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Unlimited Airwaves
Dan Gillmor has an article concerning the notion of scarcity of the airwaves, which has long been a testament of faith at the FCC. Recent advances in technology may render that testament false.
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Let's watch our semantics here: Breakthroughs in technology would render the testament obsolete. Rendering the testament false implies an admission that the testament was made while ignoring the technological realities. That isn't the case here.
Kevin Fox
While radio waves may not interfere with one-another directly the way sound waves do, what would happen to radio astronomy if we opened up every possible frequency to exploitation? Is it even remotely possible that's what the FCC bureaucrats are considering, and not simply their own necks?
As an aside: the Internet should have made the TelCos obsolete years ago; but it hasn't happened yet. I wouldn't hold my breath on newer radio technology making old radio obsolete anytime in the next ten years, at least.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The second way that reality defies the old logic is what happens when you add wireless devices to networks. I won't go into the details of Reed's argument, which you can find on his site, but he contends that you end up with more capacity -- the ability to move bits of data around -- than when you started.
This guy never owned a CB radio apparently.
(Yes I know AM is terrible compared to SSB or Spreadspectrum, but those just mitigate the limitations, not eliminate them.)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So, like so many other computer/data related things, it will amount to how well new equipment would be able to sort through the overlapping radio transmissions to find the one you actually want to capture and decode.
Essentially, current radio tuners are serial, in that they lock onto a single frequency and attenuate all others down. Reed's suggestion is basically to receive many frequencies in parallel and toss them out as you decode them and they prove to not be the one you want?
Sounds good. It would make security through adaptive modulation interesting.
Screw it up??
They should give some more of this "unlimited" spectrum to the poor amateur radio operators.
We're here to give you an OS, not a religion.
I don't know, I would kind of like to see some test results first. Everyone in the neighborhood gets a Wireless router and what happens, something...nothing. I know that when 2 radio stations are competing for a similiar frequency you get crosstalk. Kind of like when you get on a cb radio and someone is using more wattage they talk across more than one channel. I don't want to be trading my packets with anyone, I don't know about you.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
It's long been an article of faith that the airwaves are a scarce resource. On this notion rides the existence of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the airwaves, not to mention the ownership of great swaths of the spectrum by a variety of public and private interests.
What if the scarcity turns out to be an artifact of history and outmoded technology? That's not a new thought, but it's back on the table for discussion in tech and policy circles. If scarcity can be overcome, the implications are both exciting and disruptive -- a cornucopia of communications that foreshadows woes for some of our biggest telecommunications companies. Late last month, David P. Reed gave a provocative talk to the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council. He told the group of experts, in effect, that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.
Reed is no newcomer to the tech scene. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught computer science and headed the Laboratory for Computer Science's Computer Systems Structure Group. He was chief scientist at Lotus Development and Software Arts, two of the pioneering software companies, and worked at the now-closed Interval Research, the Paul Allen-funded think tank in Palo Alto. Lately he's been a consultant, entrepreneur and researcher.
He's been involved in Internet technical details for several decades, and even has a ``law'' named after him. ``Reed's Law'' isn't as famous as Moore's Law, but it's a big one. The importance of the Internet, under Reed's Law, is at least as much about the formation of groups that communicate and collaborate as about person-to-person contact.
In a panel discussion and interview last week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, Reed put in plain English some of the concepts he discussed at the FCC and which he has put online at his Web site (www.reed.com/dpr.html). Simply put, he said, we have to start looking at spectrum as an almost limitless commodity, not a scarce one.
The current regulatory regime that allocates spectrum ``is a legal metaphor that does not correspond to physical reality,'' he said.
Why not? First, he said, the notion of interference has more to do with the equipment we use to send and receive signals than with the physics of radio waves.
``Radio waves pass through each other,'' Reed said. ``They do not damage each other.''
In the early days of radio, the gear could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.
The second way that reality defies the old logic is what happens when you add wireless devices to networks. I won't go into the details of Reed's argument, which you can find on his site, but he contends that you end up with more capacity -- the ability to move bits of data around -- than when you started.
``In principle, the capacity of a certain bandwidth in a certain physical space increases with the number of transceivers in a given space,'' he said. Yet the FCC regulates the airwaves as if the capacity was a fixed amount.
Yes, he said, this is counter-intuitive. And, to be sure, there are experts who disagree with him.
