America Needs Unchained Spectrum?

pillageplunder writes "Businessweek has an interesting viewpoint on the state of the wireless spectrum and how it's not being utilized to its max. While it's an opinion piece, the author raises several valid points. Establishing an exchange-entity to facilitate trading wireless spectrum, ridding the restrictions on spectrum available for sale, and weeding out the politics behind many of the recent and not so recent FCC policies. A thought-provoking read."

Comments

Re:Everything old is new again

[Kiryat Malachi]

No....

Wrong. Spread spectrum provides no more, and no less, bandwidth than channelized transmissions; what it does is provide a more graceful degradation of bandwidth instead. Channelized transmission has a hard limit - you can have X transmitters, each getting Y bandwidth. Spread spectrum, on the other hand, gives everyone XY bandwidth. *However*, as more people transmit, the signal to noise ratio goes down, which reduces the capacity of that bandwidth.

Look into Shannon's capacity theorem - it explains exactly what you can get out of a given amount of spectrum. While spread spectrum is good at avoiding hard limits on number of users, nothing can eliminate the hard limit on total information.

The better analogy would be: channelization is like DSL. Everyone gets their own pipe, which runs at the stated speed. Spread spectrum is like cable - if no one else is on, you can get lots of bandwidth, but as more people start using the same cable, the available bandwidth goes down.