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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?"
I think the issue is pretty straightforward, and if their service is interfering with emergency bands then it needs to be reallocated. The good question is, what's fair for them afterwards? It doesn't seem like such a move should put them out of business, but some are trying to do so.
The FCC couldn't make up their minds at the last meeting, will things change at the next? I have a feeling this could get pushed around for a while.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
They should have seen this comming before selling that spectrum to Nextel. It's too bad that it's interfering with emergency services but the FCC sold Nextel a license to use it and revoking that license w/o awarding equal bandwidth elsewhere will put Nextel out of business, which is just not acceptable.
Of course Verizon and Voadfone don't like it! They see this is a way to easily kill of some competiton.
900MHz
I would have grave doubts about the FCC being able to reorganize a sock drawer, much less the 800Mhz band.
Cable is immune to that crap being sheilded and running on the sub-band through hyperband anyway on most plants.
If cells are wrecking emergency services, I for one would rather an ambulance make it to me in time rather than the bitch driving a car knowing what Tammy wore yesterday and what color eye shadow to put on while driving AND yip yapping.
900 MHZ, as someone already posted.
But on a related note, I have some pro-audio wireless mic gear that uses 800MHz; I think it's fairly common in UHF pro gear. I'd really hate to have to replace this stuff because I can't get a clean signal for my band gigs, and I'm sure I'm far from alone here. (And that leads me to a digression - I wish more of this pro gear would use programmable oscillators/ frequency synthesizers so they wouldn't lock you into just one or two frequencies. Bleah...)
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
When I think 800mhz I think VHF UHF my self. Some people prefer to call it VHF for some reason.
Cable Channels 126-141 805.25-895.25mhz according to my Kworld video card. I've never seen these used.
UHF channel 69 801.25mhz.. 70-83 I believe were the ones realocated to celular 806-890mhz.
http://www.inactivex.net/cellular/800MHz.html
I'm less familar with the 800mhz emergency frequencies.
900mhz I believe is what you're thinking of... I'm a cheep bastard and I own a pair of 900mhz cordless phones.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Here in colorado, the government just gave a mountain top away for $875, that is valued at more than 16 Million. The funny thing is that they used an obscure law from 1872 to get it. But when they first tried back 1999, they were laughed out. huuuummmm.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
0.8 cycles/sec? Never heard of that frequency band before.
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.
Would resolve a lot of issues !
a. Lower prices ! The telco equipment, because of competition, is reasonnably priced
b. Interoperability ! 1billion GSM users, what should I say more
c. Frequency to choose from ! Available are : 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz. Adapt to local regulations!
d. Roaming ! When Nextel own service is not available, they could have local roaming agreements with t-mobile or at&t.
End the end the customer would be the winner !
One police officer recounted how he came upon a man who had been shot in the back and was laying there bleeding, when the officer tried to radio in for help he found that he had no radio reception, so he had to wander out into the middle of the street holding his radio up to the sky until he found a spot with reception.
AMW has a site here where you can sign an online petition, and a description of the problem here
Additionally here's a link to the Consensus Plan which is supported by emergency first responders to eliminate interference. Apparently there have been over a 1000 cases of interference nationwide in these states since the first case was reported 5 years ago.
Getting a license from the FCC is like buying a house. It's in your interest to know your neighbors and to make an effort to be a good neighbor. With that in mind, here's a few notes on what this whole fuss over interference is really about.
1. direct interference - someone transmits on someone else's frequency. This happens occassionally by accident and usually gets fixed quick. Nextel was once fined for doing this unintentionally a few years ago near New Orleans, LA.
2. co-channel interference - two entities each have a license to use the same frequency in geographically overlapping areas. The two parties are mutually responsible for making equipment and operating adjustments to eliminate interference.
3. equipment mis-configuration (including co-located equipment) - different companies often share the same tower sites and often the signal from one company's transmitter will "leak" into another causing mixed products and emissions outside licensed frequencies.
4. receiver desensitivity caused by proximity to low elevation, high power transmitter sites (ie. cell towers).
