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Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm
prostoalex writes ""Almost everything you think you know about spectrum is wrong." - starts Kevin Werbach in his working paper Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm. He touches the possibilities of using open spectrum, and then dwells on such innovative products like software-defined radios, spread spectrum or cooperative wireless networking. Truly informative insight into where the U.S. government stands on the issues of wireless spectrum, where it should be, and how it will benefit society and individuals."
or are people who use the word "paradigm" almost always talking out their ass.
Maybe it's just me.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
One thing I do know about it that I am fairly certain is not wrong: the government will attempt to regulate it. It doesn't matter what shape it takes the government will make sure it makes a profit from it.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Even if the FCC goes along with this, the telecom industry can not afford to roll it out.
They are heavily burdened by debt from Cell and cable modems.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I swear I think all this extra radiation is adversly affecting my health. (places tinfoil hat on head)
This has about as much chance as the US switching over to the metric system tomorrow.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
there are some really interesting possibilities. Think of software-defined radio letting you join different wireless networks that are decentralized and encrypted using something ala freenet. If you were to couple unfettered access to wireless frequencies where people's ingenuity sets the standard, and not self-interested corporations.
I would personally love to see open hardware designed to utilize wireless technology available similar to the projects at OpenCores.
--Kevin
While the author is correct in stating that modern advances in digital spread spectrum allow digital signal processors to place multiple signals in the same frequency, he ignores the impact this would have on existing analog technologies which are incapable of this feat. I personally do not wish to be walking down the street the day it starts raining model airplanes.
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
Don't even kid about that, it's true! I work in a room with 30 10kw HF transmitters, two 40kw LF transmitters, and one 200kw VLF transmitter. The antennas for these are less than 500 meters away. My co-workers' and my own hair is already falling out and I'm 23 years old.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
(tort is the legal action against harm within common law jurisdictions). Let's consider a future where individuals have wireless wheelchair, interacting with their environment (like doors/cars/etc). How do you prevent individuals being careless (cf case of leaving a concrete block on road for car to hit)?
Courts (in torts against trespass to chattels w.r.t. deciding spam cases) have rules that having an electronic signal impacting on the computer system is sufficient to be "in contact". Now extend this to a generic wireless world and you can see the potential combinations of potential problems. If my wireless car activates someone elses' garage leading to a theft then are you liable? Medical instrumentation are a major concern, as are anything which records ownership (cf person entering building with wireless and downloading trade secrets).
Wireless will change how we interact provided we can sort out how social responsibilities and obligations are partitioned.
LL
The paper goes on and on about how WiFi shows that open spectrum works, there's no problem with congestion, no need for ownership or frequency allocation. Then in recommendation 2 we read this:
Improving existing unlicensed bands isn't enough. Most are so narrow and congested that their utility for open spectrum is limited.
So here he's saying exactly the opposite, that congestion is a serious problem for open spectrum! Which is it?
It's also bogus to claim that WiFi proves that open spectrum works. The truth is that WiFi is so sparsely implemented that congestion hasn't yet been an issue. For all the hype, my town of 175,000 people has no wireless public access points. Even in the big cities they're not so close that congestion is a problem.
The article could just as well have used cordless phones and baby monitors (which use the same frequencies) as evidence that open spectrum works. The only difference is that they don't score as high on the hype meter. All these examples prove is that the technology works when the range and distribution of the transmitters is sufficiently limited, which everyone knew already.
It is time to question our long-held assumptions, and explore new policy approaches that could generate tremendous benefits for the American people.
He had me until this sentence. Getting the government to act in the best interests of the American people is not on the agenda. The current licensing scheme guarantees profit for the few. The few, in turn, guarantee $$$ to the government. Anything that threatens this simply will never happen.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
How dare someone post such a LONG article that is interesting at the EOB on a Friday. Man, now I have to stay at work late.
come on fhqwhgads
The FCC has been metric for years. Go figure
Um, like uh ok.
Are you likening a radio with a wide receive and transmit to a um Win Modem?
