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Open Spectrum: Free the Airwaves
akb writes: "Most of the RF spectrum in use is licensed for exclusive use. What do we get? Inefficient use through spectrum hoarding, political finagling to abuse the regulatory system to gain competitive advantage and access to the airwaves for only a few players. A good article over at CNET picks up on the example of 802.11b in using spread spectrum technology and unlicensed bands and proposes that model be applied to the rest of the spectrum. For the hardcore check out NYU law professor Yochai Benkler's writings, particularly this article (pdf) and Durga Satapathy's papers for the tech end of things."
just like everyother usefull inovation. Hoarded by corperations and over regulated by the Government.
Licensed airwaves is a good thing. It ensures that frequencies remain useable and don't obstruct other frequencies. If anyone could broadcast on any frequency, the airwaves would be useless due to noise.
Maybe more work needs to go into reforming the regulation policies instead of developing free-for-alls.
tcd004
Fear the box office of Harry Potter!
This is big bucks in the Euro govt. coffers, which is more than what US gets for it's bandwidth, but it is a good example of an overvalued asset, imho.
Now I dont really know where I was going with all this.
Unlisenced radio not controlled by the RIAA is probably scaring the pants of them.
Didn't you read the article at *all*? Your point was addressed and refuted.
Apparently spread spectrum technologies deal with this problem.
All right, our 100 years of plain broadcasting has ended. How are we supposed to pick up an alien signal if their window of opportunity is 100 years wide also?
As a cable modem customer, I know all too well that a "plentiful" reserve of bandwidth quickly gets hogged by jerks who queue up and download several movies, ISOs, and pieces of warez simultaneously. This is a prime example of the tragedy of the commons.
One thing I learned at Worldcom is that the dirty little secret of CDMA, TDMA, and any other spectrum-sharing technology is that a small percentage of "rogue" devices that are designed to hog bandwidth or disrupt service will be able to do so, at the expense of everybody elses service.
Currently, if a terrorist wanted to block a wireless service (say, television or 802.11b), he would use a transmitter that is easy to locate through triangulation, and only focuses on one particular service. If, however, spectrum is shared amongst many services, that terrorist could take out all of those services and it would be almost impossible to tell which transmitter was his, and which belonged to legitimate users.
Although the idea sounds utopian and attractive, one must keep security in mind. And with security in mind, I pronounce the idea DOA.
~wally
Mabye we should assign bands for specific technologies. Bluetooth, 802.11x, etc get bands in which no other technologies(or mabye a few that have shown they don't interfere with all the others using those bands) can use.
While this may seem like an unfair govermental restriction, radio frequencies are not an unlimited resource, like, say, bandwidth, at least not at the present time. There are bands that are available for unrestricted use, just as there are bands that are not usable by just anyone. I do think the regulatory bodies need to keep a better handle on the usage and they need to be able to reclaim bands that are not being put to the best use, though this is quite difficult in practice (for example, digital TV is mandated to be put in place over the next several years, but one string attached to the new frequencies given to existing TV stations was that they give up their current frequencies once they switch over).
this reminds me of the available TCP-IP ports available for use. most people just make one up and hope that it doesn't conflict with another that is registered.
do companies have to use wavelengths that are gov't regulated? would the gov't really track down people who use these frequencies?
aren't there any old frequencies that aren't in use anymore that we can free up?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Amateur radio operators still have access to huge amounts of valuable spectrum. While HF (shortwave) bandwidth is somewhat limited, it is successfully shared with a multitude of other services: military, industrial, broadcasters. Hams also have access to TONS of VHF and UHF bandwidth, especially in the GHz and up range, that are prime experimenting ground for whatever your heart desires. The price of entrance is passing a straightforward license exam. My point is that the RF spectrum is not entirely "owned". If you want to play, you don't necessarily have to pay. More information about becoming a ham here.
Unfortunately, there was a big problem.
People started to turn green in the 50 houses inbetween.
I was lucky to find out before the authorities did, and dismantled it.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Specifically, I recall a post here on slashdot about someone's 2.4ghz phone interfered with their pr0n surfing.
It makes about has much sense for computer professionals to decide how RF spectrum is used as it does for RF engineers to decide what software to run.
