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Spectrum as Property
the economist troll writes "An article in this week's Economist argues that overcautious control of electromagnetic spectrum, on the part of regulatory agencies, has resulted in the sheer waste of up to 95% of available spectrum. The article suggests remedies for this sorry state of affairs, including (but not limited to) various methods of privatization. Peppered with history and interesting facts--for instance, did you know only 2% of America's spectrum allocation is determined by auction?--this is one article you won't want to miss."
Peppered with history and interesting facts--for instance, did you know only 2% of America's spectrum allocation is determined by auction?--this is one article you won't want to miss.
Yeah, if the rest of the article contains statistics half as fascinating as that one, I'd probably be riddled with regret if I didn't read it. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to find out precisely which frequencies are actually determined by those actions. Thanks for the heads up!
Its braindead. The RF spectrum is a limited resource, and as such is subject to speculation and fraud -- have we forgotten electricity auctions so quickly?
Politicus
As a ham many areas of spectrum are underutilized because the technology does not exist to successfully exploit them. For example the repeater which takes a radio signal coming on one frequency and retransmits it on another is the basis for the entire cell phone industry.
At the time the commercial interests wanted that spectrum for expansion of paging.
What financially driven interests forget frequently is that basic non-directed research is a good thing which yields benefits down the road and often entire new industries.
Like the RFID crowd wants to put high power RFID tags on the 70cm band. This interferes with both Hams, Wind profiling radar and satellite communications. The difference is someone can make a quick buck.
Also these RFID tags can be read at a distance of several miles with the right equipment. So much for RFID being a 'short range' technology
If i am lucky First Post
...I've been 'regulating' 3 SSIDS from inside my apartment for months now.
Oddly, my neighbor just got a large envelope from the RIAA...
If you think
Four more years for Bush (and Michael Powell)
Don't be so fscking blind. Comments like that are so high school. Look at all the give-aways BOTH parties toss out to their paid clients. If you believe for one second Bush/Republicans are any worse than the Democrats, you're a bigger fool than they ever hoped for. Bush's FCC commissioner, Junior Powell, obviously is a lacky for large corporate interests. But so were his predecessors under Clinton. Hell, go read the USDA rural broadband money rules (from the bill Democrat Senator Harkin sponsored). Would you be surprised it's just a slush fund to give money back to the incumbant phone companies? Yup. If you ain't one, or ain't established old money, you ain't getting money. Funny how it always works that way.
While we're on the propaganda debunking, here's one for you:
1. Go read MoveOn.org's propeganda, especially all the blathering hatred at Bush for sending US jobs offshore to places like India, China, etc.
2. Then read who MoveOn.org is funded by (George Soros).
3. Then read Soros Investments list of holdings. Wow... it's like a list of all the major guilty offshoring companies! How can this be? Maybe Soros doesn't know?
4. Then read the white papers and recommendations by Soros Holdings on offshoring. HINT: If you are a company he invests in and are NOT making him money, he will move to find better management or dump his investment in you.
This country would rock if it wasn't for all you stupid sheep.
i am writing this on
my ipaq from my 1st
floor coat closet in
my house in FORT
MEADE, FLORIDA! i
am being ravished by
hurricane charlie.
the power went out
almost 6 hours ago,
but somehow i can
still reach a wi-fi
access point (must
be on a UPS). if
anyone can read
this -- please send
beer and porn and
wish me luck!!
cheers,
roger
Clay Shirky has just posted his essay, The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good . It starts with mentioning that the FCC is considering opening up additional spectrum for unlicensed uses -- "the same kind of regulatory change that gave rise to Wifi" -- and points out that "The 2.4Ghz spectrum is not treated as property, with the FCC in the ungainly role of a 'No Trespassing" enforcer; instead, it is being treated as a public good, with regulations in place to require devices to be good neighbors, but with no caps or other restrictions on deployment or use."
Good reading all 'round.
