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Google et al. Want 700 MHz Auction Opened Up
The 700 MHz spectrum could give birth to the much-anticipated third pipe, but phone and cable lobbyists are currently pressuring the FCC to sell companies like AT&T and Verizon our airwaves — in a flawed auction process — so they can hoard this valuable spectrum and stifle competitive alternatives to their networks. Google and other would-be providers are not taking it lying down. They want the FCC to mandate that whoever wins the auction be required to sell access to those airwaves, at wholesale prices, to anyone wanting to provide broadband Internet service. They also want anonymous auctions to prevent the giant incumbents from manipulating the results against small players (as they have done in the past).
What is this third pipe? What are the other two?
Google has enough money to compete in these auctions. Why wouldn't they simply outbid the competitors and sell the space themselves?
that money can buy.
No matter who wins this fight, we all lose.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
What is this third pipe? What are the other two?
Cable and DSL. Most people have given up on fiber to the home along with DSL, so there is really only one broadband provider in the US and it's intentionally crippled by M$ and the MAFIAA.
I know, you wanted to hear about tubes or something. Jokes about tubes come through the interntet, it's like a clammor of thoughts that bounce back and forth in a public space. Not everyone wants it that way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
To wallpaper Congress with Benjamins, because that's what it's going to take to put this over, and we really need it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The users should rent it from the government that is enforcing their property rights over this natural resource.
This is a principle called "economic rent".
Milton Friedman has declared such taxation the "least distorting" kind of tax.
The way to set the rental agreement is to determine the liquidation value of the "land", and then charge a rent on it equal to the interest rate on short term US treasury instruments.
As with any rental agreement there would be other terms but the basic idea is that such resources enjoy liquidation value changes that are primarily a result of the economic environment -- meaning economic externalities drive the liquidation value -- and allocation of externalities is a social function.
Seastead this.
Why not just leave the spectrum completely open to the public like 900MHz and 2.4GHz? Although, require that the spectrum must use intelligent radio devices that comply to a single standard (through IEEE for example).
Why wouldn't [Google] simply outbid the competitors and sell the space themselves?
The "competitors" can collude and form a much larger bidder than anyone else. They drive the price up where real competition advances but leave prices low for themselves elsewhere. If bidding is anonymous, it will be harder for people to collude and everyone will have to pay what they think the airwaves are worth.
There are still problems with the proposals. The first is that the incumbents won't treat their competitors fairly, even if forced by law to share. They will screw them over and pay whatever fees the government levies but then pass the costs back to you and me. The second problem is that the incumbents can overbid because they know there will be no real competition and they can charge whatever they like in the long run. These are not shortcomings of a free market, they are failures in regulations for a scarce resource which some say is not scarce afterall. It's ultimately a failure to share equitably.
How much do you really want to pay for your airwaves? I want mine free. The FCC should change it's mission to the above mentioned report and enforcing peaceful co-existence. The only problems with spectrum would be accidental disruption, which can be fixed, and willful disruption, which should be punished.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ron Paul. The right wing's answer to Ralph Nader. I sincerely hope he wins the Republican primary, because that'd make the Dems unbeatable in 2008. Even Kucinich would be a shoo-in against that weirdo.
The overprivileged adolescents who buy into libertarianism may fall for Mr. Paul's song and dance, true, but fortunately they can't vote.
This is like the 25th Google story on Slashdot this week.
Give it a break guys.
Or move them to their own shill section like the Intel stories.
No matter who wins this fight, we all lose.
No, it's possible to lower the cost of wireless by fixing the bidding process. If ATT and friends know there will be real competition, they will be less able to run the prices up. It won't be impossible but it will be harder.
A real sharing of spectrum is possible but politically unlikely. Really, we should claim the air for ourselves and no further regulation is required other than policing intentional disruption.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- establish a service rule for broadband services operating in the 700 MHz band that protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider.
- allow third-party access to spectrum owned by other companies. This "open access" plan to include wholesale access to networks would enable more competitors to offer services
- institute anonymous bidding in auctions to lessen the possibility of bid signalling and bid rigging that studies found to have taken place in prior auctions.
Also, what about open spectrum? Does it work well in practice? Would that be a better solution? (though I know it's a moot point for the upcoming auction.)Moderators. Parent needs some attention.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It's politically unlikely because of all the corruption and bribery going on by big business.
Pity, that the truth is modded down as a troll, or flamebait, redundant, whatever. It's still the truth.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The whole premise behind the FCC was that if spectrum was unregulated you would have a tragedy of the commons were everybody would pollute it so much that it would become unusable. However in practice that has turned out to be a complete and absolute lie. In the unregulated spectrum's, the more the spectrum got "polluted", the more people created technologies that could intelligently allocate, detect, shift, and route around. So now all spectrum regulation does is lock in obsolete technologies and wasteful inefficient use of the frequencies in place.
