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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."
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.
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:
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|A''(1MHz) | A (10)| B (10) | A' (1.5)| B'(2.5) |
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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!
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)
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
Who exactly is selling this bandwidth, and to who?
;)
The government (well FCC) to celluar providers, Sprint, AT&T, Airtouch, Vodaphone etc.
I imagine that the government will sell it off. But what is their requirments for being able to buy it
After they auction off the bandwidth, it's no longer a public eternity, to buy it you basically need a shed load of cash (way into the billions of $), they don't have to pay rent since the license usually lasts ~ 20 years.
How de we know that Ted Turner won't buy the whole junk of bandwidth
I doubt even he would have enough cash, also I think there are restrictions so one company = one license, some of the licenses have bigger allotments of frequencies though (in the UK at least). The UK licenses went for $35 Billion in total, and the UK only has 1/4 the population of the US, so you can only guess what these auctions will generate.
And why is the government putting so much energy into finding ways for yuppies to have as many toys as they want?
The last time I saw a yuppie thinking a mobile phone was flash was in the 80's, they're hardly a status icon anymore, nearly all the kids over here (from about 11 up) have phones thanks to the pay-as-you talk packages. Some kids even have much smarter phones than me or even rich businessmen, smug little shits
Unless you can't send abusive SMS messages to yer mates mobile in the playground, you're just not hip anymore.