FCC Commercializes More Bandwidth for 3G services

prostoalex writes "Federal Communications Commission opened up 90 MHz of previously reserved bandwidth for next-generation wireless services. The FCC news release (MS Word, PDF, apparently no HTML) specifies the following ranges to be available for commercial exploitation: 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz. Currently the licenses are issued to the business capable of providing "substantial service by the end of the license term", later on the licenses will be sold to the highest bidder. There's also this announcement about millimeter wave broadband frequencies."

Comments

About time

[PhysicsExpert]

This is great news, the development of 3G services in the US has been held up for long enough by beaurocracy. Countries such as Japan, South Korea and Rhodesia have established a technical lead in this area, which can only harm the already weak economy.

What might be interesting, however, is when the new 4G technologies come along. These will be different from previous technologies that work by modulating a carrier frequency, but will instead be analagous to ethernet with each phone using the same frequency and collisions being detected.

The advantages of this is that much lower frequencies can be used (50Hz is being talked about), but by allowing the phones to transmit many millions of times per second, data transfer rates of up to 15Gigabytes can be achieved. That should make video on the cellphone a realistic goal.

The only worry is that again government beaurocracy will not allow theses low frequencies to be used meaning that even poor countries will be able to have better services than the US.