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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."
I have often wondered about why the frequency ranges are so terribly restricted. It seems to me that we should have better diversity in our frequency ranges. Why does everything in the world have to operate at 2.4 Ghz? The FCC is saturating that frequency band at an unsustanable rate. Just my .02
Over-the-air TV now serves less than 20% of the market. Each analog channel could be replaced by six digital channels. And one TV tower blankets an entire city transmitting a single program, instead of hundreds of small street-corner antennas each sending out hundreds of different shows and reusing the same bandwidth over and over again.
And what would happen if this was the case? A single entity would buy up all the individual local markets and begin transmitting their own crap back over it. They might even keep the individual programs but still carry them under their own waving flag.
We all know what I'm talking about so I won't even bother to give them the free advertising space... So when the local market is bought up by the conglomerate company what happens? Any number of things but most likely a dampening of freedom due to needing to show the world what a great company your station represents.
An end to freedom.
And third, spectrum is so politicized that nimble decision-making is impossible. For more than a decade the FCC, in a vain attempt to save the U.S. consumer-electronics industry, has pushed high-definition TV onto broadcasters.
Like I give a fuck about the broadcasters. The FCC pushed HD on to the people. The same people that own that fucking spectrum and should be the ones choosing what happens with it. Sadly the FCC has taken on more and more power to do what IT thinks best not what IS best.
HDTV is a joke. It's a waste of money and time. There were thousands of better things that we could have used that money on. Not to mention that it was mandated to be in every TV and every broadcast by a certain date. We had to pay for it once to be mandated and now we have to pay for it again to be used. THANKS! Just what I wanted... To be able to see the noise hairs and sweat on an NBA player.
Personally, I think they should have spent the time and money protecting us from consolidation in the media markets but that's me. I didn't have a say in it and neither did any of the rest of us.
Talk about win-win-win! Everyone would gain, especially the U.S. economy. As the successful pioneers of the first broad, free-market-driven spectrum exchange, we would set world standards for usage and equipment. The U.S. economy, the home of innovation and the lone entrepreneur, would prevail once more.
You are suggesting something that the government and the business world cannot fathom. You are suggesting that there be a true free market. Not one regulated by a single entity handing out slices like it was the last piece of pie on earth... Not one that gives instant money in large chunks rather than small bits here and there over time...
Businesses want control so that they can continue to win. If everyone had access then they couldn't dish it out and hold on. Why would they want to have other people innovating and using the networks like they could be? They can run everything on antiquated crap and offer shit services for high prices.
Isn't that what communications is all about?
What a USELESS article...
Yes, that's *exactly* what we need is more confusion as to what goes where in the airwaves. No, we don't want standards like "Channel 6 is always ~87Mhz" oh no....We want each company to just pick their own frequencies and purposes and then CHANGE them on a whim. What a GREAT idea!
You know, the FCC has a purpose other than censorship...they are there to organize what goes in the air, different frequency bands for different purposes. So what if we waste some small partition of frequencies? Change the classifications for what goes where if you want, but don't just throw it to the dogs.
Kiddies. Way back in the years before the FCC or even the FRC, radio spectrum was free. You would think that people would have approached this with wisdom and respected each others rights in using the spectrum. But this didn't happen. In the early days of radio, there was a lot of fierce disagreement about the best modulation schemes (AM vs. FM), frequency bands and other related issues. There was also a lot of corporate crap going on where one company would make a radio that would only recieve stations that used their transmitters (again a modulation scheme roadblock). So if you wanted to listen to certain programs, you had to buy more than one brand of radio. On top of that, without any regulation, people just picked the frequency they wanted and used it while paying no mind to their competitors. The reult was a completely unworkable radio scheme. This is WHY the FRC (which eventually became the FCC) was created. They wanted to prevent the kinds of interference that all of this bad behavior caused.
The frequencies were divided up by region in order to ensure that there wouldn't be two stations operating on the same or even close frequencies within a certain distance. This is why you will see that if a large city has a n FM station at 107.9 MHz, you won't see another station at that frequency for a very good distance. In the past it used to be better because the FCC didn't used to bend over and spread them for the broadcasters like they do today. Now the geographic regions are smaller so the distance isn't quite so great and you hear more interference where you have bigger cities close together.