Nextel is causing problems for other 800Mhz licensees mostly as a result of items 3 and 4. Non-Nextel cell towers (like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T) also cause #4 above but the problem is more severe when near a Nextel tower site because the transmissions are in the same band as the other non-Nextel users' equipment.
-rickThe 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...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
NexTel is the innovator of the "Push to talk" cel phone (something Verizon (vodaphone) has copied in some parts of the US)
They use yet another tech (aside from AMPS/TDMA/GSM/CDMA) called iDen (integrated digital enhanced network I think) that motorola came up with.
Their first phones were, quite apropriatly, referred to as "Bricks" (the old Ericson 888 world is stylish in comparison) but nowadays they're much better style-wise. They were really popular in replacing licensed and unlicensed handheld radios in construction/warehouse biz, and then got picked up on by the ISP folks (which is how I got my experience with them) and others who need a quick communication method.
The push to talk is charged at a much lower rate than normal minutes, and works mostly nationwide (if you believe the adverts). Of course being PTT, there's not "ring" or "accept" phase, so the phone just starts yapping when someone pushes a button. You can do point to point or point to multipoint messages.
I haven't had a nextel in about 5 years so some of my observations might be outdated, but while the PTT worked well, they had a bad habit of dropping calls on cel hops.
Hope that helps. Motorola's iDen site is here
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
I think congress should vote more bandwidth into existance. I seem to recall something from math that talked about unreal numbers that aren't used much. I propose that Congress pass a bill allowing bandwith in the unreal number ranges since the real number ranges have been used up.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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.
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,....
Nextel's poor behavior as a spectrum-sharer has worried many public-safety-communications officials whose ability to redesign their systems is subject to politics and shrinking budgets. Their proposal puts the public sector at a real disadvantage, no matter how much money they propose to throw at the problem.
Public safety agencies started to move up to 800 MHz frequencies in the early 1980s. In some cases, these moves were promped by spectrum scarcity, but in many more instances it was equipment manufacturers (especially Motorola and Ericsson) who convinced local agencies to buy complicated and failure-prone trunked radio systems. These systems were often (though not always) solutions in search of problems, and their performance has often been questioned. It's clear that advanced communications technology doesn't necessarily guarantee the safety of personnel; quite the opposite is true, in fact. (Try Googling "trunked radio system problems" for more on this.)
Since 9/11, loud voices have been calling for "interoperability" in public safety communications, in order that different agencies might better be able to speak with one another. New 800 MHz (and now 700 MHz) systems have been touted as a solution. Unfortunately, competing and contentious departments (like the NYPD and NYFD) won't talk with one another regardless of how much money is spent on systems to connect them. New York City had an interagency 800 MHz system working on 9/11 (the DoITT system, for those familar with NYC comms), and it saw very little use. Interoperability is most often a social and cultural issue, not a technical issue.
Nextel plays a problematic role in public safety comms in another way. Many agencies, especially those engaging in undercover ops and including key Federal law enforcement agencies, prefer to let their own expensive radio systems gather dust and use Nextel handsets instead. Nextel offers comparative privacy (citizens can't monitor iDEN transmissions), group call, and cheap equipment. Tto the problem is that no proprietary system is as robust and reliable as many dedicated public safety radio systems. I'd hate to have to rely on a Nextel handset if I was doing risky undercover work -- I'd be competing for bandwidth with SMS spam and teenagers (Nextel markets to youth under the name Boost Mobile).
Anyway, as most of us know, there are other ways to address communications issues than to lock up spectrum in the name of a few large corps.
(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.
=====
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.
What frequency where the fireman in the twin towers using that failed so horrorably? 800Mhz of course! And the failure was hardly NextTel interference. Unless you have antenna every few miles, it is an irresponsible place to put emergency anything. With the band being line of sight with no way for it to penetrate wall's, the old 150 MHz equipment's performance makes this stuff look like a bugger.