I understand what you mean but I really hate your terminology. Software defined agile radio, OMG lets just make all this kewl stuff sound like a pansy made it.
This really isn't anything new the idea in some forms exists now and has for some time and has been implemented. The only new thing is trying to convince the FCC to allow you to work in unused TV channels and other under-utilized bandwidth because your equipment is smart enough to know there isn't anything in there... ...kewl
Coulda said that in one line rather than such a verbose article.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Why? Our whole enterprise system is based upon monopolies. Look at the FCC these days... they've been making the monopoly of the airwaves BIGGER! In most cities, instead of having 15 or 20 different radio owners, it's now down to three or four. The U.S. radio spectrum policy is based as much (if not more) on politics as on physics and technology. As long as it stays this way (and it will, trust me), the status quo will prevail. The unlicensed bands are few compared to the licensed (read: monopolized) ones...they are less then 1 % of the electromagnetic spectrum. This isn't likely to change, either.
I'm afraid it's true. Open Spectrum beats current wireless networking technologies hands down.
The clock frequency of the Z80 processor is well-optimized for generating long- and short- range RF waves. With the Spectrum case Open, the highly advanced rubber keys act as efficient waveguides, particularly helped by the printed-on aerials (square shapes with one half or one quarter cut out, depending on the phase of the waveform).
The only snag is that due to an unfortunate typo, the Sinclair Microwave communication device ended up as the bizarre Sinclair Microdrive.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Writer: "'Paradigm' and 'Proactive'...aren't those just buzzwords that stupid people use to sound smart?"
*Blank looks from the managers*
Writer: "I'm fired, aren't I?"
Manager: "Yes."
If you ever work with Satellite communications systems (spread spectrum included) you will quickly find that even with all the so called "Draconian rules" in place, there is a high probability of someone stepping on your signal and satellite channel - the same has been my experience with other more conventional line of site RF systems - The ONLY way that whis would ever be feasible is if we took all the existing systems and simultaneously destroyed them before wheeling out the "Open Spectrum" systems. I for one don't believe that "free for all" RF spectrum is ever going to be practical or desireable. Does anyone else remember the days of the CB radio arms race and home built 100 W linear amplifiers ? As hard as it is to accept government regulation this is one area we don't want to let go to anarchy - if we do all we'll hear on our fancy Spread Spectrum radios will be static.
I read the .pdf and then I popped over to the New America Foundation and looked at the Senior Staff bios.
Wow I am so stunned at why anyone gives a rip what these jokers put out.
The head guy, the dude the Washington Post profiled last year, Ted Halstead - President and CEO, he doesn't do research. I work with people that don't do reseach, I call them the Grounds Crew.
He went to Harvard woohoo, Presidents Bush and W Bush went to Yale, having exclusive school deploma doesn't mean one is a genius. Harvard Business School didn't consider anything Internet to be "business" until about 1998-99.
Ooh Hollywood types and CongressCritters like them. Another nail in the coffin of respectablity.
The head joker at NAF is the buttmunch that told Warren Beatty to run for President.
"Previously, Mr. Halstead was Executive Director of Redefining Progress, another public policy institute that he founded to promote new approaches to economic and environmental policy." - Thats alot of words to say "He sat around and talked about cloud-cookoo-land."
"Kevin Werbach" - the guy that wrote the paper linked here - "is a technology consultant, author, and founder of the Supernova Group." He also has some 'leet HTML skillz - http://werbach.com/home.html - He uses a Mac, a point in his favor.
They throw out buzz words and do 20 pages and we are suposed to care why?
There are a host of problems with ad-hoc networking schemes such as this. I have a few solutions to them, but mostly they would be overpriced in the consumer market. One such beast that will start to bite you on the * really hard is hidden transmitter syndrome . This is where your controlling nodes overlap, and say node A is visible to base B and base C but base B and Base C are out of each others range. If B and C don't "hear" each other they can't work in unison without a third party. So when Node A (mobile presumably) hunts for a connection, both B and C try to talk at the same time to A, thus hampering the usable bandwidth. Lots more lessons can be learned by just searcjing for the syndrome and reading the other problems mentioned around it.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
... say node A is visible to base B and base C but base B and ase C are out of each others range. If B and C don't "hear" each other they can't work in unison without a third party. So when Node A (mobile presumably) hunts for a connection, both B and C try to talk at the same time to A, thus hampering the usable bandwidth.