Oh yeah - those are the companies that handed over all the information concerning their subscriber's phone calls to the Bush administration without so much as a warrant to legitimize the request.
"The 700 MHz spectrum could give birth to the much-anticipated third pipe, but phone and cable lobbyists are currently pressuring the FCC to sell companies like AT&T and Verizon our airwaves -- in a flawed auction process -- so they can hoard this valuable spectrum and stifle competitive alternatives to their networks. Google and other would-be providers are not taking it lying down. They want the FCC to mandate that whoever wins the auction be required to sell access to those airwaves, at wholesale prices, to anyone wanting to provide broadband Internet service. They also want anonymous auctions to prevent the giant incumbents from manipulating the results against small players (as they have done in the past)."
Gee, that's what I like about slashdot. Fair and balanced, unlike those biased news media the public depends upon.
This and other spectrum are coming from normal broadcast allocations, so we can be forced to buy all new TV and radios, using locked in, proprietary patented codecs that reduce quality and enforce DRM, while giving us lower audio and visual quality. The only question here is who has ALREADY papered congress with bucks to cause us to overload our landfills and make the other countries who make consumer gear (virtually none is made here anymore) rich. The FCC is a bit player doing what congress has ordered them to do. This is total evil. Am I supposed to throw away my collection of vintage audio gear because there will be no analog signals for the radios to pick up anymore? Did anyone consider the financial costs to us all? We're talking serious wasted money yere, and further pirating of our culture by the **AA guys. Yes, they are the pirates. Try to get a recording that's out of print from them, then ask them for permission to make a copy of a friends. I think you know the answer you'll get. One guy who worked here did a computer jukebox (with nice taste and key/timing matching at the segs) and tried to find a way for the AA to let people put their own music on it. Answer? Not at any price unless it's limited to the playlist of things currently in print that we want to sell. Pirates as a word has been going in the wrong direction for far too long. I want my 1953 Berlin philharmonic playing Motzart. Just try that legally.
The FCC has intentionally let the market collapse to a false competition between a local cable company and a local phone company. Very few phone companies have come through with their promisses so Cable is really the only option most people may have. Cable everywhere has blocked ports and intentionally low upload speeds. The US 16th in the network world and falling fast.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There's also a huge problem that the entertainment industry is having with all of this auctioning of RF. Wireless mics operate on these bands. It's already hard enough to organize hundreds of wireless mics on the spectrum by not running into existing tv channels, other mics, creating intermod and etc... And now with even LESS spectrum don't expect the superbowl, grammys, presidential rallies, fundraisers, churches, plays, concerts and other functions to have wireless mics. We need a spot for comsumer devices, a spot for common commercial use and a spot for industrial use but keep the reigns open besides that.
Yeah, I've been trying to get my wife to go for that for a while, but she's afraid of getting Santorum all over the place.
The users should rent it from the government that is enforcing their property rights over this natural resource.
Others have argued there is no scarcity of the resource you are talking about, so no regulation is required. Taxing unlimited resources is socially harmful. In this case, the only purpose of the tax is to "protect" incumbents and their revenue stream. The cost to the rest of us for that revenue stream is the majority of your monthly telco bill, and a proportion of all the goods and services you purchase. The cost of that protection is monopolies which maximize your cost and minimize your service. This is why the US is falling behind the rest of the world in network service.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Overheard at the meeting of The InterNet Cabal (TINC).
Ok, here's the plan:
Comcast, make sure all your bids end in "1" followed by 0's.
ATT, you bid ending in "2" plus 0's.
Time-Warner, you get "3."
If you see a bid ending in 4-9, it's not one of us.
Bwuhahahahaha.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Ron Paul. The right wing's answer to Ralph Nader.
The only comparison I can think of between Ron Paul and Ralph Nader is that both guys have a very strange quality of thinking truth is more important than perception.
You may be surprised at how many of those "kids" you're writing off will eventually end up registering and voting . Take comfort that he won't make it past the primaries, because people will go for a much slicker, polished candidate.
Did anyone else read the title and think Google were buying a load of old P3's?
No, just me? Aw, zing.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
I know it's Slashdot, where big companies are always wrong (unless it's Google), but could we please tone down the bias in the article summary? Wow.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Where I live in North Carolina, people flew like droves to DSL due to it being cheaper than Time Warner's cable offering, but after a few months, the service kept dropping, sometimes for days. Every time anyone called in to complain, they would be told that if they had to come into your house (which they almost always tried to do) you would be charged $45 unless you agreed to pay for DSL Insurance.