But if he and others in his camp are right, we have a lot of work ahead to fix a hopelessly broken regulatory system. And if that happens, the sky is literally the limit for future communications -- but the consequences for some of the most powerful companies in our economy may be grim.
Reed wants the FCC to open up some spectrum for these more open wireless networks, giving entrepreneurs a new public space in which to innovate and create value for the rest of us. He's not sure who'll make money in this space, but surely equipment manufacturers and other companies, especially software companies, will be in the middle of a wave of innovation.
Software is a key, perhaps the key, to the future Reed envisions. Most radio-like devices using today's spectrum -- radios, televisions, mobile phones and the like -- are based on the old way of doing things, constrained by hardware to receive and transmit signals in specific ways and in specific places of the airwaves.
To get the capacity multiplier effect, he said, we need devices with fairly generic but powerful hardware components. ``Software defined radios'' will be vastly more adaptable, and useful, than their old-fashioned cousins, according to Reed and others who are promoting the concept. The military has been using these devices, also called ``agile radio,'' for some time; civilian availability is getting closer as costs come down.
Who stands to lose? Apart from regulators whose jobs might be largely unnecessary, consider the potential plight of the phone companies. Their business model is based on economics that Reed's notions, should they become reality in the marketplace, would shred.
Getting from here to there is a huge, perhaps insurmountable task given the business interests that would object to changes in the rules. Some regulation would still be necessary in at least some areas, no doubt.
Imagining this new world has another attraction. It conjures a boost for a civil liberty we take for granted in America but which has been dampened under the current regulatory scheme.
I'm talking about free speech. Regulation of the airwaves has specifically included curbs on speech, such as the FCC's commands to the nation's TV and radio broadcasters about what may or may not be said on the air.
Restrictions on speech have been justified under the idea that the spectrum is a public and limited resource. If that is not true, there's no reason to regulate speech in this way. Maybe, someday, the First Amendment will mean something when people broadcast their views, not just when they put them on paper or on the Internet.
The worst direction for the FCC to move right now, Reed said, is to keep giving or auctioning spectrum to ``monopoly owners'' that won't use it efficiently. A new kind of open space is all about the public good, he said, and there's a fine analogy in recent history.
``We need to do for spectrum,'' he said, ``what the Internet did for the network.''
Ok, there may be lots of bandwidth and frequencies, but to unregulate all of it is to say the same as "The USA has a lot a land that people could drive on, so why have traffic laws?". Not quite on point, but food for thought....
I'll finally be able to have my own television station and rebroadcast 'Thundar the Barbarian' 24 hours a day! Oh, Joy!
I believe a work around was described before, by each radio device using a certain time slot. It was described like several people in a room speaking a different language, and you could easily pick out your native language. It was posted on slashdot awhile back, does anyone remember the article?
-dk
What a moron.
I would think that a huge increase in speed with Agile Radio devices would draw business uses immediately. With business use comes price decrease, with price decrease comes mass acceptance. The problem lies in deciding whether or not this technology is viable for something like a wireless network.
"It tastes like.... burning." -Ralph Wiggum
So, he doesn't like government regulation of the airwaves, but can't find a way around it if the radio spectrum is scarce. And, he says he's found that there's a way to actually add bandwidth by adding more receivers, so maybe radio spectrum isn't scarce after all, although, "to be sure, there are experts who disagree with him." Maybe it's true, but it sounds like wishful thinking to me. Plus, how expensive would these new systems be, and would we have to scrap all our old systems?
As it stands, radio stations only occupy a narrow band of their assigned frequency, so you can stack many stations close together, especially at the bottom of the band where a lot of non-commercial and religios type stations are (like wfmu.org).
When the commercial stations go to digital audio, along with better reception and CD quality sound, the signal will take up more of the band that they are assigned and cause them to 'bleed' a little bit.
The unfortunate result is that a lot of the smaller, non-commercial and religious stations who can't afford the $100k-200k upgrade to digital audio will have thier signal squelched.
Watching TechTV and they had a story about Northpoint Wireless.
Northpoint wireless wants to offer wireless broadband (tv/music/inet) but the FCC wants to charge for the spectrum, which northpoint owns the copyright for. They believe they should have it for free, its their technology that makes it work. And they cant afford the outrageous prices the FCC wants for the spectrum. They say they can deploy to 90% of the USA.
Who knows, sounds interesting. Maybe someone on slashdot is testing it?
Ha! Now that is funny.
