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FCC to Reorganize 800mhz Band?
nick0909 writes "Years in the making, the FCC is finally
close to deciding if they will allow Nextel to pay for the reorganization of the 800mhz bandplan. In return the FCC will give Nextel a new band in which to operate their phones, where they won't destroy public safety communications. Other cell companies are angry because they had to pay millions for their GHz frequencies, and argue Nextel is getting off cheap. On top of this, if the 800MHz band gets re-sliced, will the FCC continue to push TV broadcasters out of 700MHz, which was supposed to go all to public safety in the coming years?"
After all the founder of Nextel used to have what position at teh FCC?
It was a great move. Find a bit of frequency that had been allocated to old technology (the old mobile radio phones) and then buy up all the compaines that were losing busines to the more modern cell phones. By the time anyone had figured it out, he had bought out something like 75% of the frequency over the US.
What Verizon are trying to do in that report is so unfair. They already "paid" for the rights to a piece of spectrum when they got the rights to 800MHz. If the FCC wants that back they should be compensated with equal share of the usable spectrum elsewhere.
It's only fair.
The 1.9Ghz Band is far more worth than the 800 Mhz. This is why some are ready to offer 5 Billion dollard for it as a STARTING point. Read the FA. This is not even the highiest worth but a "floor" bid. Nextel choose to concentrate on the 800Mhz for some reason (which is as the article point out, less usefull and disturb public service).
The public service is the priority, to that I agree. But this is what is suggested as follow up which is downright anti capitalist. No Company has the RIGHT to claim compensation from the governement by getting a HIGHIER value spectrum. At best, they get back their money for the 800 Mhz and THEN the governement auction the 1.9Ghz.
Giving them something which is valued at 5 Billion at least for a paltry sum, is downright anti competiting and nearly a gift of some billion from the taxpayer into the Nextel's account.
Frankly I would not be surprised that nextel has some friends in the FCC and in the governement if this get thru...
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visit randi.org
Check out how small the 800MHz band is in comparison to everything else we currently know about: Spectrum
All of Nextel's bulky phones operate only on the 800Mhz band so if they FCC permits them to move to the 1.9GHz band, every one of Nextel's customers will have to get a new phone. Like most of the time, customers never pay full price for the phone, so Nextel would be taking another hit there. Also, moving to the 1.9GHz will put HUGE gaps in their current network.
Why? I have had netel for years. I work with companies that have hundreds of nextel phones. Last time I checked GSM wasent a great platform for 2way wihc is a HUGE part of Nextels appeal. Most places I work if they dont have good nextel reception (or cell phone reception period) Nextel or a rep has put in a repeater this means a lot when your several stories underground in a datacenter but still have 6 bars of service and can 2 way your coworkers. GSM is a nice standard but it dosent seem to offer the same feature set. Nextel needs to move to a next generation solution something with higher bitrates for data and keep the fast setup for 2way to work well.
No sir I dont like it.
What a deal:
Do a sloppy deployment job. (That's the only excuse for the interference.)
Lead the technologically clueless, politically motivated FCC down the garden path. "Oh, we can't fix this. We did the best we could. You just muffed the band plan. Think of the children".
Sell the FCC on a 'fix' that leaves you smelling like a rose in the eyes of your stockholders.
There are aspects to this game that are yet to be revealed. Follow the money!
At work, I can tell when a user is on a Nextel phone by the noises, dropouts, co-channel crosstalk. But that is their issue. Nextel, as well as all the other cellphone providers, have to work on a cellular concept of spectrum reuse. They have a fixed amount of channels to use and as users increase, they have to get more cellsites to reuse the allotment. If my mind is working, most Public Service equipment in the 800 MHz band is using trunking and if the radio can't hear the controlling information because the radio's front end is swamped by the broadbanded, higher signal strength local cellsite, the radio usually refuses to transmit because it does not know where to go. As another feature, the people using the radio can't hear to other end of the conversation. Usually, the public services have one or a few transmit/receive sites for their coverage area of many square miles as where the cell services can have many cell sites per square mile depending on their conditions. I would say that the blame is square on the FCC's spectrum management group for this one and they are buying into what may end up being a spectrum grab by Nextel. I just keep being reminded of Jeffrey Pelt's line in "Hunt for Red October" .... "I am a politician. While I am kissing the babies, I am stealing their candy." This feels like the FCC is arranging this to get this monkey off their backs, they profit, and Nextel does a little "charity" and profits more. Just follow the money, the money,....