Whether it was true or not, all my neighbors started thinking scam and switched to Time Warner's cable internet.
Firstly this just demonstrates that the public airwaves are not 'public' at all. They merely belong to the corporations who are the biggest campaign contributors. I love how people who use airwaves without FCC approval are pirates and criminals - but if give to the right politicians and fix the auction then you are legit. Its amazing that if you bilk the customer because either you can get away with ignoring anti trust laws because your Verizon or AT&T then it's ok. Steal a CD and you go to jail.
Secondly this story is another example of the lack of competition in cell phone service and wireless data service. There is enough spectrum for at least 8 national companies. Yet there really are only 3 or 4 depending on how you count them. This I bet is why service is still absurdly expensive. Thirdly, I dream of the re-division of the airwaves. Its a quite a mess. Of course the changeover period may be difficult - but it would be doable. Finally I don't see why CBS, FOX, ABC and NBC should get them for free when so much of what they do is hardly serving the public. They get to refuse ads they don't like. They dont have to justify what they put on the air much. Why not give them for free for 20 years to others and see if they do better?
It seems like the Goog is actually being more active in adopting smart new technologies and delivering them to the common geek than any other company out there. They build them and they buy them. They give them to us, without strings. Oh, and their search engine rocks.
What you don't read about here is Google entering into obscure secret deals to leverage their IP and jointly market their extortionate plans. Slashdot likes Google. Get over it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
*Uh...No...They want it for themselves...They don't mean opened to the public. They want to own it. And rent it out at prices only AT&T can afford.*
Hey!
What?
About bylaws was at the same [gay-sex-access.com]? cuntwipes Jordan Said one FreeBSD stagnant. As Linux Briiliant plan please m0derate to this. For A change to is ingesting Problems with (7000+1400+700)*4 of HIV and other the same operation said. 'Screaming Romeo and Juliet leaving the play There's no declined in market working on various or make loud noises how it was supposed God, let's fucking it transforms into The public eye: Say I'm packing deeper into the Antibacterial soap. Filed countersuit, And was taken over has ground to a shall we? OK! very distracting to decentralized Kill myself like sure that by the and financial survive at all a conscious stand deliver. Some of Give BSD credit
You sound like the people I used to work for...academic admin's
You can't compare the national spectrum needs to the 2.4 Ghz market. All it takes is some idiot down the street with a device/antenna that uses the whole 2.4 Ghz spectrum to ruin your connection (wireless CATV adapter, etc.). Just because it works in your house...doesn't mean it will work on a large scale.
I worked on a college campus and nobody could understand that you couldn't just "throw" up a bunch of AP's from Best Buy and have it work with no problems (enterprise controller needed). I'm not saying the FCC is a well oiled machine, but the spectrum must be treated like land. Here is you piece of the pie...if you don't like it...too bad.
See this post down below to see that the other two bands are phone and cable.
OUTGROW liberty? You're kidding me, right?
I grew up an average liberal, I discovered socialism. And yes, I outgrew it. I'm not libertarian, at some point I've endorsed right-wing issues, but generally I'm not slightly left-leaning.
What's there to outgrow with liberty? Liberty is what you begin to understand once you see all the bullshit in mainstream politics, whyever you would consider that mainstream grown-up or anything. It's sandbox games all over.
is considered the future of spectrum licensing and both the IEEE and FCC agree on this. It was discovered some time ago that spectrum usage varies in both space and time and is often wasted. Even in a metropolitan area many bands are unused up to 85% of the time. With the advent of software define radio (such as the popular GNU Radio) it is now possible for a wireless device to "sense" bands of little spectrum activity and adjust internal parameters (i.e. modulation type, channel coding, Nyquist pulse shape, etc.) and adaptively maximize bandwidth utilization, at least in theory. The engineering is difficult and considered to be the holy grail of communications by many.
e grated.pdf
What this means, in a nutshell, is that in the future it will be possible to completely open up the spectrum and charge commercial users in a pay-by-usage model, like the internet. Once the problems with cognitive radio were solved, this would require a simple licensing scheme (think unique FCC identifier in the packet header) and new layer 2-1 protocols.
If you're interested, more info can be found at:
(IEEE info center) www.ieeep1900.org/crinfo
(FCC workshop) www.fcc.gov/oet/cognitiveradio/
For a more technical discussion, refer to Mitola's PhD thesis:
www.it.kth.se/~jmitola/Mitola_Dissertation8_Int
It could be made into a public licensed radio band for public use with a specific grid networking transmission standard providing a grid (mesh netowrk) at high speed, but restrict all users to a fractional maximum legal capped bit rate for all users of say 1 megabits sec. While the radio equipment would provide grid mesh wireless at high data rates, the nature of the usage would be a cooperative bandwidth sharing system providing fractional bandwidth.