While it is true that the signal-processing capability has expanded to the point where it is technically feasible to pack the spectrum more tightly, the premise fails to address either the economic or political feasibility. How many people would be interested in having two hundred more stations in the FM band if it meant that they had to rip out their existing car stereo and replace it with a $500 (low end) software-controlled radio to listen to them, and if they didn't, all they'd get on their stereo was a random hash of noise because their old radio can't separate the stations?
Look at how effectively HDTV has replaced the existing television broadcasts, for example. Unless you can replace all the hardware in use on a spectrum band at the same time, you're faced with the choice of retaining backward compatibility -- which defeats the purpose of the upgrade -- or cutting off the people who don't want or can't upgrade.
For specific and short-range purposes, such as wireless LANs, it may be practical to require a complete end-to-end replacement, but there are large parts of the EM spectrum that are currently in use for which the entrenched interests will lobby strongly against any disruption
Consider that people in a crowded restaurant are all talking on basically the same frequencies... the reason you can "listen" to someone is that the brain can do time-delay comparison to lock onto the sender... so, why not have two antennas on devices to enable them to pick signals out of the soup of signals in the air? The military has used this technique to make jamming GPS less practical (requiring more power from the jammer). Note, that a signal or conversation can still be jammed by a high-power source or a loud patron, respectively.
The EM spectrum has alot of bandwidth; i think it could allocated more efficiently and fairly, while still maintaining channel integrity.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Missed two things:
Whether you were a fan or not, you know his influence on culture.
and
He will be sorely missed.
I thought that radiowaves can interfear by weakening the signal of each other if the colide based on the reletive vector to ach other and their Amplitude.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
There has to be regulation to some degree. What if I decide to start broadcasting in the same frequency spectrum as air traffic controllers?
Just because/if there's 'unlimited' spectrum doesn't mean things won't/can't accidentally stomp on eachother.
The idea of the FCC being unncessary is, to me, idiotic. Maybe they can change the way the allocate - sure. But claiming they'll be obsolete makes no sense.
There are not an unlimited number of channels, though there are more now than when the FCC was created.
Modern signalling often reuses bandwith by dividing a channel into accesses* on some other dimension (code-division, time-division, etc, spatial-division, etc). But those divisions are limited within their own scope in ways similar to the bandwidth limits of radio-frequency division, and should be regulated in exactly the same way to prevent overlap and interference.
--Blair
* - A channel is a communications connection medium. An access is an individual division of a parameter differentiating channels. E.g., channel 538 could use frequency access 7, time access 4, code accesses 3-9, and so on.
Imagine if we had cars that could pass through each other and through people without any resistance. I would be the end of traffic jams!
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
My radio knowledge is severely lacking so flame away if necessary.
Hasn't this always been the case? E.g. - I can add digits to infinity to any radio station so that instead of tuning into 95.3 I could tune into 95.3000 - 95.3999. If the hardware/software can differentiate between such small differences in frequency then in the example above we just turned one setting on the radio dial into 1000. Why stop there? Am I missing something?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
that the notion of having to occupy a specified portion of the spectrum is no longer a necessity? and, that multiplexing over channels does no harm to the signal? the summary would then be that as opposed to x slots in the spectrum, there are now infinite slots. having read similar arguments to the spectrum issue, there is not discussion of moving up or down the spectrum. but, certain companies have been pushing for just that.
Seems like he is talking about Ultra Wide Band to me. That has been covered on Slashdot a couple of times all ready.
8 /215525 4&mode=thread&tid=126
Check this:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/1
Sure, he's got a point: better ways (that we have now) of using radio spectrum may eliminate the "bandwidth limits" that we have now. But that's just not the case with many modes.
Consider your typical FM transmitter. FM broadcast radio worked so well because of a lot of factors, including the "capture effect". In FM, when you have two transmitters nearby your reciever, one of them (unless they are extreamly close) will "capture" your reciever, preventing the other from being heard. This greatly reduces the appearence of interference from distant-but-still-within-reception-range transmitters.
AM and SSB transmissions don't have/suffer from this. That's why SSB ham nets work so well - SOMEBODY is bound to be able to hear you even if your signal overlaps with others.
Now, I don't know as much about spreadsprectrum as I do other radio modes but I assume the idea is "listen to a lot of spectrum and pick out what you're interested in". Now, if my signal completely captures your reciever, just exactly what are you planning on picking up from other stations?