Nextel needs to move to a next generation solution something with higher bitrates for data
It's coming.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Ewww ... yuck. Folks need to understand that the two main communications modes used by public safety: dispatch and tactical. For dispatch you can use a cellular network. Examples of tactical comms are SWAT/hostage type situations or on-scene fire control. For tactical communications what you really want is direct peer-to-peer. You don't want to depend on your signal travelling all the way to a tower a half-mile away - and back again - just to talk to someone 100 feet away. This is critical when trying to talk from inside a burning building.
Less bandwidth? Not necessarily, ACSSB (amplitude compandored single side-band) fits inside a 5 khz wide channel.
Is clearer? Nope - the digital systems all use some form of speech compression which sacrifices sound fidelity for narrower bandwidth.
Is secure? No ... digital does not equal encryption. It's easier to encrypt once it's digital but requires key management. It's not a given.
Also, for public safety ... encryption is of little value ... reliability and interoperability among different agencies are more important. For most agencies, encrypting voice comms for surveillance activity and encrypting data terminal access is more than sufficient.
-rickComing up: "Incorrect use of apostrophes!!" News at 11.
No .sig for you. Next!
Heh. A nice lucrative new way to profit for Motorola, GE, etc, and I can see the California bond ballot initiatives now...
"Pass this bond, or we might not be able to respond to your 911 call due to interference on our county radio system"
It is a difficult tradeoff between spectrum efficiency and coverage. A 150 MHz system would more or less cover New York City in one cell. On the surface this is cool, but it limits the available traffic.
In a city the size of NYC you might have mighty many police, firefighter, ambulance driver, national guard, Boy Scouts of America, etc etc that all have good reason to communicate with each other in case of an emergency. If you have a system that can only accomodate say 10000 calls at the time, that might not be enough for such a large population.
800 MHz will penetrate walls and buildings (You do have cell-phone coverage also in-doors) but you need a lot more antennas and smaller cell-sizes to get the coverage. This should not be a problem in urban areas since the cost of more cells is divided between more people.
It is a problem if the cells are not configured properly or if all antenna's in a local area is mounted say on top of the structure that is destroyed in an emergency. The system should be configured so the cells overlap and can withstand the fall-out of individual cells.
Dual band equipment could be an attractive feature, even though carrying a 150 MHz antenna around would ruin the Armani suits of most of the MIB.
5 years ago is a long time in the cellular industry. Nextel doesn't drop any more calls than anyone else. But like all networks, there are areas in cities with bad reception and more dropped calls than normal.
The nationwide PTT is real and it does work.
I know a LOT of people that use Nextel for work (and personal use) and their only complaint is that it is one of the more expensive services. But they love how well it works and wouldn't get rid of it. I do actually know an IT guy whose department switched away from Nextel because they had some battery problems with one model of phone and went to AT&T. Every IT person hated it and within a year they had convinced management to switch back to Nextel.
In most organizations, they follow a PTT "etiquite" - chirp a person without talking and if they are in a position to talk they will chirp back and say "go ahead." It is considered extremely rude to talk over PTT without confirming that the other person can carry on a conversation.
I really think that Verizon is making a public stand saying that they would pay $5 billion as a starting bid because of the fighting between Nextel and Verizon as of late. Verizon has introduced PTT in their network and has been trying to grab customers from Nextel. Unfortunately for Verizon, their service is hugely inferior. They had started to run TV ads touting the service and inferring that it was better than Nextel. You may have noticed that those commercials stopped suddenly and haven't reappeared. Nextel sued and won an injunction against Verizon, as those ads blatently misrepresented how well the Verizon PTT service worked.
I would imagine that Verizon is attempting to force Nextel into a bidding war, knowing full well that all they need to do to eliminate Nextel as a competitor is to outbid them, which wouldn't be hard since they have more money than Nextel. Upon losing the bidding war, Nextel would have nothing as they would have already given up their existing spectrum in exchange for (apparently) the right to bid on a new chunk of spectrum.
Or maybe the poster means MHz?
You found me out! I hope it didn't ruin everything too much for you.