But mobile node A can BE the "third party". If base stations B and C have unique (or at least non-colliding) identifiers then mobile node A can say, as part of its transmission, "I'm talking to B." or "I'm talking to C."
There are variants that work even if mobile node A is saying "Who's out there for me to talk to?". Look at the IP address resolution protocols for working examples. For starters, the a similar case arises on an Ethernet when a machine that wants to be booted uses RARP, broadcasting its Ethernet address and asking potentially redundant servers for its IP address. (Granted the servers COULD hear each other. But the protocol works even if they can't.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The rules of and assumptions underlying the way the FCC is carving up spectrum are based on 1930's technology. It assumes transmitters and receivers have poor filters, and cannot tolerate adjacent or overlapping signals. It assumes no spread spectrum or channel agility / frequency hopping technology. Fast forward 70 years. Technology has marched on. Spread spectrum and channel agility are cheap and commonplace. Transmitters meet much stricter tolerances for sideband and out-of-band emissions. Receivers can pick up weaker signals, and much more successfully distinguish their signal from other overlapping or closely adjacent signals. Thus we can now pack several times the data per unit of spectrum than the current rules assume we can. Yet the rules prevent us from doing this on a large scale because the unlicensed bands in which we can operate are so few and small. Users of the licensed bands (most of them anyway, cell phones being the one big exception) have little incentive to deploy these technologies and make maximum use of their spectrum because the rules guarantee them enough free spectrum that they can use older, less efficient technology with abandon, and still get done everything they want to.
THAT is the point of this paper. We shouldn't be asking what if both nodes are at 2.4GHz. We should be asking why does the guy at 2.3GHz get to be so wasteful with his bandwidth when technology now makes it cheap and easy for him to get more done with less, and we're all crammed in here together at 2.4GHz?
-----Chaz
A couple reasons come to mind as to why this Open Spectrum nonsense won't work and won't be applied.
First and most importantly, the federal government rakes in tons of money from spectrum auctions and licensing fees. However arcane, that simply won't be eliminated because something "better" has come along that's in the interest of the people. Reducing taxes are in the interest of the people, and we know how resistant the government is to that!
Despite what the author believes, spectrum allocations are a sane way to managing RF. Granted, spread spectrum doesn't interferre with other transmissions *when technically sound methods are used*. But when left to their general devices, the public sometimes eschews technically sound ideas and does stupid things. No matter how robust spread spectrum claims to be, when the front-end of the receiver is overloaded because of a dirty transmitter down the block, things quit working.
I've never had to DF (direction find) a spread spectrum transmitter, but I suspect that it's a far cry more difficult than finding a spur created from a faulty paging server.
With greater use of the spectrum, and the potential for software defined radios to use any frequency they want to transmit on, we're going to close out the possibility of ground based radio astronomy. This is not a good thing!
Radio astronomy produced many of the basic technologies that todays wireless communications revolution depends on, but is seeing none of the (financial) benefits and is gradually getting squeezed out of its own very limited parts of reserved spectrum. Maybe there should be a 1% levy on all radio licenses dedicated to help astronomers get around this problem and properly police their parts of the spectrum. Or maybe all the money raised from spectrum auctions should be dedicated to establishing space-based astronomy in the radio - probably on the backside of the moon to get away from all the noise!
There are needs for regulation to protect the other users of spectrum that wireless networkers forget about. Total spectrum freedom is not possible or a reasonable goal.
For more information see:
AAS webpages.
Of course, this is the big conceptual problem with Open/Free Source SDR in general. Recieving is fine, but as soon as you want to transmit, the FCC wants to regulate the device. Now you are getting into the same problems you have with Open Source and DRM, if the end user has control, they can circumvent any controls by taking them out and recompliling. Buggy or malicious software could interfere in a big way, although the range of the interference would be limited by limiting the power of the transmitter which couldn't be easily overriden.
