The Illusion of Spectrum Scarcity

Codeine writes "Presentations to the Technical Advisory Council (TAC) of the FCC by Vanu Bose "Software Radio: Enabling Dynamic Spectrum Management" and by David Reed "How wireless networks scale: the illusion of spectrum scarcity." Counterintuitive results from multiuser information theory, network architectures, and physics: Multipath increases capacity, Repeating increases capacity, Motion increases capacity, Repeating reduces energy (safety), Distributed computation increases battery life, Channel sharing decreases latency and jitter. Highly recommended presentation suggesting that the cost of spectrum management by "exclusive property rights" mandated by the State outweighs the advantages we could obtain from a new model that acknowledges physics and the 70 years of receiver development since the regulatory model was adopted at the time of the sinking of the Titanic."

Comments

There are reasons to control - for now

[mwillems]

This is a philosophical discussion, but let's also look at the technology.

There are reasons to control. As a licensed radio ham (VA3MVW) I can assure you that if everyone were allowed to broadcast on shortwave ( 30 MHz) we'd have chaos. A kid in Brazil who uses $15 in parts to create a 10W shortwave transmitter can make an entire band unusable in all of Europe. Shortwave covers the world and there is very little bandwith - all of shortwave is only 30 MHz.

The reason things are getting easier now is twofild: technology and physics. Technology, because we can now transmit on GHz frequencies - unheard of just a few years ago. And physics: if you go up in frequency, bandwidth becomes almost infinitely available, antennas become shorter, and range becomes shorter (so less interference).

In other words, good reasons to control low frequencies and good reasons to allow much on wide bands of high frequencies. Which it seems to me is exactly the way it is happening.

Michael