Low-power FM was touted to be a great thing for free speech. It was to open up very low-power community FM transmitters, provided (of course) that they didn't interfere with any existing broadcast signal. This would have given voices to community groups, schools, churches, outreach organizations, etc.
There was broad political and popular support for it--but (you know what's coming) the major radio broadcasters lobbied like sons of bitches to have it turned down, using a lame excuse of interference and degradation of signal. Eventually, if I remember correct, LPFM was killed as a last-minute amendment to a bill, an amendment bought by lobbyists no doubt representing Clear Channel Communications and the other bigwigs that bring us the same pap we hear on every FM station in this country.
Don't let big corporations continue to buy up all the bandwidth and hold us hostage with it. We need to get LPFM back on track. Hell, support your local pirate radio station by just listening. You'll be seeing the effect that LPFM should be bringing us and you'll actually hear differing viewpoints, and--dare I say it?--interesting programming.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
If the FCC was a little less restrictive, there would basically be an "open source" wireless network available. This is not good for the multi-billion dollar communications companies out there.
Good luck changing things. IMHO, its not possible. There is too much money backing a closed network.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Naturally, when the whole thing came tumbling down, the big telcom guys came in and picked up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. Oh, and did I forget to mention, all this was to line the pockets of a few big players, and the US Govt. (of course)
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
If there was no control of the airwaves then we will have device manufacturers using whatever frequencies they wish. Then the question of interference comes up. What if Verizon and MCI tried to grab the same frequency to market their latest wireless service in the same location? And what if that same frequency was in use by someone else's device? Who would be the final arbiter in these situations?
If you really want to both free the airwaves and make the most efficient use of them, there is one and only technology. It is secure too as you have allready guessed. Governments were really resentful of this and hostile toward even myself that i'd suggest if you can move around fast enough you will not be detected! It should be obvious to anyone that has the least RF technical knowledge (unfortunate, but this is a closed technology) that spreading yourself thin will only slightly increase the background noise.
It's just too bad for those pathetic suits that authorised $Billions to be spent on tiny slices of the microwave spectrum for the 'next generation' wireless phones. So it goes for those that invest unknowingly!
Today we can transmit huge amounts of data and NOT cause any noticable interferrence. In time the world will catch on. There will allways be winners and losers.
It seems to me that one of the main advantages of spread spectrum is that by distributing a signal across a wider range of frequencies, better use of that frequency range occurs and so multiple transmitters/receivers can share the same bit of spectrum. And yet some products which claim to be spread spectrum seem to take spread spectrum to mean they can just transmit at high power across a larger frequency range.
I have a phone and an 802.11 network card which constantly conflict with one another. And yet both claim to be 2.4 GHz spread spectrum... I had also tried (and returned) one of those remote TV boxes and that also interfered with the phone.
What's up with that?
-Kekoa
Just as each computer needs a unique address (let's leave NAT out of this) to successfully transmit and receive their data; radio transmitters must use specific frequencies, power levels and operating times to avoid interferience (the operating times make the spectrum allocations work like dymanic IP).
So someone has to retain control of the spectrum "for the public interest". That's why we human beings create organizations.
Chris
If you look at the history of Radio broadcasting, the entire purpose of government regulation of frequency allocations was give interference-free access to the most desirable bands to commercial broadcasters, while forcing non-commercial users who used radio for personal communication or experimentation (the ancestors of modern amateur radio operators) into less desirable frequencies (and then, when those were proven to be useful by the efforts of the amateurs, taking much of that bandwidth away from the public, also).
But now regulation clearly could serve the opposite purpose. After all, if all regulations were eliminated, and everybody were allowed to transmit wherever they like, the big corporate interests (cellphone companies, broadcasters, etc.) would probably be able to effectively claim everything, since they could run higher-power transmitters and more of them than any individual could hope to. If there is to be any kind of non-commercial use of RF, it clearly needs exclusive bandwidth protected by the FCC (as hams, CB users, GPRS/PRS, wireless networks, etc. already have).
