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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!
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.
There is really only one broadband provider in the US and it's intentionally crippled by M$ and the MAFIAA.
O_O
Honestly if you can prove to me that this sentence is making even some limited amount of sense, I'll give ya a hundred bucks immediately.
People have given up on DSL?
It's been way more reliable for me than my neighbors' cable internet. Sure, their highest burst download speeds are better than my paltry 3 meg connection, but I have that 3 meg connection with very little variation day and night. Their cable connection slows down noticeably after school and in the evenings--when most of us are using the net. Our DSL does not slow in any detectable way.
Cable still has a stronghold here (semi-rural Kansas) due to the number of people out of reach of the DSL service area, but still within cable service.
I just don't see DSL as dead, or even threatened. Not around here, anyway.
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.
Don't you guys have MANs? They're pretty popular here in Beijing, and provide pretty good performance too, certainly good value (99rmb/month). The ones I've used have been 10BaseT ethernet connections.
Max.
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 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.
I understand, thanks for explaining your support. Shaking things up in government is something we can probably all agree on.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
I recently heard the suggestion that one should evaluate candidate's positions not on what they say they will do, or are likely to try to do, but on what they actually *could* do if elected. Examined in this light, Paul looks a lot more appealing. And I definitely want someone with more respect for the constitution.
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.
I signed up for DSL, they said from my location I could get a 'whopping' 1 Mbit connection with 256k up for $39/mo- after getting hooked up and paying some $60 for the modem, I found the connection was bombing about every 5 minutes due to excessive errors. They dropped my rate to 512k down, 256k up and kept my fee the same, how thoughtful. After my IP phone ate all my bandwidth for work-related calls and brought my work-related SSH connections to a crawl such that I couldn't do both (eg, couldn't do my job) I switched to cable. I'm not outside the city limits, and in fact I'm on a large residential street right next door to a school. Aside from a bunch of 'planned' maintenance that they can never tell me about and a summer of highly intermittant connectivity (SNRs would decrease during the heat of day and drop for hours at a time and come back in the evening) that took 12 trips to resolve with their usual 1-2 weeks between each visit where they'd come and the connection would of course be working when they came and about 12 minutes after they left would shut down... anyway, ever since it has been incredibly reliable and they've even increased my speed for $3 / month. I used to get about 600kbytes/s down and 30kbytes/s up, now closer to 1MB/s down and 60kb/s up. Although I'm reasonably happy with it, the 'planned' outages always get me since I often work through the night. I asked a year ago how to find out about them and they had an email list they were working on setting up... I gave them my address, never heard a peep.. asked the other day and they're working on a website that will list these... i'll believe it when I see it. If I could get reliable / fast dsl for the same price as my cable internet (~$45/mo + tax/fees, own my own modem) I'd switch back because it was rock solid once they knocked me down to a crawl.
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.
Im also in Kansas and have DSL, as my understanding was the cable in this town is lousy. The DSL, through SBC/AT&T has been reliable, though getting it in the first place was a serious hassle.
;)
I have the option of wireless internet, as I work for a WISP who just put up an ap about 6 blocks from my place. They offered me service but....meh, that stuff has lousy bandwidth in the 900mhz range
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
*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?
From 1998 through 2002 I had a nice very stable (4 hours of downtime TOTAL in 4 years) DSL connection in Cedar Rapids, IA through a local ISP - about half the downtime was their fault (router went bad once, another time their big pipe went down) other half was qwest outtages (storm once, servicing another time).
Between then and now I had a mixture of college-provided lan, then cable internet (mediacom) which was decent - but i just moved this last few days to a new appartment - came with internet delivered via HPNA, shared bandwidth between multiple buildings (not told of this in advance), filtered (not told of this in advanced), qos-degraded for non http/imap/smtp/pop traffic (not told of this in advance) weee. So anyway.. nasty emails to the new landlords - and a new 1.5mbit Qwest DSL connection ordered [with my own DSL modem/bridge so i can get one that is JUST A BRIDGE since I already have a 10/100 switch/wireless-g ap/NAT router and qwest only lets you rent dsl modem/routers (one w/ wireless, one w/o)].
so... dsl definantly not dead.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Likewise! I've had both cable and DSL off and on since around 2000, and much prefer DSL. It tends to be a lot cheaper and more reliable. None of the DSL connections I've had have ever appeared to just "not work" for more than a minute or two, and that only very rarely (maybe once a month or less). While cable connections seem to flake out for hours at a time, and more frequently.
