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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??
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....
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?
I seemed to have answered my own question, the article i was refering to was the Ultra Wide Band. Additionally, this article seemed interesting.
-dk
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?
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
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.
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.
This is one of the reasons Morse code is still so popular with amateur radio enthusiasts - you can send extremely narrow band signals that allow you to communicate fairly quickly. If someone is really good at it, they can communicate almost as fast as speech, over a channel a few *tens of Hertz* wide.
- 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.
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.
That's an understandable perception and theoretically will work. Consider this enlightenment and not a flame.
Current FM radio modulates the signal above and below the designated carrier frequency. Therefore a 20Khz signal (peak of human hearing) will modulate a 95.3MHz carrier between 95.28 and 95.32MHz. IIRC the full 40Khz deviation accounts for both channels of a stereo broadcast.
There's additional use for Broadcast radio. I forget where I saw it, but I believe there is an offset from the designated frequency to place a mono only 20Khz band away from the stereo part of the transmission for mono FM radios to pick up properly. This may however be an outdated use of the extra bandwidth.
Additional bandwidth can be used for other data/audio signals to be carried independent of the main broadcast for Broadcast FM plus 'padding' between stations.
Hello? FCC...this really is a no-brainer.
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.)
This is an example of the Paradox of the Best Network:
cpeterso
It's sometimes called M/S (mid/side), so we can express it like this:
M=L+R, S=L-R when transmitting.
L=M+S, R=M-L
Clear as mud, right?
The radio waves don't care about the packet headers in the data they are carrying.
We are talking about fundamental things here, like noise floor, and front end overload.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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
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.
BTW, Digital AM and FM are coming very soon, using Ibiquity's IBOC system:
IBOC technology makes use of the existing AM and FM band (In-Band) by adding digital carriers to a radio station's analog signal, allowing broadcasters to transmit digitally on their existing channel assignments (On-Channel). A station will convert to iBiquity Digital's IBOC technology and begin transmitting a simultaneous analog and digital signal, known as the "Hybrid Mode".
AM will soon sound like FM.
I recommend that you get hold of the ARRL handbook from your local library, or indeed the RSGB book if you're in the UK. These are the standard works on amateur radio, and explain all these things far better than I can....
Cat5 has a nominal bandwidth of 100Mhz, you are confusing bandwidth and frequency.
0 C: www.molexpn.com.au/solution/files/ufab.pdf+etherne t+frequency+and+bandwidth&hl=en&ie=utf-8
Try this URL if you want the details.
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:vRq6AoANKp
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
AM will soon sound like FM.
I very seriously doubt that. That low you don't have enough cycles to work with to encode more than 300-600bps or so.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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?
It sounds bizarre, but in the case of people actually sitting on the earth surrounded by reflective/absorbant stuff, it probably makes a great deal of sense. If you are in free space, where there's less things to absorb/reflect radio, then lasers are probably the way to go though.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That low you don't have enough cycles to work with to encode more than 300-600bps or so
In the AM band, the total allowable channel is about 30 khz wide. The total area outside typical analog broadcasts is 20 khz, but IBOC also adds digital signals in the analog area as well. Using QAM, that gives you 120 kbps. In this day and age, a static-less pop-less 30-40 kbps audio sounds pretty sweet.
Why cant we just use higher and higer frequencies? 2GHz full? Use 20GHz? Or 50GHz? Or a googlehertz?
You hit the nail on the head right there. Check out my employer's website, since that is the crux of what we are doing today. Actually, Fox News just did a story on us, which should go national soon. I'm the one running the computer in the video, and yes I'm busy surfing Slashdot ;)
Basically, instead of transmitting at high power to a base station, the transciever finds the path that takes the least amount of power. By transmitting at lower power, you get better spectrum reuse in a given area. One conventional cell becomes thousands of picocells. It really doesnt make sense to try to run a packet switched protocol like IP over circut switched networks like CDMA, et al.
This guy does have the right idea, but I think some people are reading the article the wrong way. He isn't calling for deregulation, just more bands for people to experiment in, like the ISM band.
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?
I still remember this stuff from my undergrad EE days. It's basic communications theory. For any radio broadcast (let's take FM as an example, but this also applies to AM), your signal to noise ratio is determined by the amount of power you put into the signal. FM stands for Frequency Modulation, so you are not actually using a fixed frequency; you are actually modulating the frequency within a small range.
If someone else sends a signal in a neighbouring band, their signal will appear as noise to you (in AM, you would hear a faint version of their broadcast; in FM it's just static). Therefore, you need a guard band to separate the signals. Fortunately, the amount of interference falls off pretty quickly (exponentially, I believe) with the size of the guard band, so the guard band doesn't have to be very big.
It is completely possible to reduce the bandwidth you require without losing signal quality, simply by increasing your signal to noise ratio. It is infeasible to reduce the noise, so you really need to increase the power of the signal (I seem to remember that S/N is directly proportional to power, but it might be a square law). But if you increase the power of your signal (and also reduce the size of the guard band), then you create more noise on each of the neighbour bands, so they have to increase their power output as well. The result is that we can have as many radio stations as we want, as long as each one comes complete with its own power plant.
As for the suggestion in the referrant article, I wish they had provided some facts about the science behind this guy's claims. Digital audio can certainly reduce bandwidth consumption, but it's not a panacea. Broadcasting on multiple bandwidths sounds like it will just increase ambient noise. Sure, bandwidth will go up, but so will power consumption. And that, as I've just illustrated, is nothing new.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Actually you wind up with (L + R) + (L - R) which gives you 2L and (L + R) + (-L + R) which gives you 2R. The sum (L + R) and the difference (L - R) are added together in one channel and the sum and the inverse of the difference (-L + R) are added together in the other channel.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Although bandwidth and frequency are not the same thing, I suspect that Cat5's 100MHz bandwidth starts somewhere around 0MHz and goes up, topping out somewhere around 100MHz. Just because it has a bandwidth of 100MHz doesn't mean that you could use it for 6789MHz to 7789MHz.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
But it also doesn't mean you can transmit ethernet on the FM radio band, just because the FM radio band includes 100Mhz, that was the point I was responding to. I think FM radio has a bandwidth of something around 300khz per channel.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
No shit sherlock. Jammers are usually on the ground, i.e. below you if you are a missle or a plane and the GPS constellation is above you. Hell, use GPS and a laser-ring INS to get your position and you can easily do phase comparison for a phased array receiver.
Btw, high-end GPS products are able to "count" the number of wavelengths to a satellite to determine position w/ 95% confidence interval within Differential GPS or kinematic (position is accurate while moving) differential GPS can get down to the SUB-centimeter range !!! This requires an accurately measured fixed based station and a broadcast channel for updates; mostly for farms, mines (the mineral kind), power plants, construction, etc. On the conus (the us mainland), the coast guard and others broadcast DGPS corrects that are publically available.
Differential GPS also defeats the old inserted error for non-military keyed receivers, it's a mute point because there is no error.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
The FM broadcast band runs from (approximately) 88 MHz to 108 MHz, which is only 20 MHz for the whole thing, so yes, it would be mighty tricky to shoehorn 100MHz worth of signal into it (although if you figure out a practical way to do it, how 'bout letting me in on the ground floor, pre-IPO?).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'll go and dig out the RSGB Handbook and look it up.