Of course regulation as it stands serves the opposite purpose...making as much money as possible auctioning off public spectrum to cellphone companies, etc. But that does not mean that its elimination would solve the problem of the commercialization of public spectrum.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
LPFM is not dead. The FCC is still in the process of awarding licenses -- slowly. I believe the only operating LPFM right now is in Oklahoma.
LPFM was not necessarily killed by the likes of Clear Channel and NPR alone, though they had a part. One of the things that happened is that a lot of really well funded religious loonies muscled their way through the licensing process before the "everyday" community groups did. So once you hear an LPFM on the air in your town, there's a high probability it'll be some bible beaters asking for dough and crying about unborn babies, etc.
The FCC I think was quite happy letting the religious zealouts have LPFM, because the Ashcrofts of the world have never had a problem with the right-wing God geeks.
What if there were no control over the HTTP protocol? Then every browser manufacturer would implement the protocol however they wanted...
As this is basically the case now, what can we observe? Well, there are incompatable HTML tags and such between browsers, but by and large, things work--because it is in the interest of the protocol implementors to follow the protocol (generally, if not exactly).
Like I said elsewhere, a central authority controlling the airwaves has positives, but has negatives as well. Which is worse?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Currently, if a terrorist wanted to block a wireless service (say, television or 802.11b), he would use a transmitter that is easy to locate through triangulation, and only focuses on one particular service. If, however, spectrum is shared amongst many services, that terrorist could take out all of those services and it would be almost impossible to tell which transmitter was his, and which belonged to legitimate users.
How do they "take it out". While certainly they could render services useless in a certain specific geographic area by turning up the power, to do so on a wider basis would require more power which would make them real obvious. I don't really see how a change to more spread spectrum would make a terrorists job easier.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The main problem with the radio spectrum today is that is has been portioned out over many decades. Over that time both needs and technology have changed. I don't think the entire spectrum should be opened up, but it would be smart to reevaluate and reorganize it, leaving more spectrum open for personal use, consolidating the entertainment bands to more efficiently use space with digital technologies like this, and leaving clear bands for scientific and emergency use. And of course, desiging devices so they don't transmit louder than they absolutely have to.
The only real problem with this are legacy devices, namely TV, mobile phones, and especially radio, and their transmission towers. If the transition can be eased for those devices (with adapters or cheap replacements and some gov't subsidy to upgrade transmitters) then I think things would go fine.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Back when the FCC started the plans were all laid out.
Control- absolute control for the governmrnt over communication.
The only way to get "freedom" in the airwaves is the same way we gained "freedom" in 1776
It's called a public uprising that torches the government buildings, locks the public officials in stockades and publically humilates them and thne throws them in a boat and told to never come back.
The best you can hope for is that the damage done to the public sections is very limited from year to year.
They sell off ham frequency sections on a regular basis, to UPS, to whoever wants them. The ham frequencies are the property of the US citizens or citizen of that country that resides below that section of Z axis.
you cant stop it, and they will ignore any cries to stop it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
LPFM is dying. The FCC is still in the process of awarding licenses -- slowly. I believe the only operating LPFM right now is in Oklahoma.
LPFM was not necessarily killed by the likes of Clear Channel and NPR alone, though they had a part. One of the things that happened is that a lot of really well funded religious loonies muscled their way through the licensing process before the "everyday" community groups did. So once you hear an LPFM on the air in your town, there's a high probability it'll be some bible beaters asking for dough for unborn babies, etc.
The FCC I think was quite happy letting the religious zealouts have LPFM, because the Ashcrofts of the world have never had a problem with the right-wing God geeks.
So as you can plainly see, *LPFM has deteriorated into a vast wasteland, and is rapidly dying.
I'd argue that interest in ham radio is NOT "waning". There are more than half a million licensed hams in the US right now, more than at any other time in the history of radio. Ham radio, like many other hobbies symbolic of a simpler time (model airplanes? collecting stamps?) is simply not visible above the increasing amount of cultural static. Shopping malls, SUVs, broadband, porn on demand, Playstation, XBox, Gamecube, Palm Pilot, MTV, VH1, NSync, J-Lo, etc. Minds don't wander like they used to; stringing up an antenna in the backyard and pissing off your parents with that static noise as you try to tune in Radio Clandestine on 7415 just doesn't break the squelch of the material-minded. But there's still plenty of people in the world (and more everyday) and for every 250 kids mesmerized by the latest mind-fuck from Sony, there will still be a kid interested in the more.. interesting things.