I'm not sure exactly what makes Gillmor believe that more devices using a given portion of spectrum increases the bandwidth. Perhaps he means that more information is being transmitted between more devices -- more bps, more "bandwidth". This assumes, however, that all these devices are compatible in spectrum, mode, capablility, etc. The minute I key up my 2.4GHz FM transciever for sattelite work things may change.
Think about it:
Vinnie's Cab Company in Newark, NJ is allocated the frequency of 152.125 Mhz and makes use of it maybe 15 total minutes a day. We can improve on that and also allocate 152.125 Mhz to Joyce's Cab Company in Denver, CO so you get more use out of the available spectrum by dividing it geographically.
Now how about if we could take every cab company in the US, regardless of location, and not assign them any frequency at all but provide them with technology such as CDMA or Spread Spectrum that assures no interference. In essence you have freed huge amounts of the 'limited' spectrum for other uses. Once spectrum is freed there is no longer the psychological or bureaucratic limitation on new ways to use spectrum.
The FCC is regulating based on the limited resource model and it is now outdated. Time for a change. With the way that new technologies conserve spectrum we are using a fraction of what is theoretically available.
FCC wants to charge for the spectrum, which northpoint owns the copyright for
Hunh? How do you copyright a spectrum?
It seems to me that Mr. Gilmore has bought this guys arguement entirely. The problem is - the guy isn't entirely wrong, nor is he entirely right.
The basic techology that he is pushing is going to be spread spectrum, or Ultra Wide band (read exagerated spread spectrum) type of modulation schemes. It is certainly true that these schemes can cram more users into a given chunk of spectrum than older modulation methods like AM, FM, SSB, etc. At the same time, there is a limit to even that number.
Assume you are using something like Code Division Multiplexing so that you have several different stations spreading over the same hunk of spectrum, These stations DO interfere each other, it shows up in the burst error rate of the system. As more stations show up, the noise floor goes up, as does the error rate. At some point it becomes un-satisfactory.
Now there are some technological fixes for this - upto a point. Qualcom has done an pretty good engineering job of just that. First you use the cell concept. Low power systems that talk locally. So that gives you geographic re-use of spectrum. Next you use adaptive power control so stations only put out as much energy as they need to make the link. Finally -- you can divide the cell into quadrants as done in traditional cell systems. This gets the usage up - but still has finite limits.
Next - there are some uses that CAN'T TOLERATE a raising of the noise floor. These uses are fundamentally incompatible with spread spectrum technology. What if you are trying to observe a particular line of the Hydrogen atom from weak signals originating from space. Perhaps you are trying to do experiments by bouncing signals off of the moon. Maybe you are trying to watch the satellite TV signal from a station 25000 miles away. These are ALL legitimate uses of spectrum that have no margin for sharing with spread spectrum technologies. Whoops - all of a sudden you need the traditional functions of the FCC.
Lastly - spectrum issues are NOT just settled by the FCC, but are rather coordinated at the international level by the ITU. What if Mexico doesn't agree with some Spectrum policy of the US? Hmm - anarchy?
From my view - the FCC has been moving slowly into supporting newer technologies at about the right rate. They've made some room recently for UWB for instance, just as they have refarmed older TV channels for cell phone use in the past. This isn't a place where you can tolerate revolutions - but you can allow evolution.
UWB is a technology that uses the entire spectrum. He's talking about using traditional radio technology more effiently.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
How do you patent a DNA sequence?
One if you have no regulations on the spectrum what is to say I am not going to manufacture a 100 kw router to go in everyone's home? The theory being well as long as my device is the most powerful on the block I will be fine. If someone else has a receiver nearby it would be very likely I could cook their receiver. Also this is rf. The more you fill it the more likely we are going to have collisions etc. If you assume a set wave length will have perfectly coded packets with unique IDs so that only the desired machines will decode and understand the signal you will eventually hit a point where you are receiving so many packets that your machine has collisions decoding them (similar to running your standard network at 95% capacity it does weird things) For these reasons I see there having to be regulations for a long time to come.
I am 31337 or something.
if you use something like packet switched network, and treat units withing the network as being like internet nodes, i.e., theoretically capable of routing packets to their destination as a service for other nodes on the network, then yeah, you do get more bandwidth because you aren't transmitting all data to a central point, or to a relativly limited set of central points. Exchanges can occur between peers, or between machines using a few interstitial peers as conduits for transmission.
There's a great scene in the Warren Beatty film "Bulworth" in which his character, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, explains how the current distribution of the airwaves works. I can't remember the exact lines but the general jist was as follows:
The government takes a resource that's everyone's, that's just there, freely accessible to everyone, and calls it property.
