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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."
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!
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).
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.
Specifically, I recall a post here on slashdot about someone's 2.4ghz phone interfered with their pr0n surfing.
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.
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
I have 802.11b and an 2.4GHz video sending unit. Both are useless when the other is on. I don't think we are all ready to replace everything we have with new technology that shares the spectrum.
That was you? I lived in one of those houses! You're making me angry! And you wouldn't like me when I'm angry!!!!
Bruce Banner
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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
Apparently spread spectrum technologies deal with this problem.
Not quite. Spread Spectrum is like pseudo-random radio "noise", constrained within a defined spectrum. Such transmitters have the effect of raising the "noise floor" in the spectrum they're using (and thus the error rate of the channel). This places an upper limit on the number of spread spectrum users a given channel can support. It's also a problem in spectrum (i.e. Amateur Radio and Astronomy) where weak signals are important.
One regulatory change that can be made is to allow use of spread spectrum on airwaves currently allocated for narrowband use where the narrowband noise margins are typically fairly good. In theory at least the two types of transmissions would not interfere with each other.
Error:
As far as I know, the "jerks" that you complain about are not exceeding their bandwidth limitations. That limit is set by the provider. What they are doing is using their alloted bandwidth for a sustained period. Perfectly fair use. Unfortunately, the providers assume that the bandwidth will only be used in short bursts. If they accounted for larger downlaods, they would have to advertise much lower speeds.
My point is that high use customers are using what they paid for. If they are slowing you down, your beef is with the provider.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
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
> If, however, spectrum is shared amongst many services, that terrorist could take out all of those services [...]
:) )
Sorry, but doesn't spread spectrum modulation get rid of jamming?
Isn't that the reason why the military uses it?
AFAIK, jamming, sufficiently broad spectrum provided, requires a several magnitude more powerful signal than the signal to be jammed.
( Well, if a terrorist wanted to block a wireless service like 802.11b or Bluetooth, he just switches on his microwave.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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?
Clearly, your posting holds to this statement. I mean, did you even read it? Should everything now be disallowed for the sake of the potential threat? What about elections, for example? There's always the threat of disruption there.
Anyways, from what I understand of CDMA, the transmission devices are traceable and identifiable, and will be throttled automatically via lost channel(s) when the board goes full.
I only hope one of our distinguished RF's comes along to debunk this in a cleaner and more learned manner than my own.
Again, methinks you doth protest too much, Mr. Bell.
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.
IF you jam all the freqs that the device uses to communicate, then you have jammed it.
And I believe that the military uses it more so because of the security features of spread sprectum tech then the anti-jamming. If you don't know where the signal is going to be next, then you can't decode a spread spectrum transmission. If there are multiple senders/recievers, then this will make it next to impossiable to decode.
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.
To jam it, you have to send such a strong noise so that any data is indistinguishable from the noise.
In contrast to the sender, the jammer has to send on the whole spectrum A. The sender only sends on a small, but changing part of the spectrum B.
The energy required is proportional to the product of signal strength and spectrum width.
So, the jammer has to send a signal, which is roughly B/A times stronger than the data signal.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Cable modem bandwidth is finite.
RF bandwidth is finite.
No, RF bandwidth is not finite. This is what the 'cell' in cellular is all about. Different cell tower re-use the same frequency and bandwidth. You can increase the total bandwidth available by increasing the number of cells and decreasing the power of each cell tower.
Surely there are practical limits (only so many tower you can pack in an area), but we are far from optimal utilization of the resource. That's the point of the article.
B.S. I'm a ham and have been heavily involved in disaster work. Government agencies, at least where I live, have figured it out. Yeah, they have their fancy 800MHz trunking systems that are so fragile. But they also have portable repeaters, antenna trailers, go packs of radios, etc. One agency I've dealt with even made sure to purchase AA-cell packs for their portables.
In the last 3 storms, we've never had enough hams on hand to cover communication needs. But everywhere we needed to talk to had a deputy with a radio. We didn't have to worry about the deputy showing up drunk, smelly, acting crazy, hitting on women, having a heart attack, walking off the job, fighting with others over the air, or just rag-chewing on the air. You may think I'm bullshitting you, but I've had every one of those happen. And I've had dozens of cases where hams showed up at critical positions with equipment that was either broken or insufficient, with no backup gear available.