One person's "community group" is another's "zealots!!!". We do have a 1st Amendment, after all, and there is no reason to exclude someone because they don't happen to have your exact same religion.
Looks like you only want LPFM if the viewpoints match your own bigoted views.
They sell off ham frequency sections on a regular basis, to UPS, to whoever wants them.
ONCE in the last 50 years, hams have lost a (small) portion of their allocation.
Hams, in fact, are likely to gain MORE spectrum before they lose any. The ARRL has petitioned the FCC for a new HF allocation around 5 MHz. It's likely to be approved in the next year and be available to hams by 2004 or 2005.
Why is the FCC giving hams more space? Simple. Hams are a cadre of men, women and kids who can, in a time of national emergency, provide critical communications and support to the government. Nobody else can do this.
Picture this. It's 3 AM. You're up late playing the latest mind-fuck console game from Sony. A massive-ass tornado hits your neighborhood. At the same time, a giant fucking hurricane slams into the coast. Your entire state is ruined, you're now living in a tent where your pool used to be. Roads are impassible. No cell phones, no internet access, no power. Nothing. Yet, a competent ham radio operator in the neighborhood has an antenna strung up in the last remaining tree, and he has his Kenwood TS-850 hooked up to a couple of deep cycle gel-cell batteries. Your neighbors are lining up to make phone-patches through another ham two states away, so they can call their relatives and let them know they are alright.
Hams can provide this service that nobody else can. When the lights go out, and I mean *REALLY* go out, hams will get the message through. Bluetooth will not save you.
While bandwidth is an oversimplistic way of either looking at things, or regulating them, it is a fact that any communications system can be analyzed (roughly) in terms of bandwidth. And this means that any communications system can interfere with any other communications system if they share frequencies in any sense.
For a real world example of why you can't ignore bandwidth, try running WiFi in a house where you have some 2.4GHz phones. It may work. But sometimes it doesn't - the reason - radio frequency interference. They share the same bandwidth.
Ah, you say... so they don't use good enough systems... or aren't broad-band enough... or something! Not true... there are hard physical limits that no amount of scheming will get around. The rest of this post discusses that in more technical detail.
All signaling systems (INCLUDING Time-Modulated Ultra-Wide-Band)require a separation of signal from noise. Noise is either natural (thermal, atmospheric, solar, etc), incidental (power line leakage, etc) or other radio systems. Regardless of what kind of signaling system is used, it has a limit as to the amount and kind of noise that can be tolerated in any given situation. The other limits described below affect the amount of noise reduction/signal enhancement that is possible.
Limits to processing gain. WiFi and other modern technologies (CDMA cell phones) use spread spectrum to reduce the effects of interference. Unfortunately, this does not eliminate interference. In engineering terms, it is the equivalent of adding gain to the desired signal. The gain is roughly the bandwidth occupied by the transmitted signal divided by the bandwidth required to send the signal without modulation (the baseband bandwidth). This value is measured in decibels, and is typically 20-30 dB, although it can increase. But the higherhe data rate, the lower the processing gain!
The effect of distance - radio signal energy decreases by an inverse square law. This means that a nearby interference source can have a much stronger signal, proportionally, than the desired signal from a farther source. Some numerical examples:
This illustrates that a signalling system, by itself, will not prevent interference - defeating the main argument. Specific factors are:
Imperfections in equipment. Real equipment will not reach theoretical levels of performace.
Limited dynamic range. If you have a 100,000 watt transmitter 3 feet from your receiver, there is a good chance that no matter what its technology, it will not be able to pull out the desired signal. In digital terms, this is the equivalent of running out of bits in your integer! If a number is too big, you either overflow your math, or you scale it down, losing the little bitty number you wanted.
Limited bandwidth - there is a limited amount of bandwidth, useful for a given purpose, at any place and time. This bandwidth, for many purposes, is between 1GHz and 25GHz (although for ionospheric radio, it is only 30 MHz). This means that if someone is generating a strong signal in the bandwidth you are using, there may be no other bandwidth you can jump to.