It then auctions that property off to the networks for an absolute pittance because they depend on the donations of the networks' corporate owners (GE, Disney etc).
The politicians desperately need this money because, in order to get re-elected they must be able to buy TV commercials, tiny minute-long slices of the broadcast spectrum, back from the networks.
No politician can afford to confront this system or even acknowledge the massive warping effect it has upon democracy because, if they do, none of what they say will be reported by the mainstream press and they certainly won't be able to afford to get re-elected.
Maybe this unlimited bandwidth idea will solve that rotten cycle but I've got a bad, baaaad feeling that too many powerful people would have too much to lose.
- If you use better technology (low power, repeaters, signal extraction) then you can fit more information into the same bandwidth.
- You could always use more bandwidth.
- Private industry is better at cooperating than the government is a regulation.
At no point does he really try and dispute Shannon, there is a finite limit to the information that can be transmitted, he just thinks we should be smarter at approaching that theoretical limit. He does the usual job of trying to confuse the issue and make it more complicated than it actually is, but when you get down to it, its fairly obvious.Now I'd tend to agree that we could do with being smarter. But to say that the commercial world is going to make systems that all work nicely together is just plain ignoring realities. Look at the 802.11 / Bluetooth cockup - in reality the aim will be the fast buck and market share. If you can do that by riding roughshod over the competition, so much the better.
In the end you need to engineer a balance between the short term and long term perspectives. I'd agree that its wrong at the moment, but that is a call to shake up the regulations and those that create them, not to throw out all long term thought in an orgy of competing, incompatible systems.
Maybe we could start by allocating bandwidth to particular purposes on a lease term basis. Once you reach the end of your term, you have to show that continuing to allow you that bandwidth is the optimum use for the next lease period, if not, then no bandwidth.
Maybe then we would have faster evolution, and even revolution, in the use of the EM spectrum.
After looking over the lecture slides a few links in, the authour seems to just be saying that congestion (and hence spectrum scarcity) will be a non-issue if we just switch to point-to-point transciever schemes instead of broadcast schemes (either by using cells and a backbone or by clever coding).
This is great, and would indeed increase bandwidth to silly levels... except for the fact that implementing a pervasive point-to-point network with high local bandwidth and low leakage is a PITA of vast proportions.
Summary: Good idea, and it'll certainly see greater use in the future, but it's not "unlimited airwaves" by a long shot.
as a amature radio hobbiest for over 20 years i know for certian that Radio waves are over rated, RFI and other things can be a problem, what will be the next generation of crackers & cyber crooks, probably using some sort of radio scanner that locks on a signal, well you know the rest of the story...
Yes.
There is an absolute upper limit on the number of bits per second you can get through a given frequency range.
Like most abolute upper limits, you can play with it by tinkering with the assumptions, for example by doing geographic reuse.
But the new technology is providing smarter and more efficient sharing, not changing the laws of information theory. We can do more bits per second per Hertz than we used to, but not an infinite number.
We may still want to change the regulatory regime away from "ownership" of frequencies and something more like rental, or good behavior requirements. Which isn't a revolution -- cellular phones lease a frequency or a time slot or a code for the duration of a call, and their maximum power and antenna gain are limited.
Nobody's suggesting we just unregulate everything. If you read the article, you would have noticed the following:
Reed wants the FCC to open up some spectrum for these more open wireless networks, giving entrepreneurs a new public space in which to innovate and create value for the rest of us.
It sounds like this guy wants to open up a spectrum that would use a very smart/adaptive protocol for open data/voice communications.
What's so crazy about that?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
For other modulation techniques, similar things apply; FM bandwidth usage is not a simple relation as in AM but similar. The "richer" your signal is, the more bandwidth you need. CD quality audio will need more bandwidth than what we get with commercial AM stations. TV signals require more bandwidth still.
Spread-spectrum techniques etc. work in a different way but the concepts are similar. The theoretical limit is that the information carrying ability depends on the signal-to-noise ration and the bandwidth. Add to this the fact that electronics, antennae, wires, propagation through the atmosphere etc. all behave very differently in different parts of the EM spectrum -- as a practical matter, the information carrying ability of the airwaves is very much a limited resource.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I don't believe that is what he means by Spread Spectrum. I think digital spread spectrum is more when data is sent in what are essentially packets, and the broadcast frequency-hops whenever it gets interference (sort of like a packet collision with tcp/ip on a lan) so that no one really regulates the spectrum, except for the equipment. Very much like a wireless internet, really.