Hams will still have their place, but they are no longer a critical part of the disaster response equation. The ARRL will tell you (and FCC/congress) that they are, but they're wrong.
This is exactly why I think SETI won't turn anything up. Think of the odds against us being precisely the right distance from some populated system for their little (geologically speaking) blip of EM radiation to pass over us while SETI is active.
It gets worse.
:(
While you can at least hear SS signals on a conventional receiver (they sound like more- or less-random noise), there are technologies coming down the pike that are completely undetectable without a time-correlated receiver.
See, for example, Time Domain's technology. Ultra-wideband radio is fundamentally different from both DSSS/FHSS and conventional modulation technologies, and it may very well prove to be the Right Way to send and receive wireless signals in the long run.
If time-domain radio turns out to be the natural direction of evolution for wireless systems, we don't have a chance in hell of listening in on ET's phone conversations.
This is my biggest problem with SETI -- the assumptions they are making about the nature of an advanced civilization's communications traffic are almost all entirely unwarranted. I don't think we're going to find anything interesting by staring at frequency-domain FFT displays all day.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Bingo!
It's been a number of years since I was involved in this sort of work (so my memory may be a bit fuzzy) but this is an old problem. I was part of a group of engineers that were developing software to predict the problems that proposed FM transmitters might have on instrument landing system receivers. If you look at the frequency spectrum allocations you'd say that there shouldn't be any problem. Different frequency ranges so no problem. Right? Wrong. The landing system receiver receives all the freuqncies that the antenna picks up. Some of those FM transmission frequencies combine in the receiver's front end to generate harmonics that are in the landing system frequency band. Some ILS receivers are better than others at rejecting these but the point is that they're there and they affect the S/N (adversely) and degrade the landing system's performance. Not something you want happening. I recall some of the flight tests where other people were collecting real data to confirm out models. In one case, where the technicians had tapped into the guts of the ILS receiver, they could actually hear the audio from a nearby radio station. Similar concerns about interference of the ILS signals had to do with cable systems. You think your local cable TV provider is ensuring that all the connections on the poles aren't leaking RF energy?
And, if memory serves, lowering the S/N in a spread spectrum has an adverse effect on signal acquisition and tracking. Won't it be fun when everyone in the neighborhood has a spread-spectrum connection to the internet and you find that it performs like a dialup connection.
And I just love law professors who spout views on technology policies without having the necessary technical background. Just about as much as I enjoy professional politicians doing the same thing. There are technical reasons why the spectrum is/was carved up into protected bands. The trouble with politicians (and law professors who probably want to be politicians) is that they're mainly concerned with the economic aspects of spectrum allocation. And, IMHO, that's dangerous.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
I am currently studying to become a signals officer in the Swedish army, and I have experience with spread spectrum radio transmission.
There are several important things to consider when dealing with spread spectrum transmitters and their jamming. First, with regular spread spectrum devices, you don't have to jam all the frequencies involved. If you succeed in jamming, say, half of them, a lot of air time will be wasted for resend requests only, which will soon choke the link.
A way to deal with this is to equip the devices with some kind of link level diagnostics, which continously evaluates which frequencies are jammed, and avoid them. With a hop rate faster than the jammer, this would significantly reduce jamming influence. It does, however, add to complexity and cost of a system, which might be hard to justify in a commercial civilian system.
Second, if you want to use a very wide frequency band, there will be a problem with designing the antenna. Normally, an antenna is designed for a very specific frequency, but it can be made a bit "more" wide band with some circuitry. A very wide band antenna usually tends to get quite bulky because it physically has to respond to all the frequencies it is going to be used for.
Score:-1, Wrong
This is an excellent question. Access to transit will still be required, an ISP could charge for transit and not have to worry about the last mile beyond sticking a few antennas up. Or a group of them could do it to share costs and compete on services. Or maybe the equipment manufacturers would want to do it, after all they are the ones who have been lobbying the FCC and Congress to set aside unregulated spectrum so they can sell hardware.
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.
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
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.