If you like wild west style shoot-em-ups then you'll love unregulated radio spectrum. But if you just want to properly use the technology, then you need to have regulations. The flipside to this is that you also need to make sure those regulations benefit the end user and not the broadcaster. The FCC has certainly been corrupted, but don't throw away the concept of controlled spectrum usage because of that. Otherwise we'll have the same unusable mess that old fashioned radio was before the FRC (remember most people are just laughable boxes of jizzrags) affecting our newly re-invented radios.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Excellent idea. I can't wait to check out what's on my brand new fancy multi-wave-length self-programming TV:
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In all fairness, it'd probably be better than the series premier of The Will.
There is one major difference between the spectrum and the internet- creating a webpage does not stop others from doing the same, while broadcasting over a frequency does. When BuisnessWeek says it wants to "open up the spectrum" what they mean is "license the parts of the spectrum that are available to the public".
The author of that piece is SO lacking in ANY basic knowledge of RF engineering it resembles a game-show host proposing a totally new set of regulations for nuclear power plants. His sum-total knowledge of RF tech seems to be CB and Cellular and he sees the latter as a developement of the former. While CB radio is state of the art for the 1930s (low power AM on HF frequencies), it does illustrate what total deregulation can do. That spectrum is pretty much a waste now since anyone can say and do anything on it - and they pretty much do - you can't really use CB for any kind of reliable communications or anything else except maybe getting business for truckstop whorehouses. And I *really* want 100s of TV stations on random frequencies - NOT!
We're still using 100 year old technology to receive radio broadcasts, and it's the major reason why the bandwidth is so underutilized. Nowadays, we can fit very complex receivers on tiny chips, as illustrated by cellphones, so why do we continue to use frequency division as the basis for allocating spectrum?
:P
If we move to code division, the need for regulation of the spectrum almost disappears entirely. It's too bad no one thought of this before deciding on the OTA HDTV standard.
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Deregulate IPs: That way we can be more inventive with our technology rather than having someone give us permission to be on the net.
Deregulate Domain Names: Think of the expansion of the internet if we all could use www.slashdot.com!
How about the airways: why regulate who can fly where and when?
Honestly I can see some leniency but the regulations occur because we have to think about collisions. Dont come crying to me when you cant make a 911 call because a guy 2 blocks away is streaming his music to his IPod.
Just because we have 80% space free doesnt mean we need to pack it with other stuff. For you server admins out there, who among you don't follow the 80/20 rule? 80 percent of the resources 20% of the time.
This article is a good example of someone who needs a little more insite into how the world of technology works.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
how about we get rid of radio, tv, and hdtv and use the entire spectrum as one massive digital transmission network? surely if we had the entire network free we could have tons of bandwidth per person, sufficient enough for broadcasters to transmit their shows over the internet, for voice, videophone, and whatever else we can think of?
how about we build a nationwide 100% coverage network of towers for this and socialize its maintenance as a birthright for all americans? surely as the first high-speed, fully wireless, fully-connected nation there would be all sorts of developments that would stimulate a massive wave of growth not unlike what happened when the internet took off.
Back when radio was new, many companies all trying to capitalize on frequencies created all sorts of different headaches because there was no regulatory body governing behavior. Every broadcaster tried to make their own standard so to listen to their signal you had to buy their radio and create their own custom broadcast array. Every broadcaster was under no obligation to honor another's usage of another frequency. The only time it mattered to them was when it dropped their quality. Then of course none of this was cheap for the consumer either....
It was an unregulated, unmitigated disaster and hence the reason why the FRC (predicessor to the FCC) was created. They standardized radio broadcasting practices. They organized bandwidth usage so overlaping wouldn't be a problem. They made the system at least approachable.
Now we can argue if the FCC is to ridgid in their regulation but the idea of making a regulatory body for spectrum usage is a good idea.
> Does anyone really think Goliath should win in this? Isn't the need for weather-prediction pretty
> obvious now?
Well, as was demonstrated by Ham operators during the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the necessity for health and safety of managing and regulating the spectrum is essential.
Physics puts some constraints on activities, and its sad to see regulatory agencies permitting commercial interests to harm services essential to our well-being. Imagine if corporate interests had managed to seize amateur radio bands. Ponder that corporate interests would gladly sacrifice your safety to make their shareholders (who are apparently immune to disaster) a few pennies more per share.
Unfortunately, saying something like this brings out the uber-Capitalist crowd, who seem to think anybody who says "I don't actually want to sell my socks and shoes to commercial interests" is a Communist trying to destroy the American way of life.
