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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."
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!