegraphy-style messages, it's probably OK, but a decent size picture would take hours). So most of the low bands are out. With respect to the higher bands, keep in mind that under normal atmospheric conditions, there's not adequate propagation for anything above about 30-40 MHz to go beyond line of site. Yeah, there are exceptions (meteor scatter, satellites, moonbounce, various types of tropospheric ducting, etc) but that's the general rule. All that said, the FCC and other countries already belong to a treaty organization that regulates the usage of frequency bands and divvys them up according to usage. The International Telecommunications Union handles almost all of that stuff and act as a pseudo-international FCC organization to an extent. I won't vouch for the goodness/badness of how the ITU works specifically, but the need for such an organization is pretty clear.

It's called the International Telecommunications Union, or ITU for short.

It's homepage is here.

It's purpose is to develop and foster global standards for bandwidth usage, among other things. Most modern countries have communications ministries or bureaus that abide by them (the FCC for example).

As for a "global FCC," well that's just a huge stinker of a solution.
International Telecommunications Union, or ITU. It's been around for awhile.

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Second paragraph in: http://www.gsmdata.com/paprysavy.htm

This is just the first phase. GPRS is scalable so you can add more bandwidth. Question is, at what price?

Then there's IMT which will do 2mbs, alledgedly, but requires significant hardware upgrade at the transmitter sites (unlike GPRS which is just "GSM Plus", slot a new board into the existing basestation box'o'tricks, plug in the fibre and yer done, mate).

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Re: Crusoe's aim at wireless Internet appliances

Linux Paranoid wrote: Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.

We have 98% digital cellular coverage of the entire landmass (that's landmass, not population). GPRS (128kb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide this year. IMT (2mb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide in two years. Those two services are software upgrades to the existing hardware. No-one needs to errect any more masts or launch any more satellites.

And that's not to mention Digital Terrestrial Television which is right now pumping 50 channels of MPEG TV (widescreen, DVD quality) into my living room (no cable, no dish, just a normal TV aerial). You heard me - right now - for US$10 a month. Cartoon Network humming away as I type. They are already trialling Internet services over Digital Terrestrial as we speak - although admittedly the bandwidth is downlink only.

I don't see a problem here. The infrastructure for wireless Internet already exists.

But then I live in the UK.

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I wonder if it's time for the FCC to relinquish control of the broadcast spectrum to the UN or some other similar international agency? Or maybe, an ISO standard for frequency allocations.


Sounds like a job for the International Telecommunication Union. There's some info about wireless network access here, though I'm not familiar with the details of any of this.

I wonder if it's time for the FCC to relinquish control of the broadcast spectrum to the UN or some other similar international agency? Or maybe, an ISO standard for frequency allocations.


Sounds like a job for the International Telecommunication Union. There's some info about wireless network access here, though I'm not familiar with the details of any of this.