Intermodulation. Any nonlinearity in the system, including incidental nonlinearities such as a nearby rusty pipe, will cause all the RF signals impinging on them to be mixed, and the mixing products re-radiated. Receivers have inherent nonlinearity, which unfortunately gets worse as the power used by the receiver is reduced.
Leakage. You may have a great receiver, but an interfering transmitter that is close enough may leak through its plastic case and get into an intermediate stage of your receiver.
etc.
Without regulation, some other system must arise to arbitrate needs for radio spectrum, or chaos will result
The only good weather is bad weather.
ok, one really:
the FCC decries "interference" from LPFM sources, when FM now a days is so over taxed a radio station, local, highpower, less than 5 mile away gets blotted out by NO LESS than 3 other stations.
It is quite disconcerting to be rocking out to a good rock/metal song and have a country tune of "my dog left me, took my truck and ran over my girl on the way out"... sheesh. And on a daily basis no less.
Changing channels does not matter, same sh*t, different station.
Oh, and wouldn't it be funny if this were on *Wired's* website first?
(heh, electronics tech before I was a 'puter tech...some habits never leave)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Am I IP banned or am I not?
I guess that would be a no.
It is only a matter of time before we all have access to theoretically unlimited bandwidth. Of course corporations will do their best to prevent this,(unlimited availability=0 value) and governments, especially now, will bring forward security concerns. The folks at http://www.dirc.net have the right idea, except that one day it will be publicly owned, rather than copropate. If it doesn't happen, we are back to fascism!
Everything for everyone. There is no shortage of anything.
The International Amateur Radio Union recently met and passed a motion to have ALL Morse code testing requirements dropped at the next WARC which I believe is in 2003.
Within the last 5 years, the 20wpm and 13wpm code tests have been eliminated. 5wpm remains for the General class test (you can still get a codeless Technician class of course). However, it's all but certain that Morse will be gone for good as a requirement in the next year or two.
This means that you'll be able to pass written testing elements to get on HF. This will be a HUGE boost to ham radio, because HF is "where it's at".
~wally
Something else, that most people here seem to hate, who will pay for some of these systems ? If you look at cellular networks - billions of dollars are spent developing these.
... a shit load !! I can do the same with my phone (because of the early ATT monopoly - a guarateed return), and my cell phone (because of spectrum ownership).
The government also creates markets and wealth - Yes, cell companies have spent 17 billion on a slice of spectrum (look for the NextWave fiasco) and will be spending countless billions building up the networks. This provides over 500,000 jobs in the US alone !!! Plus, with the communications infrastructure developed - it helps create efficiency and wealth in other domains. With a cell phone, you now have more time and control over your communications (business and pleasure).
If you remove the exclusivity - who would have put cash on the table to build these networks ? The internet is kick ass because I can spread the cost of infrastructure accross a greater population - who remembers how much a leased line cost 10 years ago
Thats my take.
After years bouts with cancer, Harrison sucummb to the ..oh wait that George Harrison my fault...Geoff is alive and well ...
Try www.winradio.com
8 bit computing - It may be 2007 out there, but it's 1983 in here!!
The separation of channels by frequency has two special properties that help with this problem:
1. There are no common physical processes that change frequency much between the transmitter and receiver (Doppler and changing refraction effects are generally small).
2. It is possible to get very large channel separation with frequency-selective filters.
You give up these special properties with broadband schemes. Time-division and code-division separation of channels are particularly sensitive to multipath propagation, a ubiquitous property of radio. While multipath can produce fading and distortion in narrowband transmission, it cannot cause one channel to spill into others.
Anyone with any practical experience at doing things with RF (I only have 30 years of experience with it, so those of more years and more engineering degrees, feel free to argue with me) knows that spread spectrum is very bad at spectrum sharing with anything else. Spread spectrum has the effect of raising the noise floor for everyone on the frequency. This reduces noise margin. So what? Well here's what:
1. TV fringe reception goes from usable to unusable, so fewer pops, so fewer advertising dollars, so less profit for TV stations (who are already hurting by the way). Thats a direct to the bottom of the GDP spreadsheet example of why UWB is bad.
