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White House Wants 3G Bandwidth
MikeD--NULL writes "President Clinton urges the departments of commerce and defense to identify spectrum suitable for upcoming 3rd generation wireless technology. The 700MHz freed from TV's transition to digital appears to be insufficient. This along with the any new found spectrum will be auctioned off on March 6, 2001. Better start saving now."
These are not royalty free technologies. They all require the licensing of patents.
GSM is obsolete and inferior to CDMA. DAB is a failure. DVB-T is the only technology listed that would be good for the USA. Unfortunately, the FCC still believes that ATSC (8-VSB) can be made to work, even though everyone else has jumped ship.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
According to the Radio Act of 1934, which created the FCC, frequency allocations are not property and neither the FCC or licensees own them. Therefore, these auctions are illegal.
Except that the Congress passed some laws in the '90s explicitly authorizing auctions of spectrum by the FCC. So unless the Radio Act became a part of the Constitution while nobody was looking, they are absolutely legal.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Assuming arraycomm is willing to sell their technology for something under about 40 times the cost of the bandwidth, I don't see why the winners of the bandwidth auction wouldn't also buy arraycomm's technology. Unless of corse arraycomm's technology turns out to be a sham. Or works, but is extreamly costly to deply. Or works in the lab, but is screwed by some real life effects (multipath reflection, flying birds, tastyness of equiptment to crawly things). Or someone else doesn't come up with something better.
If the ability to serve 20 milion households is worth $2b, the ability to serve 400 million is surely worth much more.
The 'beauty contest' concept of allotting licenses is actually much better than buying your way in, the Nordic nations go for the beauty contest approach, where each company is asked how many jobs their company will generate, what investment the company will put into local universities, the cost of the end product, etc.
When you have cellular companies throwing ridiculous amounts of cash to the government for licenses, who you think ends up paying the bill? The consumer of course, so the auctions are just an indirect form of tax.
The cellular companies over here spend $35 Billion to get their licenses, this means they've gotta charge the consumer extortionate amounts of money to get a return on investment, the companies themselves have just thrown themselves into huge amounts of debt without really knowing the uptake of 3G services, while the government is sitting pretty with its huge wad of cash.
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Spectrum should be allocated on the basis of technical merit, not auctions. In an auction, those who have the most money can gain control of precious spectrum, but not necessarily put it to the best use. Arraycomm (www.arraycomm.com) claims it can deliver 40 times as much bandwidth for a given band of spectrum as 3rd generation products. Perhaps the Time Domain technology mentioned in a previous post deserves its share of spectrum. If the spectrum is already controlled by some entity that uses less efficient technology, the government should buy it back, and _give_ it to the entity that can put it to the most efficient use. A qualification could be imposed so the spectrum would only be re-allocated if an entity has a technology yielding a tenfold improvement in bandwidth compared to existing technologies. The entity given the spectrum also has to contract to develop it in a timely fashion, and to sell it at a reasonable cost.
Okay, so you use discrete pulses of signal to transmit the information. At first, there's not that much traffic so you can send pulses once every second. Then your traffic doubles so you start sending packets once ever half second. Then you send ever 0.25 seconds. Then 0.125 seconds, 0.0625, 0.03125, 0.015625, etc. etc. etc.
At what point do you begin sending pulses so frequently that you are effectively transmitting continuously?
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
How about the FCC mandating that we abandon all of these different incompatible systems and adopt a single standard cellular phone system like Europe has
.5MHz) That can really kill the bandwidth of a system. (FYI, CDMA->CDMA or GSM->GSM doesn't neccessarly need those barriers, except some service providers use them anyways)
I don't think that this is a good idea. It's kinda analogous to saying "We should all abandon all Operating Systems except Windows, so that software will run on all machines." I personally think that competition is good for *most* industries, and the cell phone industry is no exception. When two standards are competing, they will try & provide us with the services *we* want the most.
Get rid of the mish-mash of competing standards and you'll probably free up tons of bandwidth.
This is *totally* true. When you have two types of cells (such as CDMA->GSM) in a close frequency range, you need about 270KHz to seperate them (on both sides, for a total of just over
Doh!
Bill Clinton want's more bandwith?
We all know he's just going to use it to download more porn...
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
carldrawings.dk3.com
Maybe he wants to switch to online interns?
Sorry, cheap shot, couldn't resist.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Have you guys seen what Time Domain is up to?
They've got a technology to use the spectrum differently. Right now, information is transmitted by sending out continuous waves while modulating their frequency, and we've pretty much reached the limit of how much information we can send in one chunk of the spectrum.
These guys have a totally different idea -- instead of a continuous wave, they use wave pulses, millions pers second or more, I think, to transmit the information.
Any physics folks here have any idea about the potential? They claim it has a lot.
When I first saw this post, I thought it was suggesting that the actual White House itself needed 3 Gigs of Bandwidth...I was wondering why that would be so important?
If all those OC-3s can be installed before Jan 20th, Bill Clinton can enjoy some streaming mp3s together with "www.rolypolygirls.com"...