;) (actually, I can't remember my login)
This idea is being tested for digital cellphones (3G may be based on this, right?) I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's why I'm anonymous
Dan
Hello? FCC...this really is a no-brainer.
The idea of software controlled transcievers fails if you look at it as a "new radio." It's not like HTDV, though; the purpose of putting one of these fancy things into your car wouldn't just be "FM", (or, for that matter anti-theft devices, GPS/directions systems which are also prevalant today), but maybe also movies for the kids, internet access... whatever.
Sure, you have to create a need for it, but... with the rate that people want to be unteathered, you have to make better use of the spectrum.
This article comes across like a sci-fi movie, very aloof. The writer paraphrases and quotes from what another guy supposedly said, with no indication of technical facts or other groups or individuals that agree. I have no reason to believe the author and subject are credible, making it hard to trust the article. I'm not the most knowledgable on the FCC's policies, but I don't tend to believe this "evangalist" in general.
However technically speaking, there are some points that sound feasible and are likely true. I would expect that the FCC does inhibit inventors and small companies that have good ideas. Their licensing fees and other policies do make startup "disruptive technologies" difficult, which is exactly what the established companies that already have spectrum want. However some areas of the spectrum (i.e. 2.4GHz, etc) are open, and he fails to address the collision problems that exist in those areas. I think we are now beginning to see hardware in the free spectrums that is capable of dealing with very noisy environments, but in my eyes that equipment is still in it's infancy. (If someone knows more on that please reply to this post on this subject..)
I would say once these technologies are proven, the FCC should listen, but in the meantime there is a LOT of equipment that isn't capable of dealing with this and could become rather useless if the spectrum is opened up. Seems like a logical approach, before changing the regulation system. Prove your point, man! Gimme some examples.
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
So, you see, the patent process is just that easy.
(Yes, this is a lame attempt at humor, so don't mod me as flamebait if you don't get it.)
No it didn't have to be said, and moderators, it wasn't funny!
This is an example of the Paradox of the Best Network:
cpeterso
Thanks for the explanation.
/. is like going out naked with only a mask on.
Being a radio "goober", I am still inclined to wonder why it can't be 'split' much more. Given a 10kHz spread for modulation.. why not modulate much more minutely... lots of quick itty bitty (getting technical here I know) modulations that don't spread out so far? In effect hitting the zoom button on the analyzer so the very thin spike looks huge. Bandwidth of 3000-34000 1/10th Hz? Guess I should RTFM.
Admitting ingorance on
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Yes, we can make more efficient use of spectrum now, and the fcc should change it's rules to reflect this. This would enable a whole new world of wireless communications.
However, it's not a bottomless glass. Spectrum is still quite limited.
The much-hyped ultra-wide-band is not a final solution, though it may be more efficient.
test
sorry. just testing to see if mozilla is submitting to /. correctly.
Ok, my knowledge of radio is very low, but I have often wondered why the following couldn't be implemented, at least for "one-way" broadcasts (ie, similar to what FM is now):
1. Allocate a section of frequency bandwidth, enough for a 32-56Kbps transmission system.
2. Each "radio" is "tuned" to this "station".
3. All broadcasts have "addresses", and are packetised (ie, digitized, then the packet of digital signal has a header attached with this "address").
4. The user "tunes" to an "address", and starts receiving packets from that address, which are buffered, then reprocessed (D2A) into sound.
Ok, maybe the "bandwidth" would have to be bigger than what I proposed above to get enough "stations" into play, and the packets would have to be either ordered in some manner or randomised to ensure that the radio's buffer never underruns or whatnot - and maybe this is why this whole scheme has not been tried (can't transmit the packets fast enough because of bandwidth limits, etc).
I am just curious if this would work, or if it would be a failure (I tend to think the latter, otherwise it would have been done by now, if it hasn't already)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the HDTV frequencies' exclusive rights just given to broadcaster's for free?
Reed's quote about "network operation increasing capacity" obscures an important loss -- the loss of the anonymous listener. It seems that for this technology to work, receivers are going to have to be independently addressable, broadcasting your listening or viewing choices to the public. How's that grab you?
The anonymous listener is fundamental to democracy. Imagine a world where you fear to stay on a given channel too long, for fear that someone is going to associate you with the views being expressed. This is the kind of thing that we should be steering away from with new technologies, not toward.