2. How about instrument landing systems. Gee.... when do they have the least noise margin: in bad weather, close to the ground. Gee... what would UWB wipe out? How many planes do you want UWB to crash?
These are only two examples. Advocates for UWB need to go through the math service by services (and there are 100's) and show that they don't kill people or rob people. They ain't done that yet.
The next 20 years will see quite a revolution in wireless. It won't do away with wires, mind you, but will complement it seamlessly. What technology is this, you ask?
Quantum entanglement transcievers.
Never heard of it? That's not suprising. It's a really weird physics phenomena (OK, so maybe you have heard of it.) where 2 particles start acting as if they're a single particle. Even after they are seperated by a distance. You can push particle A and particle B moves... things like that. Now, imagine that you can "entangle" these particles for an indefinite period of time... well, at this point, you merely have to put them each into seperate hardware devices. I propose gigabit ethernet as the tech of choice for this.
*grin*
(Note: Actually, each transciever would have 2 particles, a Rx and a Tx, while the mated transciever would have 2 particles paired to each them.)
So you take yours home to your switch, and plug it into an uplink port, or straight into the nic in the back of your linux box. You mail the mated transciever to a friend, or any geek that has plenty of ethernet ports free (like me). When I plug it into my switch, boom! Wireless long distance gigabit. You could be buried in a lead vault, and it wouldn't matter. A few moutain ranges in between? No biggy. Aliens have abducted you, and they didn't think to confiscate the laptop? Big deal... even if you're already on the other side of the universe.
(Note: To create something much more cool, you and 20 friends chip in for a 24port gigabit switch, and decide who gets the burden of maintaining it. You each plug one of your transciever pairmates into his switch, and take the other home with you. As more people do this, you interconnect the switches. Since distance doesn't matter, no telling where they might be. You might even set up scenarios where you interconnect anonymously. Totally cool possibilities, if you ask me.)
Oh, and if they catch me using this to pirate MP3's? They STILL can't use my transciever to trace it back to you. No such thing as triangulation.
Now, why, you ask, if I'm such a depressed pessimistic asshole, do I think this will happen, and realtively soon at that??? Because, you see, people like you and I will NEVER... I repeat NEVER EVER get to use this. Military, official goverment use. Built-in GPS that sends location info via another split muon, included for just that purpose, and a tamper proof mechanism that ruins the transciever, if you try to remove it. (Doubtless transmitting the location to some fucking scary NSA place, where all this is monitored) It will be outlawed for the average citizen, and it's incredibly doubtful that it will be homebrewable.
The universe sucks, doesn't it?
They guy who started Nextel bought out allmost all the two-way radio phone licenses in the US. After cellular took off most of the old mobile phone operators where hurting for business and where happy to sell out. Someone at Motorola figured out what was going on and they started buying up licenses too. The result was that Nextel/Motorola ended up with more than 90% of the US coverage and then they got the FCC to change the rules for that band so they could put cell phones on it.
The cellular frequency lotterys where also a joke. For example the one that Ms Clinton bought for $1000 because she won the lottery. She had about a 1/10 chance of winning because the rules were stacked aginst most people but it was common at the time to sell out to a major carrier at 100x or more than the license cost.
Its not just the US that has stupid rules about spectrum use. In Melbourne Australia, there is a big hill that has line of sight coverage to about 2 million people. None of the compaines that bought the 2.4ghz licenses intend to offer real internet service and most of the licnese are still not in use and I don't think most of them will ever be paid for considering the finicial state of most of the winners.
There's a good article over at Media Alliance about the efforts of Dewyane Hendricks of the Dandin Group to open up the airwaves for spread spectrum communications.
Dewayne found out that he could prove his concepts in "regulatory havens" like Tonga and tribal lands. This stuff is being done today! Eventually the FCC is going to have to wake up and realize that it actually makes sense, in spite of the lobbys.
"You can't have everything. Where would you keep it?" -- Steven Wright
Most of the posters here today are posers
who don't know about
RF or about ehternet at all.
Don't read this stuff if you think you are going to learn about the real issues with bandwidth distribution.
These people are blowing wind as far as I can tell. Hey, and maybe I am a little too.
