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FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap

Posted by timothy on from the congress-from-whom-all-blessings-flow dept.

locallyunscene writes "'We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month,' FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. 'So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?'"

3 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's 1996 again? by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Informative

    >>>Once the air is saturated on the allocated frequencies, we are done

    Not quite "done". We can say goodbye to over-the-air FM and TV. We already lost channels 52 to 83 that were turned-over to cellphones, and I suspect it's only a matter of time until channels 2 to 51 (including the FM band) disappear. That would not meet the FCC's "30 fold" estimate, but it would increase the available wireless spectrum by about 9 times present levels.

    Lower frequency shortwave and AM radio will probably survive, simply because it's not practical to carry-around 100 foot long transmitting antennas with your phone.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Re:Are Silos The Problem? by nxtw · · Score: 4, Informative

    Suppose every house with a land-line connection also had a wi-fi hub that was open. I think the bandwidth problem would not exist.

    802.11 based systems aren't good at many things that existing cellular systems are. It doesn't have soft handoffs and doesn't work well when the same network has adjacent cells using the same channel. For 2.4 GHz 802.11, there are only 3 non-overlapping channels.

    802.11 can't support devices at the same distances / similar power as modern cellular networks.

  3. Re:It's 1996 again? by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

    No DSL is *not* over telephone lines. POTS (plain old telephone service) is defined as having a 0 to 8000 hertz bandwidth, hence the 56k dialup limit. The engineers have squeezed as much data as they can into that limited range.

    DSL disconnects the POTS line, and replaces it with a central box (DSLAM) that converts the incoming twisted-pair and passes it along to higher-quality fiber or coax.

    BTW thanks for modding me "troll" kevinmenzel.
    -1 I disagree is not why moderation exists.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall