FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap

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?'"

Comments

Spectrum auction

[Scutter]

Isn't that why our government just auctioned off billions of dollars of our publicly-owned spectrum? So that companies could sell it back to us in the form of a three-year contract?

Dynamic frequency negotiation

[six11]

I'm no radio engineer, but it is my understanding that there's been a bit of work on dynamic frequency negotiation that allow devices to find frequencies that are and aren't being used (or what levels of noise there are). I've just started looking into Software defined radio and the more esoteric (and horribly-named IMO) Cognitive radio that theoretically provides the (artificial) intelligence to perform such negotiation. The theory is that this approach makes more efficient use of the same spectrum while improving communication for those devices because their I/O is very flexible. And, the devices are hackable in software, which is fun for the whole family.

If there are any radio people in the room, speak up.

Re:The FCC is at fault

[vux984]

Get rid of the public airwaves and work on letting the market come up with standards -- frequency hopping software radios, hive networks, whatever. It'll be more efficient, cheaper, and it'll provide for much more competition.

er... this is where cellphones are already heading. hell... they are already there.

Today, we still are wasting a significant portion of bandwidth on broadcasting when the future is point to point communications along with some form of P2P crowdcasting.

crowdcasting/p2p is going to evolve significantly. We are already near the cusp i think, given how much traffic is already p2p. Sooner or later p2p is going to be metered and restricted and paid for. As soon as that happens crowdcasting is dead in the water. It only works as long as everyone has 'unlimited bandwidth' right now the market is working out that 'we have a lot, but its not unlimited, but we won't meter it yet because we have enough that most people don't need to know its not unlimited and unlimited is easier to sell... so we'll just deal with the blowback when the very small number people run us into the limits.

Let something like 'crowdcasting video' catch on to the point that it can replace 'broadcast tv', where everyone anywhere watching a TV show is simultaneously p2p serving it back on to the network... at the point the jig is up; and the bandwidth meters will go up.

Re:It's 1996 again?

[Nikker]

Don't worry about the physical bandwidth as it will open the door to more ideas like distributed caching and broadcasting single packets among multiple devices. Then again the more people cry about the sky falling the more incentive there is to impliment ideas like this for way too much money to satisfy egos. Wireless is really the way to go for the end consumer and if it does really get that big then cell carriers will devote their towers into the mix(for a price of course). Remember it's not all the bandwidth that's being eaten up it's just this particular portion as demand goes up so eventually will the supply, we will just come up with more effective and clever ways of doing it.

Are Silos The Problem?

[Bob9113]

"'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?'"

Is the problem all the silos? 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.

We'd be left with the "how can we profit on this" problem and the "how can the FBI spy on this" problem, but those don't seem nearly as important as the "how can we make information access ubiquitous and fast" problem.

Re:Are Silos The Problem?

[Bob9113]

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.

Good info

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

If you could solve the first point above, would that be a problem if open hotspots (or something similar) were ubiquitous?

You'd still need long distance for low population areas, but there isn't a spectrum crunch out there. The spectrum crunch is where population density is high -- which is where large numbers of land-line connected wireless repeaters of some sort seem to be able to solve the problem.

Admittedly, this is way outside of any kind of existing feasible business model -- but peculiar new problems seem like a decent place for peculiar new solutions.

I am genuinely curious what you think -- I think it would serve us all well if we could figure out a workable solution.

Re:Over Hyped

[nxtw]

I know radio is more complicated than that but if it worked and does work for cable ISPs then why can't it work for cell companies as well?

Cable companies:

• have almost 1 GHz of bandwidth, although much of it is used for TV. Wireless providers have much less; in some markets, some providers might only have 10 MHz.
• have control of the coax/fiber on their network. If there's a problem that results in increased transmission errors, they can fix it. Mobile providers don't control the space between the base station and the mobile device, and can't tear down obstructions to the signal.
• don't really have to deal with variable signal quality, like mobile devices do. When a mobile device's signal quality drops, error correction must be increased and/or the raw data rate must be decreased.
• don't need to introduce additional latency to better handle errors, and don't need to retransmit dropped frames/packets as often.
• can allocate more channels to data if necessary, especially as analog channels are eliminated and digital channels are moved to SDV.
• can split a node so that fewer customers use the same shared channel(s), and can do so as many times as needed. Cellular providers can't build towers whenever they want.
• can use the same channels on separate nodes with no effect between them. Adjacent cells on (W)CDMA-based networks can share a channel - but this increases the total noise, and will not result in the full bandwidth being available from all given cells. (It also results in reduced power levels, which means poorer service in areas with poor signal strength.)
• don't have to deal with handoffs at all - a DOCSIS modem stays plugged in to the same line, and doesn't physically move to another location. Cellular networks support handoffs, and customers get upset when handoffs do not work.

DOCSIS provides 38 mbit shared downstream iny 6 MHz. In optimal conditions, current HSDPA tech provides up to 14.4 mbit shared downstream using 5 MHz, and real world results will frequently be less than that.

Re:It's 1996 again?

[coolsnowmen]

You could use microeletric gyroscopes to detemine orientation, and (in real time) use phased array antennas to only broadcast at the the closest tower.