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Does OSS Make The FCC Irrelevant?
JordanL writes "Daniel Fisher over at Forbes.com wonders whether or not OSS makes the FCC irrelevant. From the article: 'The agency might have made sense in the 1920s, Moglen says, when it was formed to assign specific frequencies to broadcasters so they wouldnt try to drown each other out by cranking up the transmitter power. But a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else.'"
Yeah right. If I go by your same logic and just for the sake of argument let us also assume that Napster was Open Source. Do you really think RIAA still wouldn't have crushed it? First Amendment my ass. Our "friendly" (and genius) lawmakers will find a loophole or make a law that First Amendment will violate. Yup the greenback has a voice, and it is fuckin' loud!
Do we have a cite for this? It sounds bogus. Moglen is smarter than that.
The FCC is still needed. There is still a finite set of bandwidth available. Technology may allow more and more things to utilize that bandwidth but there are limits. And if it is unregulated then the most powerful transmitter wins will be the way it works. This would result in areas where lower power devices would not be able to operate because someone is splattering the spectrum those devices use with their own noise.
:)
Actually it might not be bad if you could walk/drive around with a cell phone jammer. Or even better a high frequency Ham radio that can cause that rolling speaker that pulled up next to you some serious interference directly into the speakers.
Just need enough power to permanetly damage his speakers with one ear shattering squelch!
If we were a nation of boy scouts that might work, but experience in wireless band usage in the unlicensed ranges indicates this is not the case
Unlicensed wireless spectrum in Omaha, Nebraska, population 500k, is managed by a mixture of microwave design and troubleshooting, back stabbing, jamming with amateur gear, intrusions into ISP's networks, 'uncoordinated' adjustments of competitor's antennas and radios in shared facilities, lawsuits, character assassination, 'testing' of heavily amplified frequency hopping products, and occasional play on the part of aircrews on RC-135 Rivet Joints flying out of Offutt AFB.
Never in a million billion zillion years would the licensed band network operators here tolerate that sort of conduct. Eben needs to stick to software licenses and leave radio physics alone
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
What would prevent the kiddie down the street from buying a 1000 watt transmitter, radiating himself and his neighbors, overmodulating his signal and washing out half the FM radio spectrum within a nearby radius?
There is no way to mandate computer networked transmitters, or to enforce things from the transmitter side.
The fcc handles figuring out land topology, power, assignments, and a myriad other factors involved in assigning a frequency and maximum power- for the entire country's radio space over several ghz of spectrum.
What does open source really have to do with this anyway? Sure, open source could theoretically implement the system he talks about, but the post is more about the supposed irrelevance of the fcc and is using OSS as a buzzword to generate hype.
But we ain't there yet- and given my history with used radios and TVs, and the current hassle over HDTV broadcast, I'd say we're at least 40, perhaps 50 years away from this becoming nationwide reality; and at least 100 years before it becomes worldwide reality.
Do you really think so? I mean, when I bought my first computer 10 years ago, 56k was blazing fast. And wireless was unheard of (at least beyond 5 foot, PDA to PDA transmissions). Now Wireless is much more commonplace, and the bandwidth is rising rapidly. I doubt it'll take 50 years. Given the rate at which technology now moves, we could see enough bandwidth wirelessly all over major markets (read: big cities) within 15 years, and maybe 25 for it to go everywhere. Since the amount of bandwidth you need is roughly proportional to population, it's easier to cover rural areas adequately. With radio, signal strength needs to be based on terrain, since an area needs a certain amount of signal regardless of whether it is populated or not.
You need the FCC to assign certain bandwidths to certain types and standards of communication, but you no longer need the FCC to assign a specific bandwidth to a specific station, thereby limiting stations.
It would be totally possible to have some sort of digital packet broadcast system where stations need a specific frequency band, that would allow tens of thousands of radio stations in an area instead of 5 or 10. The primary purpose of the FCC regulation of radio nowadays is to maintain a limited amount of radio stations, thereby sustaining the profit model of radio. (After all, price is set by supply and demand. If you increase the supply of radio broadcasts, but the demand for radio broadcasts stays the same, the cost of advertising on radio will go down!)