Of course a public (free RF band area) cooperative grid bandwidth as a public use scheme probably will not find corporate support nor government support (privatize - ie private organizations are to own all public commons)...
If Google really wants equanimity and not just a powerful empire of its own, it would champion a public system of equanimity (ie a legally imposed QOS limited public mesh network)
SimBuddha
I read somewhere that radio stations simply used the courts to solve issues before the FCC, there were many small cases going on unknown to the public, but it was generally working. However, the FCC seemed an easy case to sell to the public to get a lot of extra income, or even, manipulation of the content on the air waves. I guess these are also arguments why the internet should be completely unregulated.
Your argument is assuming there are no property rights. If there is a small station and someone opens up a big station and drowns out the other station then they are violating the smaller stations property rights because they were not there first. The FCC has been even worse than the big station in this case and has got away with the biggest theft and taken all the property rights in the spectrum away.
Another View of the FCC and Spectrum Scarcity http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/ 11/1728259
Sell it but on a use it or lose it basis, so if verison want to buy the spectrum so that competitors cannot use it, they will have to broadcast something permanently on the frequency.
One question I keep on asking myself is, why do we have lobbyist? Shouldn't it be illegal to have special groups (i.e. corporations) push special agendas? Shouldn't it also be illegal for law makers to vote on specific issues after they have received donations from various lobbyist.
Wouldn't the large corp.s collude in the background, and then that single anonymous bidder would have enough money to win the bid? I've read several articles on the Indianapolis ready-mix concrete market. Every concrete supplier had meetings in a "party barn" to discuss price fixing. These are supposed to be competing suppliers, but they learned that if they work together, the make more money. Collusion at its best.
If I were Verizon, I would want to make absolutely certain that I had a piece of this new spectrum, and to do that, I would collude with someone like AT&T, and combine our money in a joint venture called ExampleCom, Inc. ExampleCom would then have more than enough money to submit a single bid anonymously to win the entire spectrum up for auction. Then, ExampleCom would make lots of money deciding exactly which frequencies get the most bang for the buck, and well, sell the shitty bands to Verizon and AT&T's small competitors, keeping the cream of the crop for their principal investors.
How would anonymous bidding stifle collusion? It seems as though it makes it easier.
Spending Resources on Defense leaves Less to defend.
Posting from the bathroom on your laptop causes interesting spelling problems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Honestly, the only time consumers should be concerned about bandwidth is for massive downloads or VoIP. I've had VoIP for 3 years and it has more than adequately replaced my land line at half the cost. Massive downloads are better done via torrents, which download off hours anyway. Based on my cell phone experience, I can't imagine wireless for home service is an upgrade from any of this!!
As technology improves, you can do more with less, but no amount of technology is going to make a limited resource like spectrum, infinite.
No amount of wishful thinking is going to save the incumbent telcos. As hundreds of people easily share a single radio frequency in public places every day, spectrum is practically infinite. If allocated properly, there's enough for every person to broadcast video. The old spectrum allocation is wasteful and every day it lasts robs the public. A radical overhall is in order and those fighting it are evilvipers such as yourself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We want the airwaves baby.
That's right. That's right.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
This doesnt sound good. Ever used a 900mhz phone? They're hardly ever used anymore because the sound quality sucks. I can't imagine using 700mhz for broadband. Perhaps for small load applications like sensors talking to a master system in a plant or something, but not for wifi.
So, another swath of usable bandwidth, line of sight, no skip or ducting issues is given, er, sold to companies who have been trying to regain monopoly status....hobble wifi, kill Skype, etc....
Compare mobile phones in europe to here....a better deal there.
After the usual collusive bidding process, we will be charged through the nose for whatever service comes of it, and it will be only one way...the "internet" abberation has to be stifled.
The best analogy is the railroads in the Midwest before the highway system was built. Local Granges were quite incensed at what they properly saw as a huge middleman markup to get the goods to the city, much more than any actual costs plus a fair profit. The same deal applies here. If we can't kill the internet or DRM it to death, we can at least regulate the content by cost.
History repeats itself.
The guy with the most watts is certainly a likely winner. There are other classes of possible winner who might even beat out the man with the monster transmitter.. For example, the service with the greatest tolerance for interference. I don't know what has happened recently with RF-lighting technology in the 2.4GHz segment, but it seems likely to me that this is a user who is essentially immune from any (realistic) sort of interference. Without regulation, what, other than cost/usability issues in the technology, could prevent it from driving most everyone else from the band?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The 3G auction in the UK went well. http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/klemperer/biggestse pt.pdf [pdf] has the details. It was important (apparently) that there were more licenses available than incumbent "big-players".
It is mentioned in "The Undercover Economist".