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The Dirty Business of Assembling WiMAX Spectrum
go_jesse writes in to make us aware of a MarketWatch article reporting on the battles that WiMAX partners Sprint and Clearwire are fighting — sometimes with one another — to put together enough spectrum to fill in their planned WiMAX coverage map. The problem is that decades ago the FCC passed out licenses in what would become the WiMAX band to schools and non-profits nationwide. Once Sprint began knocking on their doors asking to license their spectrum — once they began seeing dollar signs in a forgotten resource — dozens, then hundreds of these organizations applied to the FCC to renew long-dormant licenses. The FCC has granted the first of these requests and Sprint has asked it to reconsider. Confusingly, Sprint's partner Clearwire has sided with the schools and non-profits. The article sheds light in one messy corner of the battle to provide a "third pipe" into US consumers' homes.
I'm tired of Slashdot discriminating against perfectly fine corporations like Sprint, AT&T, and Microsoft. Corporations are people too! They;re just trying to get the best price so they can pass the value on to the consumer.
Vote George W. Bush in 2008 to keep global warming liberals out of office!
Write in the man!
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Global warming is a bunch of hot air.
Yeah, but we're going to get screwed by the telecoms either way. May as well have them paying the schools in the meantime.
WiMAX partners Sprint and Clearwire are fighting to put together enough spectrum to fill in their planned WiMAX coverage map.
Given that they can't even fill in their cell service coverage map, I can't imagine this is going well at all.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
They ignore that all other efforts to build a massive wireless data infrastructure have failed to find sufficient customers even when they make it easy and fairly cheap.
Huh? WiMAX may be over-hyped, but when has someone ever created an effective, ubiquitous, highspeed wireless data infrastructure and then offered it cheaply? I don't know what "MetroCom" you're referring to, but I'm sure that no one has ever offered a good wireless data network anywhere I've lived. Verizon's data services are kind of passable, assuming you don't mind being stuck with Verizon's service and a proprietary wireless receiver, but they're not that great. And they have customers.
When are phased array digital radio networks going to be cheap, fast and reliable enough that "spectrum" is no longer a bottleneck? Different signals can be coded by their 3D location, which is exclusive of other signals by completely familiar physical reality, so there's no need for registration of frequencies other than that required by the signaling protocol itself.
No more treating bandwidth as a limited resource. Other implications are the FCC losing most of its legitimate role, except maybe just to test and regulate health effects of the radiation - and maybe the locations of ugly transceivers. Since the expense of owning and operating a transceiver would drop, the industry wouldn't be in the hands of just the big telcos, which all have mutual interests that are at odds with those of most consumers.
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make install -not war
WiFi has shown that the world doesn't end when there's a region of spectrum that anybody can use; modern electronics is smart enough to co-exist, and when there is interferences (Bluetooth vs. WiFi), manufacturers get together and work it out.
So, just open up a bunch of bands under similar terms to WiFi. If Sprint wants to deploy WiMax there, great. If other people want to use it for baby monitors, that's great too.
What companies are really after is for the government to hand them a monopoly and to make it difficult for their competitors to enter the market, and that we shouldn't happen.
So, FCC, take away the bands from the spectrum-hoarding institutions, but don't give them to other companies, just open them up.
There are schools in very sparsely populated areas that still use this. Primarily they use it for tele-teaching types of things where the student sits in front of a TV while the teacher on the TV is giving a lesson to the entire district or even state. It should not just be taken away from them. These places often have no other way to do something like this. They have been investing into this infrastructure for decades. If the spectrum is taken away from them, then they should be paid so that they can create other forms of distance learning. Verizon doesn't want to pay for this, but they just can't wait for when the same schools will pay them for the services that they will provide over that spectrum later.
...But what you've just said proves that you didn't even bother to read three sentences into the article summary on Slashdot. You only read the headline and jumped to your own conclusion.
First, here's what you missed from the article summary:
Once Sprint began knocking on their doors asking to license their spectrum -- once they began seeing dollar signs in a forgotten resource -- dozens, then hundreds of these organizations applied to the FCC to renew long-dormant licenses.
The article itself goes on to explain further how these school districts never used this wireless spectrum, how some didn't even know they owned it, until Verizon came knocking at their door. Only after Verizon came asking for rights to the spectrum did the schools and non-profits step up and try to renew licenses that they already let expire.
On the one hand, these businesses are playing dirty pool and are only stopping Verizon's development of that wireless spectrum because of the money. On the other hand, that slice of the wireless spectrum (2.5 GHz band) was specifically reserved for school & non-profit use, and was never meant to be utilized for commercial development.
My personal opinion: let Verizon have it. Verizon's attempting to buy out a slice of the spectrum to develop a privately-owned wireless network. While they expect everyone to buy Verizon equipment to exclusively operate on that frequency, chances are the market will prefer public-access frequencies that are more widely available and cheaper. Let them waste their money.
Instead of using the GSM 900/1800 the US has gone for 850/1900. This has no technical merit since 900/1800 is more effective because they are allowing for a simpler antenna design than 850/1900.
I don't know if there is a yearly fee to pay for an assigned frequency or not, but if someone pays for a frequency and don't use it that's just stupid from an economic point of view. If no yearly fee is required that is effectively creating a waste of resources situation.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.