"There is still a finite set of bandwidth available." Clarification: saying that there is a shortage of radio spectrum is like saying there is a shortage of colors. Both are infinite. Colors become finite only when you restrict yourself to a discrete color-space, like a box of Crayola crayons. Radio spectrum becomes finite only when you chop it into big discrete chunks, like radio stations. Reference, for example, http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/199507/msg00023.html, as well as numerous other discussions along the same lines. Radio bands are as big as they are only because early 20th century vacuum tube technology required them to be. Modern microlectronics could allow modern radio bands to be however "skinny" we like.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
...as long as they can make tons of money divvying up the frequency spectrum. For example, they're drooling over the eventual switch from analog to digital TV. The amount of cash they'll make off the range of analog TV frequencies will be huge.
This is not insightful, even though it includes the magic slashdot keywords "they" and "make money."
They FCC doesn't make money. They're a regulatory agency. They license the use of a finite natural resource, and enforce regs to make sure that someone feeling particularly "open" and "free" doesn't just crank up a huge transmitter and step all over everyone's use of the spectrum. For the heavy hitters, larger amounts of cash are involved in those licenses. For the rest of us, there's no licensing (or fee) involved.
Where do you think the licensing fees go? Would you rather that a large commercial user of the spectrum pay no fees, and that the budget is just offset by higher taxes on everyone else (even those that are not using that spectrum-user's services)? I'd much rather see people and businesses that make use of (and a living from) a finite public resource pay their own way than see all of us pay for it, whether we use it or not. User fees should offset the costs of regulating/protecting things - just like at national parks. Someone who never sets foot in a national park does still have an interest in preserving them, but most of that cash flow should still come from the people that drive their RVs through them, or need rangers to run off the bear that has them up a tree.
Likewise with spectrum. If I relied on a chunk of the airwaves to dispatch my fleet of taxis, I'd understand that there's a regulatory cost involved in keeping that assigned bit of spectrum set aside (and enforced).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
... and then there are all the analog ham radio, etc broadcasters out there who, in the absence of the FCC, would be prefectly happy cranking the power output from their transmitters in order to gain distance. The FCC is the entity that keeps these guys in check.
A few years back, we had a neighbor with a ham radio who would crank it up whenever he thought nobody was paying attention. It was strong enough to actually hear his voice coming out of the home theater audio system in our house. Did he care to respond to complaints? Not one bit until someone reported him.
Some FCC-like entity is necessary to enforce rules upon those who won't volunteer to cooperate.
Tell that to my microwave.
Clones are people two.
While the electromagnetic spectrum is in theory infinite, the physically usable spectrum is finite.
We have at most 20-24 GHz of economically usable bandwidth. For some applications (point-to-multipoint broadcast), LOS restrictions and the difficulty of generating appreciable amounts of power at higher microwave frequencies limits us to far less than that.
Honestly, the only economical transceivers I know of that work above the 5.8 GHz ISM band are specialty devices not well suited to communications. (Gunn diode and magnetron sources at 10 GHz and 24 GHz. Good for radar, not good for communications due to large amounts of noise and frequency drift.) Generating more than a few milliwatts above 5.8 GHz is HARD and expensive! To handle high power, an amplifying device (i.e. transistor) must be large, but at microwave frequencies, the device size is a more significant portion of the wavelength of the frequency to be amplified. Developing more than a watt or so at 2.4 GHz and above requires either hundreds of dollars, or specialty vacuum tubes (magnetrons as used in microwave ovens, or traveling wave tubes.) Note that magnetrons are very noisy and unstable sources that are useless for all but Morse code communications.
Anyone who things the FCC can be made obsolete in less than 50-100 years is ignorant to the realities of communications systems and RF engineering. Software defined radios are a big step forward, but they're still best considered to be an infant technology. The only SDRs that are actually in use today are by people who ABSOLUTELY need the flexibility *at any cost* (read: military applications). Broadband RF design techniques and high-speed general-purpose DSPs needed for a flexible SDR designs exist, but both broadband RF design and high-speed general-purpose DSPs are EXPENSIVE.
Even 50-100 years from now, we're going to still need the FCC to make sure that people's SDRs play nicely with each other, otherwise (as a previous poster mentioned) someone will fire up a multi-kilowatt spark gap attached to a microcontroller and call it a "smart radio".
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?