Couple this with the fact that there's not exactly a lack of spectrum in the first place: 90% of the channels on your UHF dial are sitting there doing nothing right now because the FCC and Congress prefer THAT to leasing them to nonprofit organizations at a reduced rate.
Like most of our current "technological" problems, what's broken isn't electronic but human.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Ten percent of the spectrum needs to be "open" for exparamentation, testing, and demonstration of new methods and technologies. This space needs to be broadly applied so that different technologies can be tried across a wide variety of bands.
This way when something better comes along, it can be proven and space made available for it where it best belongs.
I like the concept of spread-spectrum communications where enough redundancy is built in so that thousands of signals can share the same space without interference. From what I understand, the space of a single TV channel could handle an entire city's "personal communications" (two way radio, cellular, paging, SMS and etc.) needs with lots of room left over.
When you think about the un-used potential in the airwaves, you just gotta drool.
Unlike the RIAA, the telcos accept that new technology is going to change the way they do business drastically, and trying to fight the oncoming tide of VoIP, etc. is suicide.
AT&T was the first to see the light - AT&T put quite a lot of research into VoIP techniques, believe it or not. MCI, another major telco, controls a LARGE portion of the US Internet backbone.
Why do you think all of the telcos have been branching into the ISP business? The telcos have a lot of the infrastructure needed for network backbones (Mainly dark fiber and rights to lay more cable where they already have cable/fiber), the Internet is not a threat to them, it is simply the direction their business is evolving. This is why you see telcos now becoming major large-scale ISPs - They know it is their only way to survive, and they also have the capital and infrastructure to succeed in the new market.
At one time, the telcos fought against the Internet and VoIP, but unlike the RIAA, the telcos have seen that fighting the new wave is futile.
The war you're anticipating has already happened and passed. It wasn't much of a war either, more like a small street gang firefight.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
nothing in that article will happen with the current "business-friendly" presidential administration.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Acronym Definition @Amazon.com
PITA Pain In the Ass
PITA Pacific International Trapshooting Association
PITA Palestinian Information Technology Association
Experiment!
Well everyone here seems to like talking about the limitations set by the FM band. It seems the measures suggested in the article would indeed eliminate the "anonymous listener" which is, indeed, important for the free dissemination of information, specifically to prevent fear of being tracked in listening to "subversive" speech. Bandwidth could easily be used more efficiently without eliminating that. Just go to a digital system, so stations could easily be placed much closer together. CDs give (for all practical intents and purposes) better quality than tapes. Just set up bits transmitting every 44kHz or however fast CDs sample. ... and TV, etc.
I doubt there would be much trouble setting up such a system, with the only limitations being the willingness of consumers to buy the new technology. This could be easily remedied by giving a licence to every station that already exists in the old band a station in the new. Then say the old band will go away in X years. people will buy new cars with hybrid receivers until everything is transmitted on the new band. There goes all that bandwidth wasted by FM... and AM
... oh yeah, and you can polarize the signals, too... that gives you at least double (maybe triple if they get longitudinal polarizaiton to work) the bandwidth.
Baby steps...
Why cant we just use higher and higer frequencies? 2GHz full? Use 20GHz? Or 50GHz? Or a googlehertz?
Who would have guessed?
90% of the channels on your UHF dial are sitting there doing nothing right now because the FCC and Congress prefer THAT to leasing them to nonprofit organizations at a reduced rate. Excellent! Excellent points.
If they can use aplitude modulation and frequency modulation to send signals, why don't they also use polarity modulation and get one more channel?
Since it's free, PM could be reserved for digital devices.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art02/slid es02/fau/fau_slides.pdf
For that matter who do you think the AOLs, MSN etc buy much of their dial up capacity from. Teleco!
I guess if there is unlimited frequences, then it would be hard to scan for alien ones when they could be useing a way different scale.
You can actually drop quite a bit of packets before vocal communication becomes garbled. There was a demonstration at a local science centre about that. Vocal communication has a lot of built in error correction.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Or the all caps may have been for emphasis, and he was talking about a thin flat bread pocket.
??? How could he talk about "bandwidth" in 1994? I thought Microsoft invented the Internet in 1995 when they integrated MSIE with Windows. ;-) And "bandwidth" is a purely Internet concept that has nothing to do with radio waves. ;-]
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
My Mac communicates with AirPort networks and Bluetooth devices seamlessly, and simultaneously.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Watching the current battle for HDTV adoption makes me think that the FCC is really trying (somewhat ineptly) to work for the public good.