The Economist recommends privatisation as a solution. Now what a surprise. Don't get me wrong, it's a great paper and I actually subscribe to it, but there are times when it gets into the realms of market fundamentalism, so you should always read between the lines. Some of their articles also read as if they belong in the Leader section, so thick do they lay it on with the opinions.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I want to purchase all electromagnetic frequencies between 380 nm and 780 nm. Therefore, everything that people could see would belong to me. Or does somebody else already own that part already?
Of course, I'll licence them under the GNU's GPL.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Thoughts of Dave Reed (the guy who gave us TCP/IP)
on the subject
Paul B.
Why is formalizing the status quo the cure for the status quo?
Well, if I understand the question correctly, it indeed raises a valid point -- that the political process is a poor way to run anything, even the process of de-politicizing something.
At the time the FCC was founded, a handful of courts were settling disputes between broadcasters by applying a "homesteading" analogy rooted in common law and the concept of first/continuing use of a given freq at a certain power level in a given geographical area.
Revisionist historians have pointed out that, in hindsight, it looks a lot like the creation of the FCC (and the attendant nationalization of the airwaves) might have been pushed into place precisely to forestall that legal trend -- thereby locking the ordinary person and small business owner out of the new field and consolidfating ruling class power.
Now, if privatization is carried out as merely a sham for finalizing this expropriation from early broadcasters (who are, admittedly, almost all surely dead now), then you would be correct to be cynical. It would, however, ALSO remain true that (in general) any private ownership is a better way to manage any resource -- but that overlooks the matter of justice in the face of expropriation.
That brings us to this -- the whole debate ought to be not about whether or not to privatize, but what is the correct way to go about it and why.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
then why do I hear two different radio stations on the same frequency so often?
Why does one over-the-air broadcast station have ghosting caused by another??
What, the free market is supposed to fix those problems magically, without government oversight, when they're still pretty bad with the FCC throwing down tons of rules *and* charging licensing fees?
I smell typical Economist free-market hype. Just let the highest bidders control your spectrum, and everything will be fine, kiddies...
I'm not saying there isn't a need for change in the way RF is used. But I am calling into question a highest-bidder-takes-all approach, and the motives of those who back such an approach.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Currently, you get a chunk of spectrum and you do whatever with it. If someone interferes, you track that one person down and get them to stop. The size of your spectrum effectively limits the bitrate you can throw across it, assuming consistent power/noise ratios, because after all, if no one is interfering, noise stays consistent.
A UWB transmitter raises the noise floor across all bands ever so slightly, basically proportionately to the bitrate and range the transmitter seeks. Not really a problem for a few transmitters. Also, since people transmit so infrequently, lumping everything together means you're less likely to be affected by the interference.
But if UWB becomes commonplace, and people become greedy for higher bitrates, then keeping the noise floor low for the people still using fixed spectrum allocations will become a forgotten priority. And even if UWB becomes truly universal, if the noise floor gets too high, where do you start to fix it? How do you decide which UWB transmitters are talking too loudly and for too long? If you start to license how much power and time they can use, how do you determine that a given licensee (or an anonymous unlicensed user) is the problem?
Some analogies:
If allocated spectrum is like having slow individual PC's, UWB is like being on a fast mainframe while the admin is on vacation.
If allocated spectrum is like a stain on a shirt, UWB is what the stain looks like after it bleeds to all the other clothes you washed with it.
If allocated spectrum is like a monthly marital spat, UWB is like the loud party the neighbors are always having.
I belive the point the grandparent is trying to make is that it would be a much better system if we build more intelligence into the endpoints of the system (better transmitters, receivers), since in this case we obviously can't change the medium.
Imagine if you could broadcast anything over the radio without fear of the FCC, as long as your station was popular enough to pay your broadcast bills instead of your fines to the government?
Imagine that, perhaps, not all radio emissions generate money. Imagine that researchers and hams get trampled on by some company because the company has millions to throw at a piece of the spectrum and the researcher/ham doesn't?