Beyond that, this sort of thing can harm commercial interests. We run some 2.4ghz wireless hardware that's getting wiped out by 2.4ghz phones, 802.11 equipment and the like, and suspect that some clever-yet-daft jerks are pumping up the power on their equipment and drowning us out, irritating our customers, causing us to lose business and forcing us to buy new hardware to move up to a higher spectrum, which, because the laws of physics are immutable, will be more difficult to deal with in certain situations.
Just like we raised a generation that thought fresh water was an unlimited resource, and then a generation that thought oil would just magically plop out of the ground and into our gas tanks, we are now raising a generation that thinks that the radio spectrum is some unlimited resource that should just be chucked out to the highest bidder.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Broacast spectrum could be rented. TV stations should have to go back and re-rent it every year. That would shake up the broadcast industry.
The author is obviously arguing from a non technical standpoint and doesn't understand the physical limitations. Yes, in principle, a totally free air wave might cause a boom similar to the Internet. However, the problem is that there still needs to be regulations and oversight. Even thought 802.11, Bluetooth, and cordless phones share the same frequency and do so relatively successfully, there are still limits placed on their output if I'm not mistaken. No matter what kind of media access technology you're using, if someone totally overpowers the airwaves with his transmitter, you won't get your signal. For fairness sake, there has to be a limit to each user's "sphere of influence". The airwave is a shared medium and regulations ensure that everyone gets his fair share of it. Government regulations on such resources are there to ensure that the limited resource benefits the most people. While our current regulations are outdated and inefficient, it doesn't mean we should throw away the idea of regulations entirely. We should instead improve them. The FCC can assign narrower bands because current digital technology is more precise and require less bandwidth for the same amount of info. Perhaps they should allow the free trading of bands. But at some level, there has be some authority to ensure that it's not chaos out there. We've seen unregulated air waves before. Before the FCC, radio stations would hop frequencies whenever they wanted to. Listener couldn't be sure the station they had yesterday will be there again tomorrow. Let's not return to that.
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Perhaps it's time to dump the word "spectrum" as it applies to the public airwaves. The word itself implies a management philosophy that hearkens back to LC tank circuits and passive RF filters. The fact is that technology has evolved way beyond partitioning the airwaves in the frequency domain only. What with frequency-hopping, code division multiple access (CDMA), and ultra-wideband (UWB), viewing this public resource as acreage to be platted and parceled out on spectral boundaries is a tad old-fashioned.
Like I give a fuck about the broadcasters. The FCC pushed HD on to the people. The same people that own that fucking spectrum and should be the ones choosing what happens with it. Sadly the FCC has taken on more and more power to do what IT thinks best not what IS best.
The FCC was essentially asked at the behest of the broadcasters to do this through several politcings that caused the broadcasters to shoot themselves in the foot. In the 1980's land mobile (cellphones, pocket radios) wanted more spectrum and the TVs had some prime spectrum. The Broadcasters didn't want to give this up due to the interference issues they would have. So they clambored aboard a HDTV/DTV bandwagon so they could keep the spectrum (so that the consumers could have a better picture was the claim). They thought that any DTV was decades away at the time but this one guy working at DigiCypher came up with a compression algorithm that would work.
So now DTV exists, and they can find out they can put 4 SD DTV (Noter: 6 is wrong for decent quality, it should be 4) channels in the place of 1 SD Analogue channel. Now, they weren't too hot on HDTV at the time so they were keeping mum about it. The senators get wind of this and start to say then that why should they have all 6mhz of bandwidth and not a quarter that if that is what it takes to broadcast a DTV station? And the broadcasters come back and start talking about HDTV, since that would require the entire 6mhz channel. So they shot them selves in the foot with all this.
Long story short, they originally didn't want to go to DTV much less HDTV but are doing so in order to keep spectrum and interference from occuring. So they did decide to go to DTV to keep their spectrum.
As for pushing Digital TV on everyone? They did that in the 40s/50s whenever it was to standardize on the original B&W TV standard. Then later on the RCA Collor TV Standard as well so that their wouldn't be a format war. The FCC has always decided on how the TV and Radio is broadcast. This is nothing new.
As for that 20% that recieve over the air? Is that people that still recieve it over the air or that don't have cable/satelite? That is still a lot of people no matter how you look at it. And almost all of them I bet can not get cable/satelite due to location or expense.
Personally, I think they should have spent the time and money protecting us from consolidation in the media markets but that's me. I didn't have a say in it and neither did any of the rest of us.
I agree against the consolidation too, but it has nothing to do with HDTV. Of course, in a true free market that you talk about there would be no rules about station ownership.
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