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700 MHz Auction Begins Tomorrow
necro81 writes "On Thursday, after much speculation and wrangling, the FCC will begin auctioning licenses to the coveted 700 MHz band that will be vacated by analog TV in 2009. The NY Times has a good summary of the players (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Google, et al.), how the auction will work, how Google has already scored an open networks victory, and what it could all mean for consumers. The auction will go on for several months, but you can keep tabs on the bids at this FCC site."
I know the article says that their main goal was to make sure that whoever does get the license keeps the airwaves open to a "wider range of hardware", but I really don't see any reason why Google couldn't get serious and really try to bid for some air space.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
A major telco, or a coalition of the major telcos, will go deep into dept to bid an extremely high price that no one can match, then win, then use their effective monopoly to continue the USA's crappy position in telecommunication quality, and thereby charge high enough prices to pay back the debt from their bid.
:-P
I want to be wrong, but I want credit if I'm right.
I hope Google can get enough money to outbid. Maybe sell "Gbonds" so they can pay absurdly low yields on borrowed money
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Let big business pay for the privilege of using our spectrum. This is a good way to raise revenue without raising taxes. I would argue that we don't charge enough for spectrum. It's our most renewable resource.
This isn't the ANWR drilling we are talking about dude. What do you want, lowest bidder? Seriously, you are king of the world...how would you handle this?
What exactly did you lose?
THL phish sticks
The government builds a highway, and then opens a rest area. They sell restaurant/gas/convenience store space to the highest bidder. Then the company that leases the space charges more for a Big Mac or a gallon of gas than in the city. Everybody's a winner - except the consumer.
They should take that spectrum, and award it based on the public good that will come of it. How low a price will you charge for the services you provide for that spectrum... not how much can we, the government, make off of it.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Don't pin your hopes for lower-cost, widely available internet access on this auction.
In the current political/business climate in the U.S. the chances that nothing good for the consumer will come from this auction are excellent.
It's not just about the auction itself. Imagine for a moment a telco doesn't win the spectrum. The telcos still have the experience and access to the senate and congress to write regulations that increase the cost of doing business with the spectrum. Recent history is filled with examples.
-VOIP regulations, patent litigation parties
-Limited consumer access to bandwidth.
-Limited throughput.
-NSA shenanigans. The get out of jail free cards have already been issued.
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Or you could just leave it unregulated, and give the spectrum to whoever wins the war to have the most powerful transmitter.
I'd love to see this actually tried for once. With todays technology, power isn't the only way to get past noise.
This isn't the ANWR drilling we are talking about dude. What do you want, lowest bidder? Seriously, you are king of the world...how would you handle this?
DHSS. Use the same technology in our wireless cards. Make this a truely public spectrum. There's always a technological solution to a government problem. Why sell what we can use for free?
It could be given out to, in the case of broadcasters, to strictly locally owners assuring a decentralised media that is not controlled by large corporations. Remember the FCCs ownership rules? They prevented a company from owning more than a handful of radio stations and more than one or two stations in a particular market, assuring a broad diversity of sources of information, news,etc. Now the FCC has pretty much gutted these rules, and a few large corporations now control most radio outlets (clear channel), tv outlets, and now broadcasters will be allowed to own newspapers as well, furthering the consolidation. Allegedly we have free speech, but the means to free expression is increasingly being controlled by a few large corporations who, due to their rapidly expanding power and how they own government and seem to be above the law, the laws are made for them and government is a puppet that they own.
There was a push to get low power FM passed through, which would not have interfered with larger stations and which would have been required to be licenced to only small locally owners, but was opposed by corporations, on a complete lie that it would interfere with their large high power stations, which is a lie since the lpfm licences would require an engineering study to assure they didnt. The corporations just didnt want people freely expressing themselves and are hell bent on controlling all forms of communication.
I remember setting up a TV with the ol' rabbit ears and tin foil and it worked for "free" no problems.
It was still private. 60 or so years ago when television first appeared, the spectrum was licensed to various TV stations (though with some restrictions on that license of course). It "belonged" to them in the same sense as the spectrum will "belong" to whoever wins the auctions. The fact that broadcast TV is "free as in beer" to you doesn't mean it was "public" in the sense that you're talking about.
but it's there also a law about government not taking what's yours without compensation?
Hmm.. that's kind of a strange distinction. "The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy. I'm not sure what you're really driving at here.. who's the "you" in this sentence, and why isn't "the you" represented by "the government"?
AccountKiller
(I'm Canadian, so this doesn't affect me beyond the influence factor, but I'm curious none-the-less.)
Where does the money go? The FCC will raise the money, but where does that substantial bankroll go? Does it just roll into the federal budget to be dished out as the government sees fit with the rest of the money or is it earmarked for a specific use (debt repayment, for example)?
(And, heck, with the Canadian government about to do a similar auction, if anyone has the answer in regards to Canada, feel free to share it as well.)
The radio spectrum is NOT public. Even the citizen's band has transmitting power limits (4w for AM and 12w for SSB)[reference], and amateur radio bands are the same way.
Think of it this way. Public forests being sold so that oil can be drilled wrecks those forests, right? The oil isn't there anymore afterwards and all the pollution from the oil drilling and construction processes damages the land so that it is no longer as valuable. Unused spectrum meanwhile is completely empty until someone is permitted to transmit on it. Then it is occupied. After the permission to transmit expires or the spectrum segment is no longer used, it's still there and just as good. It's available to be used again.
Above all, what would you do with it and, in all fairness, how do you know your purpose is more noble or better for the common good than what the big businesses have come up with?
That's all well and good and you won't find too many people on my side of the fence that disagree with that concept.
What bothers me is that outfits like AT&T and Verizon that already own large swaths of the cellular (850mhz) band are going to be allowed to gobble up large swaths of the 700mhz band. Nobody has asked them to justify why they need this much spectrum. One would think that with the pending shutdown of AMPS that they'd have lots of free spectrum in 850mhz to do whatever they'd like with.
Why the hell are we allowing AT&T and Verizon to further cement their stranglehold on the wireless industry in the United States? If you believe that the airwaves should be used for the public benefit then you should want to see a more competitive market for wireless services emerge. This isn't going to happen as long as we allow two large companies (combined with two smaller ones) to completely dominate an industry. We should be taking steps to bring more companies into this market, not further cementing the position of the existing ones.
What would I do differently? At the very least I would require a justification of the existing use of the spectrum that they have and detailed roll-out plans. I'd also exclude AT&T and Verizon from the 700mhz band in any market where they already have cellular (850mhz) licenses. Let the carriers stuck with the poorer-performing PCS (1900mhz) band have the first shot at this valuable space. I'd also mandate stricter rules on what they can do with these bands, including a full adoption of carterfone rules and the elimination of their practice of locking people up into long term contracts with hefty termination fees.
Did you know that in some markets AT&T owns more then 50% of the available wireless (cellular, PCS and AWS) licenses? If you combine them with Verizon in those markets the two manage to own 75-80% of the available spectrum. What's wrong with that picture? AT&T previously justified by it by saying they needed to run three (AMPS/TDMA/GSM) networks. What's the excuse now?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I use several wireless microphones that operate in the UHF 66 to 69 range, high 700 Mhz to low 800s. Is that part of the spectrum that's going to be "vacated" next year? Any other audio guys who know more about the impact, what gear I should be buying to replace the old stuff?