Media companies aren't interested in giving higher quality content to the public, but they need to deal with the FCC to get at the public's airwaves. Even then, they're fighting tooth and nail to only deliver the same old crud (480i) and pass it off as the HDTV they promised congress. Oh, and by the way, they want to encrypt the content and control all receivers to eliminate that pesky "time shifting" thing that seems to be all the rage.
Deregulating the airwaves, even though it might be a good idea technically in the long run, would remove the only stick the republic has to hit corporations with. IMHO, information flow is too important to risk for the sake of maximizing profits.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
Concerning bands: those reservations last only as long as convenient. Many bands face regular challenges (the more recent being a spate of "little LEOs), and there is no guarantee they will remain as is. In fact, much of the pounding the FCC takes stems from their decisions on these spectrum challenges.
Concerning power: Point taken. I was not entirely clear. Sure, they can run on a 12-volt gel cell, but for how long? Many people thought that digital was a panacea for ermergency communications, but they forgot that you need a lot of batteries to keep a full packet rig running for two days.
There is also a question of the cost of the equipment to the emergency volunteer, who is often on a budget.
gm
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Who would you appoint king to divide the oceans?
The whole point is that there is NO scarcity of bandwith. I'm not a PhD from MIT like Reed is so let's quote the article then the man:
David P. Reed gave a provocative talk to the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council. He told the group of experts, in effect, that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.
Wow, heavy stuff. The FCC invited Reed to tell them they are impeeding the march of progress. That's impressive, perhapse they will listen, you too now:
``Radio waves pass through each other,'' Reed said. ``They do not damage each other.'' In the early days of radio, the gear could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.
Let's go to Reed's site to learn some more. Woops, freaking Real, encrypted pdfs requiring a non US plugin for ghost script. OK, enlightenment there will have to wait a little.
The basic concept is that there is more specturm than everyone needs, and therfore no need to regulate what was once considered scarce. Haven't you been convinced by the use of a single frequency to handle everyone's cell phones, bluetooth, 802.11 what not? Imagine if the entire specturm was allocated that way, free for everyone. Kinda like air. People like you would like to lease me the air I breath, wouldn't you? Hopefully, technical demonstrations will prove their worth before the FCC crushes everything by encouraging 2.4 GHz light bulbs. The revolution will come when people like you get out of the way and let the rest of the world do as it pleases with a virtually unlimited resource.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Personnally, I believe we need to work on these ideals and work towards the abolishing of owned spectrum space.
With a full, publically owned spectrum, freedom will be unbelievably enhanced. Internet could become faster, free, and available almost anywhere.
Corporations shouldn't be afraid of this. They have to pay for the space they use now. They wouldn't have to pay for this. And, no or less FCC could lead to at least some tax cuts, if they don't feed it into FBI Terrorism agecies.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
The FCC is ineffective and becoming obsolete.
FM stations use most of their bandwidth already, not a "narrow band". Even if they don't run a subcarrier, they're still using most of the 200 kHz channel. Inband On Channel (IBOC) digital FM sticks on subchannels which essentially broaden the shoulders of the frequency pattern, but it doesn't significantly impact how tight the spectrum can be.
The FCC's original LPFM rules were realistic. Some IBOC advocates thought that 2-channel spacing *might* be a problem, but Congress really overturned the FCC on behalf of big broadcasters who didn't want the competition. That's the issue in broadcasting now, not technology.
Shannon's Law says that for a given signal to noise ratio, there is a maximum error free bit rate which can be supported. Recent advances have shown that Shannon's law applies on a per antenna basis. If your transmitter and receiver each have 'n' antennas, it is possible to transmit 'n' times the information which one tx/rx antenna pair can transmit. To my knowledge, there is no limit on how large 'n' can be. Researchers are currently trying to figure out if there is a limit.
Repeating myself in different words. It not only matters at what frequency you radiate (frequency diversity) and when you radiate (time diversity), it also matters where you radiate from (spatial diversity). Since available time and frequencies are limited, it was thought that spectrum was limited. Add space (of which there is lots) to the equation, as recent advances did, and the available spectrum becomes unlimited (though new boundaries may show up with more research).
This is not pie in the sky stuff. Space-Time coding techniques allow such capacities to be realised. Bell labs have already demonstrated a working system in the lab.
John