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FCC Opens Wireless 3.6GHZ Band
mdeb writes "Broadband Reports has a story on the FCC opening up a portion of the 3.6 GHz spectrum. "This initiative would reserve 50 megahertz in the 3.6 GHz band for unlicensed wireless Internet operations. Setting aside this spectrum would make it easier for vendors to build devices that would work across all Wi-Fi frequencies and create new wireless Internet opportunities in rural America. The new proposal would allow transmissions at power levels higher than currently permitted for Part 15 unlicensed devices.""
Check out http://www.locustworld.com/ for information about mesh networks.. essentially you hop along your neighbors until you get to a neighbor that has internet, thereby giving everyone internet.
The higher the frequency, the harder it is for the signal to penetrate through a wall.
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Shame you are modded as Troll. Mods must not realse the 3.6GHz spectrum would be quite useful for longer distance communication, for example it would make a wireless net (literally) covering low population density areas a lot more feasible - i.e. te 'country'.
So soon I will be able to have a 2.4 Ghz wireless network, and a 3.6 Ghz wireless phone and they shouldn't interfere with each other right?
Not necessarily. Distance scales by the inverse of the atmospheric absorption. Of course there are many, many other factors involved: EM noise from the environment, RF noise from pre-existing transmitters using this frequency range, power of the transmitter, effective area of the transmitter (or receiver), modulation scheme (how data is modulated onto the RF carrier--for example, AM, FM, PM, digitization then FM, etc), and a whole host of other issues.
I'll take you to the ball, Barbara Manitee!!!
"The new proposal would allow transmissions at power levels higher than currently permitted for Part 15 unlicensed devices."
So? It's a "higher energy" portion of the spectrum. If they didn't do this, it would stunt the range of the devices. Sorry, I'm crabby today and I feel like being negative.
Fred
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-RMS
Instead of "Broadband Reports reports that RCR Wireless News reports that the FCC said..." let's just see what the FCC said: news release, Powell statement.
One article noted that this band would require the use of cognitive radios to reduce interference far below the threshold of Part 15's normal "don't interfere, accept interference" standard.
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Why do I keep on thinking that the 802.16a extension to WiMax wireless networking will allocated that 50 MHz allocation in the 3.6 GHz range?
Spectrum isn't allocated to protocols, but you can bet that ISPs will use 802.16 in this new band.
For those who don't know, 802.16a is the standard that allows wireless broadband Internet even if you're in a moving vehicle up to 250 km/h or 155 mph...
Nope. 802.16a is for fixed devices. 802.16e will support low-speed mobility and 802.20 will support high-speed mobility (e.g. moving cars).
And BTW, 802.16a has already been obsoleted by 802.16revD.
A high-powered 50 Mhz wide slot in the 3.6g band?
That's right BANG in the middle of channel 1 of the OFDM PHY proposal for IEEE 802.15 broadband wireless Personal Area Networks. (The proposed initial deployment was to use systems that cycle through bands 1 through 3 with each transmission.)
WUSB was also to be based on the OFDM proposal.
This should throw an extra monkeywrench into both of 'em. (Possibly more into the OFDM than the DS-CDMA version, though I'm not sure of that.)
= = = = = =
The OFDM and DS-CDMA factions couldn't agree on a standard. They DID agree on a "common signaling method" that both systems could talk with only tiny tweaks to the radios, and a protocol for time-dividing the slot, so if they both ended up depolyed they could take turns rather than stepping on each other (with lots of extra system numbers available for future systems to play, too).
Then they split up.
The DS-CDMA faction was ready with silicon, needing only any tiny tweaks resulting from the standardization process. IMHO The more populous OFDM faction is now trying to delay their deployment in various ways, most involving announcements of new products to delay adoption of the DS silicon.
One of those announcements was an "improvement" to the MAC layer (requiring the DS folk to delay deployment until they can get working OFDM silicon to test against or risk incompatibility). Another is the wireless USB announcement, based on the OFDM proposal, which might get system makers to hold off on adoption in the hope of getting something that plugs into the existing USB stack.
I wonder if this is the FCC saying "Use it or lose it!"?
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WEP is being replaced by 802.11i also called WPA. Win XP already supports WPA.
Canada just recently auctioned off similar sized channels in the 3.5 GHz band. Unlike the wisp's out there running WIFI, there is no mass-market gear available to feasibly use the space.
Wi-lan's ofdm stuff is fantastic but not suited to anything other than premium business wireless subscribers - certainly not something you would use for rural residential offerings.
Anyone have any manufacturer recommendations?
This thread discusses a common misconception about loss vs. frequency. It is not true, in general, that path loss increases with frequency, as the grandparent poster suggests, nor is it true that the path loss decreases with frequency, as the parent poster posits.
Path loss is independent of frequency. Think about it--if path loss were proportional to frequency, no light would reach the Earth from the sun, due to the incredible path loss at that high frequency.
However, "apparent" path loss depends on the type of antenna used. "Constant gain" antennas, like the resonant dipoles and loops commonly used for WLANs, get smaller with increasing frequency, since their size is proportional to a wavelength. They therefore intercept proportionally less of the radiated signal at higher frequencies, and a "loss" is apparent. Parabolic dishes, on the other hand, are of the "constant aperture" antenna type; as the parent poster correctly points out, the gain of these antennas increases with frequency. Users of these antennas see a "path loss" increase at lower frequencies.
Interestingly, if one were to transmit with a dipole and receive that signal with a parabolic dish (so that one side of the link had a constant gain antenna and the other side had a constant aperture antenna), the apparent "path loss" of this system would be independent of frequency.