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.

Comments

Phased Arrays

[Doc Ruby]

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.

just open it up!

[m2943]

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.

rural schools do use this spectrum

[mzs]

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.