Plus DSL is a lot cheaper everywhere I've lived. At my parents' home in Michigan, they can get 512 kB DSL for $15/month, and 2 MB for $25, but basic cable access would be like $30/month.
My bicyles
See this post down below to see that the other two bands are phone and cable.
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 do support on DSL circuits and cable for literally thousands of businesses with vendors all over the board and IMHO DSL is by far less reliable than cable. In addition DSL repairs can take days when most cable companies get someone out same day or next, at least with business services. Ever had to schedule a vendor meet with the DSL provider and the ILEC? You never have those types of issues with cable.
~S
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
The thing that I find a lot different between the AT&T DSL I currently use and the Cox Cable Internet I tried for a grand total of 5 days before I ditched it: latency and jitter. The unwashed masses look and see they can get 12 Mbps from Cox's "Premium" Internet service, but then when I got it the average latency to major sites was 60-150 ms with jitter of 30-70ms on top of that. Add in random 10% packet loss periods during heavy usage periods in my neighborhood and I was getting clobbered. My Vonage service would drop out completely or I'd miss parts of the conversation. With my DSL the average latency is 35-55ms with less than 5ms jitter and my Vonage service is rock solid. So, mark me down as another one who doesn't buy into Cable's high bandwidth crapfest, I'll stick with my 6 Mbps/768Kbps ADSL over the 12 Mbps/1 Mbps Cox Cable offering.
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.
I really wish we could go back to our DSL connection... But we moved a mere 6 miles in the wrong direction, and the cable company has no DSL out here. They're rolling out fiber in the city itself, but out here we have nothing but cable internet.
They tell me that the cable's top speed is higher than what our DSL had to offer before - 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps - but I have yet to see it. The connection is spotty as hell. It falls over for no good reason at least once a month, while we had DSL for over two years with no interruption in service at all.
I've also run into trouble with blocked ports. I have, on more than one occasion, attempted to connect to a home PC for various purposes...RDP, VNC, FTP, WWW...I'll generally get one or two good connections, and then the ports are blocked. I've had to repeatedly change ports...and the new ones will get blocked after a couple connections as well. I realize it's a 'home' account, not 'business', but I still think I ought to be able to occasionally connect into my home PC to grab a file I forgot.
I hope our results are atypical... I hope cable is more reliable elsewhere... But from my own experiences I can't imagine trying to run a business on a cable line. I can't imagine having to rely on the cable company for connectivity. And I genuinely regret moving out of DSL range.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
How about a spammer tidbit.
i worked for Comcast, I had their highest speed possible being an employee. DSL feels far faster for one reason.. Latency. Comcast's cable modem network has nasty latency problems.. with a 5Meg up 1 meg down package VoIP sucked and had tons of problems. I quit and changed over to DSL (Cable really is incredibly overpriced) and all my Voip problems disappeared. My latency went completely away and even though I have the cheapest DSL service I get better internet and Voip. the only thing that suffers is bittorrent and large downloads... but that is what the OC3 at work is for.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Consider yourself lucky to have that choice. A friend of mine living somewhat out in the boonies has the choice between satellite internet, or dial-up. The money is saying dial-up.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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
That is a cop-out argument and (IMO) shows you don't really understand the other point of view. For one thing, if you accept that the unborn child is a person, then the mother who aborts is the one forcing her beliefs on the unborn child. And someone out there might think you don't qualify as a human because you have the wrong genes or belief system and that therefore it wouldn't be a crime to kill you. Saying, "All belief systems are equally valid so just leave me alone" won't magically solve any of the world's problems.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.