(failure-prone: read this... It's by no means the only such incident...)
And, I might add, to a considerable degree the fault for the problem lies with these equipment manufacturers. They knew (or certainly should have!) that there would be commercial two-way communications in the channels adjacent to the public-safety channels, but they sold equipment that could be overloaded by such adjacent-channel operation.
Cell towers are relatively low-powered. If those adjacent channels had been assigned to regular two-way radio (or worse, for pagers), there would have been fewer transmitting sites but those sites would have been much more powerful.
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With regard to the transfer of the 700MHz band from television... Only four channels (24MHz) of this band are planned for transfer to public-safety communications. The rest will be auctioned for commercial use. I suppose the transfer of four 6MHz blocks, rather than various channels spread among the commercial users, will make 700MHz public-safety comms less susceptible to this kind of problem.
Of course, we (the taxpayers...) will have to buy another new set of equipment...
IDEN is a proprietary Motorola system afaik only used by NEXTEL.
Until 10 min ago I thought IDEN was using the same 800 MHz frequency band as all the other cellular standards in the US (AMPS, GSM, US-TDMA, CDMA) namely: Mobile transmit 824-849 MHz and Mobile Receive 869-894 MHz.
It looks like IDEN/NEXTEL for some obscure reason is using a lower frequency band namely: Mobile transmit 806-825 MHz and Mobile Receive 851-870 MHz. What a mess, why were they allowed to use these frequencies in the first place?
IDEN mobile transmit: 806-825 MHz
IDEN mobile receive: 851-870 MHz
US cellular transmit: 824-849 MHz
US cellular receive: 869-894 MHz
No wonder IDEN can cause problems the "normal" US cellular systems cannot.
For laughs I threw in some other frequencies.
World cellular transmit: 880-915 MHz (GSM900)
World cellular receive: 925-960 MHz (GSM900)
US PCS transmit: 1850-1910 MHz
US PCS receive: 1930-1990 MHz
World hi-band transmit:1710-1785 MHz (GSM1800)
World hi-band receive: 1805-1880 MHz (GSM1800)
UMTS transmit: 1920-2170 MHz (blocked in the US)
UMTS receive: 2110-2170 MHz (Blocked in the US)
Another twist to this story is the fact that Verzon has offered news.com article5 Billion in an effort to halt the spectrum swap to its competitor Nextel. This is in comparison to the only $ 850 Million that Nextel offered to help reband its network, and pay for retuning/equipment of public safety systems and others whom its towers interfere with. Why does Nextel want the spectrum at 1.9 GHz? It's because this is where it plans to roll out its future high speed technoloy (Flash OFDM) that it is currently piloting in the Raleigh-Durham metro area using hardware from Flarion. This spectrum will allow Nextel a huge advantage when it launches this service nationwide, essentially allowing it to jump right into and dominate the markets that Verizon (EVDO) and AT&T-Cingular(EDGE) are currently trying to capture. Company propaganda "With burst rate for the downlink is 3 Megabits per second (Mbps), and 900 Kilobits per second (Kbps) for the uplink. Typical user experience is 1 Mbps in the downlink, and 300 to 500 Kbps in the uplink, with average latency below 50 milliseconds." I beta tested EVDO for Verizon and when let me tell you its impressive. Nextel's foray into this space is serious and Verizon and other carriers want to prevent this from happening.