Most people don't understand that the broadcast media are not a true free press, but a limited free press. The content is very heavially regulated ... you half to play certain types of music, you half to have programs that show no more than such and such percent nudity, you half to show a certain amount of childrens programs, you half to give certain percentials of political coverage, and so on. This is all made possible by federal regulations and the FCC - that would be impossible without bandwidth regulations. And it does much to ensure that the powers that be are never exposed to ideas too far outside the "main-stream". You'd be a fool to believe that anybody involved in the process ever cared about a tragedy of the commons ever, that is simply bull - it is such a lie, it almost hurts.
In fact, the FCC regulations are some of the few laws in human history that protect against something that we have never even witnessed, ever. You would think that with all these regulations, they would at least have some example of why we need them. for all this regulation - there was never even a single exapmle of this happening
For starters, this would mean U.S. commercial radio stations would have to pay double royalties to broadcast the same music they do now. (Check out the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995.)
Also, I think any switch that eliminates the current spectrum model would be disastrous for other reasons, too. (Fragmenting the current unified, ubiquitous radio audience into groups with and without digital receivers, for one thing.)
I'm not a lawyer or a (legal) broadcaster. Just so you know. But I think digital radio is a Bad Idea(tm).
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If you guys think Bill Gates is a son of a bitch, you should have a look at Sarnoff's career.
Just like the way that Edison fought against AC power transmission, Sarnoff fought tooth and nail against FM radio. When the advantages of FM were just too great to lie about, the son of a bitch managed to get the existing FM spectrum reassigned, and have a new band allocated for FM, which immediately made all of his competitors' receivers obsolete.
-jcr (If I'd been alive in the 1920's, I would have boycotted RCA.)
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well I don't want my DSS picking up your fucking wireless networking signals. I also don't want some jackass installing a microwave relay over my fucking house. Radio spectrum is controlled because people on average are too fucking stupid to have it unregulated. Far too many things you don't even see rely on radio communication and if suddenly everybody could broadcast on any frequency they wanted alot of this stuff would fuck up. True the FCC can act like a bastard when it comes down to meting out bandwidth to groups, mostly because it is a government organization and thus VERY prone to political workings. If you want to complain use UWB :)
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The author is out of touch with the issues now facing those of us now working on IEEE 802.11, .15, and .16 standards. The primary problem 802 has at the moment is that almost all of its draft wireless standards (e.g., 802.11g, 15.1, 15.3, 15.4, etc.) are being planned for the 2.4 GHz ISM band, due to its combination of near-worldwide unlicensed availability, suitable (i.e., relatively wide) bandwidth, and technical practicality (small antennas, possibility of cheap CMOS RF implementation, etc.). The major exceptions are in 802.16, the WirelessMAN(tm) Metropolitan Area Network standards, which typically employ such a high data rate that even the 2.4 GHz band is too narrow; however, even there, the 802.16b task group is developing a standard for the unlicensed 5-6 GHz band.
The difficulty is coexistence, or how all these standards will affect each other when networks using them are placed into service. This concern started as a Working Group issue, and was addressed by coexistence task groups (e.g., 802.15.2, 802.16.2a), but has now bubbled up to the 802 LMSC itself, with the recent formation of the 802 COEX coexistence study group. 802.11 has become the 800-lb. gorilla in the 2.4 GHz band, microwave ovens included, and it is far, far from the truth to say that just because every system involved is spread spectrum the band may automatically be shared among many users.
Spread spectrum offers protection only to the extent of its processing gain which, for direct sequence systems, is defined as the ratio of chip rate to data rate. Present FCC regulations for the 2.4 GHz band specify a minimum of 10 dB processing gain; this requires a chip rate that is 10x the data rate. As one can see, to get significant processing gain one either (a) raises the chip rate, and the associated current drain of the product, to a high value, or (b) reduces the data rate to a low value. Neither of these is attractive when one considers that even a ratio of 40 dB (10,000x) is insufficient in many interference scenarios; worse, the FCC is proposing to eliminate the 10 dB requirement completely so that OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) signals, like those proposed for 802.11g, may be used.