Imagine you have a small dinky radio station that broadcasts programs for "friends of the earth" and other ecologists, and Texaco buys out all the spectrum available, and that *oops, too bad* the dinky station can't broadcast anything?
Imagine that. It'd be great wouldn't it? I can't figure out whether you're an idiot, a troll or a convinced republican...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The author has demonstrated his lack of understanding of RF basics.
... at this frequency (VHF, much higher than VLF), data is typically sent at 1200baud. Much higher than that and it becomes more difficult.
... (thank you oh great queen of buzzwords) ... I encourage you to study some basic radio theory, get your ham license, and experiment with the APRS network which runs on 144.390mHz ... it's a world-wide "mesh network" which is very active, and very effective, and very well suited for it's purpose.
Even a sliver of new unlicensed spectrum in the very low frequencies could therefore make an enormous difference. It could, for example, make possible a cheap alternative to cable and digital-subscriber line modems (for which roads have to be dug up and trees uprooted) in delivering high-speed internet access across "the last mile" to the consumer.
Nope, sorry captain. "Very low frequencies", A.K.A. "VLF" cover about 10-30kHz. Read up on Nyquist's theorem... there's some math involved, but it basically dictates maximum data rates at any given frequency. Even then, in real world applications, maximum data rates are typically lower than nyquist rates.
For example, I'm a licensed amateur radio operator, and I actively transmit and receive data at 144.390 mHz
Basically, theoretical data rates increase as the frequency of a signal increases.
In another ham band, around 435mHz (UHF), satellites typically send data at 9600baud.
So, data rates are still relatively useless for broadband applications at any realistic point below anything ending with "gigahertz". There's no way in hell (do the math, thank you nyquist) that VLF could be a "last mile" solution.
On to another point regarding "mesh networks"
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
The amount of information that can be transmitted over an RF link with a given frequency band and noise floor is finite. The Shannon limit describes the absolute bottom signal to noise limit, below which no useful information can be sent. With wideband spead spectrum technology and robust error detection/correction algorithms, we can finally approach it. That is the bad news. The good news, this is 100x better than most of the (mostly uncompressed analog) open air transmission methods currently being used.
Consider a regular, low noise telephone line limited to 3 KHz bandwidth, no DSL, ISDN, or other high bandwidth enhancements. The first generation telephone modems ran at 110 or 300 baud. Eventually, QAM modulated modems came out that worked at 1200 baud. Later, 2400 baud modem appeared. This proved to be the limit of pure analog op-amp filter technology. 9600 baud modems requred a DSP, to process and recover data from the incoming signal. Later, 19.2k, 28.8k, 33k, and eventually (almost) 56k modems appeared, as the DSPs got faster, and more sophisticated filtering, error detection and recovery algorithms were used. But this was the limit. Pushing more data through a bandwidth limited, voice quality phone line requires a lower noise floor, or more bandwidth. Sending symbols faster requires greater bandwidth. Using a more complex symbol constellation requires a lower noise floor, or eventually the bits smear into each other to an extent that the error recovery mechanism cannot cope.
Open RF is much the same - you have a finite slice of bandwidth to use. You can reduce the signal to noise ratio by increasing the transmitter power, but then you become a greater noise source for everybody else who is transmitting over the same spectrum. CDMA phones are constantly adjusting their transmit power up and down, depending on how well the base station is receiving them. If the BER (Bit Error Rate) is too high, the phone is told to raise its transmit power. If the BER is low, the phone is told to reduce power, in order to reduce the noise. In a CDMA system, you can always add "just one more" transmitter, but eventually the noise floor is raised to the point where calls are dropped.
Also in open RF there are other problems to contend with, that dictate the optimal method of transmission - fading, (transmitter moves behind or out from behind a building) multipath, (Signal takes multiple paths to receiver, resulting in overlap because signals arrive at different times - think of trying to talk across an echoing canyon) and dopplar shifts. (Transmitter is moving, resulting in shifted carrier frequency) In practice, open RF is a pretty crappy transmission medium as compared to any sort of physical link.
