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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
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.
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.''
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
- 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.
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.
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This is an example of the Paradox of the Best Network:
cpeterso
Sure. Looks like he's talking about spread
:-)
t re sses/HedyLamar
spectrum. There are 2 kinds in wide use, FH
and DS (frequency hopping and direct sequence).
Common 802.11 uses spread spectrum with wide
bandwidth front ends (well, wider then narrow
band single carrier modulation schemes).
But he's wrong over all. Spread spectrum
techniques only achieve a limited (practical)
increase in signal to noise ratio. You can't
infinitely increase the S/N. In general, one
uses a spreading code to, well, spread the
spectrum of the signal. In the reciever,
the despreading (corrilation) also spreads
any other (interference) signls.
However gain is doubled by a doubling of length
of the spreading code, so this is no silver
bullet for bandwidth. In actual fact, this is
old technology. It was patented in the second
World War (by the very talented Heady Lamar
http://users.breathemail.net/country.talking/ac
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.
Why cant we just use higher and higer frequencies? 2GHz full? Use 20GHz? Or 50GHz? Or a googlehertz?
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.
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.