But it turns out this is just some boring article about the future of our nations infrastructure, blah blah blah.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
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I think that it is really cool that more bandwidth is being opened up for the 3G technologies. This will be good because it increases the total amount of users on a system (according to Shannon's equation, if you want more capacity, bandwidth has a linear relationship to capacity, while signal to noise has a log relationship to capacity)
It still leads us to one problem, though. When the FCC designed the first Cell-phone networks in the 800MHz area (The A & B channels), they allotted 10MHz to each carrier (local phone company + one competitor). As useage was increasing, the government allotted 2.5MHz more to each carrier. Except that they didn't give 2.5MHz "chunks" but they split it up how it was distributed. Now here's what the bandwith looks like:
-------------------------------------------
|A''(1MHz) | A (10)| B (10) | A' (1.5)| B'(2.5) |
-------------------------------------------
Because of the location of A', the US wireless system is relagated to using technologies that fit in that 1.5MHz chunk. With CDMA 2000 coming out soon, it is close to the theoritical capacity of the airwaves. Hopefully the government will give some of the 700MHz range to the carriers in the 800MHz zone and require that they no longer update the technology on the 800MHz frequency. Maybe that way we can have even more bandwith!
Doh!
Who exactly is selling this bandwidth, and to who? Since this is public bandwidth, I imagine that the government will sell it off. But what is their requirments for being able to buy it? And will the buyer have to pay any rent on it? How de we know that Ted Turner won't buy the whole junk of bandwidth? And why is the government putting so much energy into finding ways for yuppies to have as many toys as they want?
So many questions...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I think its great for huge companies to bid themselves into bankruptcy over these new allocations. TV is a vast wasteland, and its 60 year old technology doesn't make efficient use of the bandwidth it has been allocated. But this latest revelation on the size of 3G wireless systems for bandwidth frightens me. I see ham radio being among the first victims, as it doesn't generate any revenue for the government and its lobby (the ARRL) is orders of magnitude less funded than the commercial wireless industry. Time and time again, hams have been pushed off of bands that have 'commercial value', even though hams made a lot of the technical breakthroughs that allowed those bands to be practically used. Ham Radio itself is somewhat to blame. THe numbers of licensed hams has (supposedly) been declining over the past several years. The hobby has a reputation as a haven for a bunch of crotchety old men who talk about nothing but ham radio, and collect postcards from people in small countries that they have done nothing more than exchange callsigns and reception reports from. Ham radio needs to have new blood. Many of the current ham population have pointed out that the thing that attracted them to radio was the ability to contact strange and distant lands, and that these days that role is fulfiled by the Internet. But I am one of those who believe that the community of hams and the community of Internet hobbyists (hobbyists=people who don't use the Internet solely to make or spend money) have great possibilities to merge the two worlds, to a greater extent than has been done.
Enough rambling. You should already know about GuerrillaNet.
Take the amateur radio exam and get licensed (its really not hard, and you don't have to know morse code any more)...then you can add to the ranks of licensed Amatuer Radio operators and make the FCC think twice about selling off the spectrum so we can all have sprint wristwatch TVs (that will still work like shit)
What the fuck are you going to do with your very own spectrum? Hmm? Have you developed a technology that uses, say, 2.95 MHz - 3.3 MHz? Have you?
Yep.
Unfortunately, the other posters are probably right -- this allocation will end up being carved from the Amateur spectrum. It's hard to justify giving us so much space that most of us don't use. I'm very surprised we still have 1296 MHz, for instance.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
They sold a huge part of the military's telemetry bandwidth to the cell phone people "by accident".
They have classified nearly every low value area in the country as "earthquake" or "flood" zones, based on geography alone, rather than historical data.
Then, they sell the homes through government programs to the poor at low interest rates/no down payment. How can they afford to do that? They force you to buy earthquake or flood insurance as part of the loan.
Who provides such insurance? Guess! The Government. They decide your property is at risk, they make the loan requiring the insurance, and they provide the insurance. This type of insurance is $50 dollars or more a month, for a moderately priced home.
Bend over, America. Clintonian Democracy is about to "reinvent" government again. Not that the Shrub would be any better, or Algore.
This election sucks. Tweedle Dumb, and Tweedle Dumber. Tastes great/Less filling. An embarrassment to the planet.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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Of course if the government needs to take frequencies from someone, the first source will be the Amateur microwave bands followed by Radio Astronomy bands. The amateur bands are underused for the spectrum they're taking up, and the government can easily turn them over to a business if they want to.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Presuming many of you have been hiding under a rock, some background information is needed to consider this thing.
The big losers are apt to be DOD and the Amateur Radio community. DOD lobbiests will not have enough clout to protect the relatively vast amount of bandwidth that they have compaired with the communications lobbiests. Too bad, who needs militiary communications anyway right?
The Amateurs respond to attempts to take bandwidth on nearly a weekly basis. Usually they're successful, but in cases like the 220MHz band, the United Parcel Service had better lobbiests than the amateur community and 2ish MHz of bandwidth was lost. Ironically, UPS ultimately didn't use the spectrum it acquired.
So now Bill (or Hillary) gets lobbiest money to 'assist' the telecommunications industry in doing yet another land grab that makes the US treasury a little more money. If they think that March 2001 is realistic for the auction date for non-DOD bandwidth they're going to be very very wrong. It will be held up in court for years.
In the end, we've not got a telecommunications policy any more than we've got an energy policy. Both are important plans for mapping out the future. Whose fault is it? Your choice. I tend to think that fixed location systems shouldn't waste radio bandwidth that should be saved for mobile users. So much of the current initative (radio broadband) is just to get around the increasingly incompetent "last-mile" carriers.
Finally a question. When these 'bandwidth' are auctioned, how long is the 'ownership' period? If it isn't time-limited, then the bandwidth is essentially infinitely valuable and we've been screwed once again by lobbiests and the technical morons in Washington.
Multics