In order to preserve optimal use of the spectrum for others, you don't want to transmit omnidirectional. If the receiver is in front of you, the signal you transmit to the sides and back are just wasted transmitter power, and an unwanted noise source for everybody else. Ideally, you only want the signal to go in a laser like path between transmitter and receiver. Very tricky if you don't know where the receiver is, or if it is moving.
My rights don't need management.
"If the water system was truly privatized, the incentive would be that poor service would result in them losing the contract to provide the water service."
Er, no.
What has happened in a significant number of countries forced into 'Structural Adjustment' by the IMF and/or World bank is that the government is told to sell off publicly owned utilities or face complete loss of access to international finance.
The utilities (like water service) get sold off to private companies from developed nations, which inevitably raise rates beyond the point of affordability for the majority of customers. Revenues fall in certain neighbourhoods, and managers, arguing that it's not cost-effective to perform proper maintenance there, don't service the equipment.
Government officials - assuming they haven't been paid off - can gripe all they want. The managers of the utility blandly point out that they can't provide service in places where they can't make a buck, then head back to the golf^H^H^H^Hoffice.
How do I know? I'm living in a country where this exact process has crippled development of water, electricity and telecommunications services .
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You do not seem to know what you are talking about. Have you been to any of the places you're mentioning? Could you point to Moçambique on a map without looking it up first?
I'm German. I have been to a number of places in Eastern Europe that have seen the worse side of German occupation, and I have never been met with hate. I've been learning Russian, I've been learning some Hebrew so that I could read Yiddish (basically a dialect of German) and speak to some of the few remaining Jews over there, I did some reading, and then I just went there. People were a bit reserved at first, but after two minutes of talk, we got along very well. When I said I wanted to visit my German occupant grand-uncle's grave on the German military cemetery in Smolensk, we drove there together without them even asking.
My girlfriend is Ukrainian. They are probably the country that got the worst of us in World War 2. Do you think she hates me? We are talking Russian at home because my Ukrainian is too bad, and she gives me 9th-of-May victory postcards as a joke. That's Ukrainian hate for you.
I've spent the better part of the last year in Uzbekistan in the French Research Institute in Tashkent where the librarian is Crimean Tatar, born in the 1930s. We got along very well. She told me about how she got to hate Germans between '42 and '44 during German occupation of the Crimea, how Germans threatened to shoot her father before her eyes. After the war, she said, she refused even to look at Germans because of this. After the collapse of 1991, however, she said the five or ten Germans who came to Tashkent for research were young, interested in the local peopulation and their history, they spoke Russian and/or Uzbek and behaved very civilized and friendly in general. She said that these Germans were difficult to hate, and that she was compelled to relinquish her hate for Germans in general and turn it into bitter memories of the German occupants sixty years ago - an entirely different story.
So "all Africans hate the Europeans"? My brother came back a few weeks ago from eight months of work in Ghana where he lived in Accra with a host family, no running water, but the people were fine. Hated because he is European? Definitely not. I know Brits who worked in Nigeria (colony until 1960), Russians who worked in Central Asia (colony until 1917, Soviet Union afterwards) and a Portuguese who worked in Angola (colony until 1975). The memories they brought back were not ones of hate. If you visit Moçambique, there are places that you don't visit when you look like money, not when you're Portuguese. "Legitimate hate"? If that old Jew in Velizh near Smolensk had hated me, I wouldn't have blamed him, but he didn't.
Make an effort to learn people's languages, to show interest in them, their culture and their history. Respect them, look and behave in a respectable way. Stay in places for more than a couple of days, behave like a civilized person and smile when people show you their family pictures. An American who does just that is not going to be hated anywhere in the world, even in the Philippines (US colony until 1946) or Vietnam for that matter. They may not like your country (as an abstract entity) for what it does, what it did or fails to do, but they will not hate you.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)