CFR 47 15.247 devices, like 802.11 and .15 devices, are sold under the condition that they must accept interference to them caused by other devices. This was essentially a regulatory passing of the buck to the "free market," which has a spotty record in telecom (cf. U.S.' multiple cell phone standards vs. GSM). Since 802.11b has the largest installed base, any standard that follows that produces interference with 11b devices will have a hard time gaining marketplace acceptance; at the same time, brute force technologies to avoid interference, such as the use of processing gain, are insufficient. This leads standard and product designers to design ad hoc coexistence mechanisms to identify and avoid specific, predetermined interferers, an inefficient, piecemeal approach that places later, next-generation devices at a disadvantage over existing ones. The result is that 802.11 derivatives are going to defacto own the 2.4 GHz band in most corporate and (later) home environments; anything new in the band must carry the coexistence burden with it.
So, if 802.11b is the model for "Free airwaves," it's a poor model; it's more MS open spectrum than linux open spectrum.
Everyone else in the galaxy has gone to spread spectrum; that's why SETI isn't finding much.
As requested by Kevin, who wrote the original article, I am posting my email to him that originally replied to this article.
>You're making my column oversimplistic by oversimplifying it.
>My main argument is not that we can "prevent interference." It's the following, quoting from the piece:
>In practice, there are still limits on how many users can communicate effectively, depending on available frequencies, power, competing uses and the design of >transmitters and receivers. The benefit of open spectrum is that it's more efficient than the traditional licensing model, and that gap will widen over time.
>
There's much more detail in the issue of Release 1.0 [release1-0.com] that the column was based on (though unfortunately it's not available for free).
>And no, I don't claim to be an engineer... which is why I rely on engineers like David Reed, Tim Shepard and Dewayne Hendricks who've done work in this area (both >theory and practice).
First of all, I apologize for the tone (the attack on non-engineers). As a piece of technical writing, your article is quite good IMHO. And the subject is a good one and I am glad you brought it up. It is certainly true that spectrum regulation could use the sorts of changes proposed.
I have seen way too much truly ignorant writing on technical topics, and yours does not fall into that category.
I was, however, concerned about the impression many readers might get, and which I got (from a not overly careful reading), and it is that which I was trying to deal with.
I just reread your article. It seems to argue for fully open spectrum, which I still think is impractical. I think it leaves non-engineers with the idea that if we just did away with all this regulation, wonderful stuff would happen. I realize that is not exactly what you are saying, but I think that is what some readers would get out of it. It also has some oversimplistic quotes (perhaps from real experts in the field) that lend to that impression. It is not so much what you are saying, but what I feared people who did a quick read might come away wait.
The quotes that leave a dangerous impression range from highly insightful (but not exactly correct) to just plain wrong.
These are:
Benkler summarizes open spectrum's most startling claim: "Bandwidth is just a parameter in an equation; it's not a naturally bounded resource."
This really is not true. Bandwidth *is* a naturally bounded resource. There is only so much to go around at any location and point of time for a given need. For example, ionospheric bounce radios ("short wave") can only operate in a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and for communications between specific points, that are shrinks even further. If one needs that form of communication, there are HARD (natural) limits on the bandwidth availble. What he should have said is that bandwidth is one of the parameters, not the only parameter, to be considered in spectrum regulation and engineering design.
Communication is inherently an exercise in computation.
This is insightful, but easily leads one to assume that the Moore's Law rule of computation can be applied to communication. In fact, computation is only a part of the equation, but one which has risen from almost none of the process to significant part. I tried to point out limits that cannot be overcome by improved computation. I believe that in the last 10 years we have seen most of the improvement that computation can bring to communications. However, creating larger unlicensed bands would certainly allow those improvements to be applied in a way that adds a lot of transmission capability compared to the current system.
One variant, called ultra-wideband, uses such low power that it can share frequencies with licensed services, because to them it is indistinguishable from background noise.
This statement, which the promoters of UWB keep making, is really not true at all. UWB is, as you (unlike most other commentators) note, is a variant of spread spectrum, and as such it has the same limitations. The main practical difference is that it operates over a very wide spectrum (higher processing gain) so it produces *less* interference than any other system - all other variables held constant.
Overall, I think your article was a good public service.
John
The only good weather is bad weather.