I like the paper's analogy to ships on the ocean, and I think it is very accurate for spectrum use. Most of the time you can put on the autopilot and sleep without much danger, but you'd better be on watch to adjust your course when you're near the shipping lanes. In any location, most of the spectrum will be silent most or even all of the time, and most modern recievers are pretty good at cancelling interference, so nobody will even notice if you use nearby frequencies.
The TV bands have all kinds of space in them, and there is all sorts of interference already unrelated to unlicensed transmitters. I'm still using my TV antenna in an urban area, and the big problem is multipath interference from all the large steel frame buildings. I wouldn't have any way to know that unused channels were being used for underlay digital comm., and I wouldn't care much either.
As we emerge from recession, the smart money will be trying to get ahead of the curve so they can be ready with product when people are ready to buy. The entrenched monopoly players can try to stop this with legislated and regulated restrictions, but there is always a way around if you are creative enough. Any given interest has a proprietary stake in only a very small part of the overall spectrum, and the process is by law required to accomidate the needs and desires of the public at large. What industry strategy could keep all of the spectrum locked up?
Some of the owners of existing licenses are on pretty shaky financial footing anyway, and opening their spectrum for more flexible sharing policies could be a way out. Buy them out and/or compensate them for the money they already sank into licenses and you might be able to create a new commons spectrum for flexible sharing and experimentation. There is so much potential for growth of services that it could easily be way more profitable than any existing plans. Yes, it would hurt some of the entrenched players, but none of them can lock up enough resources to keep enforcing monopoly conditions. This only works if there is a shortage, and it is pretty clear from the paper that the shortage has been only in our ability to be creative about sharing the space. The only monopolies are in narrow bands of allocated spectrum, the rest is pretty wide open if appropriate sharing rules are put in place.
BUT...if you try to manufacture and sell them on any large scale, it won't be long before the FCC shuts you down.
That's why it is necessary to get the general concept of SDR transmitters approved. The question is what rules support SDR in an Open Source context. The GNUradio people are experimenting with hardware now, not necessarily in the US, so FCC rules might not come into play. If I understand correctly, you have a wide-band digital front end driving a software controlled radio transceiver. The system software plus the tranceiver define how it can work. Once the radio part is programmed, there is full access to the a wide chunk of some part of an overall spectrum, so you can limit the transmit power, and generally what bands can be programmed in the transceiver, but any fine grained control would have to be in the software.
I'm not saying they can't regulate it, just that any regulation is difficult to justify except basic power level limits, and a requirement not to interfere with other uses. Again, we have a stark choice of either freedom with responsibility, or very intrusive regulation that would have to outlaw Open Source or be unenforceable. You'd have to make it illegal to re-flash your SDR unless you are a certified technition or something.
Also, if you think that receiving signals isn't against the law, think again! ...
Same thing on the receive side. SDR makes a joke of current regulations. If you want your transmissions private, you had better use sufficiently strong encryption. Once the hardware and the software exist, you can't assume it isn't available to an adversary, regulations or not. Again, the only way to maintain the current situation is with silly laws that do nothing to actually protect the communication. Simple prudent operational precautions would tell you not to rely on this kind of protection, and it is irresponsible to do so.
At some level, the right to transmit and receive radio signals are basic freedoms. As the paper points out the transmit side has a natural connection to free speech rights, and restrictions really have to be justified. Although this seems to have been understood when the FCC was first established, and they did it anyway because there was a technical need. If you can transmit without bothering other spectrum users, there should be a presumption that it is ok to do so. On the receive side, I seem to recall that there is legal precident for a basic right to receive signals. I don't recall how the restrictions you mention are handled. A good analogy might be with the windows of your home. Just because something is visible from the street doesn't make it perfectly legal to go out of your way to peek in. Prudence tells you to draw the shades as well if you really care about privacy.