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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?'"
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?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Welcome to the real world of physics.
Wired and optical technologies will ever be superior to wireless, by the simple fact that they're essentially 1D lines running through 3D space, whereas a typical wireless signal is a 3D signal in 3D space - a single frequency gives a fixed bandwidth to a single user in a given ~volume~.
Advanced tricks allow increased sharing, but the fundamental limitations remain.
Consider the volume of a typical wifi base station .. now imagine filling that volume with OC192 cabling. As they say on the "intartoobs", "pwned".
AM and FM radio. Who listens to the radio anymore? It's either over the internet for "radio" or in the car use MP3s, iPods, or CDs for us old farts. Shortwave? Does anyone actually listen to it? I turned on a shortwave and between huge swaths of static, there was Cuba radio, Canadian News (that can be kinda cool), and a few folks praising Jesus and condemning non-believers (everyone who doesn't give them money).
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?
The same thing that always happens: The telecoms cry like babies and the consumers get less for equal or greater cost.
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.
The difference is that the internet is more scalable. We didn't run into problems back then because of increases in CPU power that allows for larger routing tables and advances in fibre that allows for more data on the same strand. This is a physical problem. There is only so much spectrum available. Once the air is saturated on the allocated frequencies, we are done. No more room, period.
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It's pretty simple, really. If the company makes money on each connection, and reinvests part of that profit, then the service network overall grows more capable. More towers, more frequencies, more bandwidth.
Assuming that the phone companies are smart enough to reinvest a portion of their profits - at my company we invest heavily in growth, and have at any time about 5x-10x capacity headroom, along with fully redundant backup schema for D/R. A few times, we've leaned on that extra infrastructure - while not cheap, it's cheap insurance.
Why would cellular networks be any different?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
> What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile
> broadband on their laptops or netbooks?
You finally admit that it isn't 1920 anymore and give up on centralized static global allocation?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Frequency#United_States_2
Doesn't look like the US military uses much of the wireless spectrum... am I missing something?
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.
Spot on. The problem with the article is that it fails to account for advances in technology. As we need more bandwidth, technology will evolve to give you more bandwidth. That in less spectrum, with higher reliability and less interference.
As you pointed out, this happened for wired connections in the past. In response, we are almost to commercial 40Gb and even 100Gb links, the latter being targeted for 40km stretches.
Shortwave? Does anyone actually listen to it?
Spies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
One man's static, is another man's coded instructions.
So you admit to listening to shortwave static and Cuba Radio? What a give-away.
I'm not sure about Canadian News, but I'm sure some charges could be trumped up for you listening to that.
As for the Jesus folks, Bibles make excellent One Time Pads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad
I think shortwave will be around for a bit, even if only spooks listen to it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If you took the entirety of the AM and FM radio space, you'd have about as much frequency space as a single wifi channel, which would be spread over a fairly large area due to the signal propagation properties. Shortwave would be even worse in that respect.
In short, it would not be very useful.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
A daisy chain type mesh setup? Oh hell no! There is no way I'm going back to setups like that. Anyone remember apple talk?
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.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
>>>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
"'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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In a congested, high user area wouldn't the telephone companies be able to turn the power down on the cell towers and then add more towers closer together? This way you can get more users in a given space, right?
I admit, I know little to nothing when it comes to radio waves, but I do know back in the 90's pre DOCSIS cable ISPs did not limit their users speed, or at least the ISP I was on. Often times the 'pipe' would fill up. The case and effect was slower bandwidth speeds for me but since it was on the ISPs end it was a high bandwidth / low latency setup aka my ping never jumped up regardless if my max speed was 500kB/s or 100kB/s.
In other words, cable ISPs added tier pricing to make more money not because there was bandwidth issues. If there was an issue with the node being over used they would just add another node aka 10 mile radio for the node now becomes a 5 mile radios for 2 or 3 nodes and then 5 miles down to ...
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?
I think GP is probably correct. When we have problems, we tend to find solutions to them. Certainly with today's approach we are going to run out of bandwidth. Perhaps tomorrow's technology will stop sending signals in every direction, but somehow negotiate direct paths over the air using directed antennae from one or both transceivers. Then the 3D space starts becoming your friend instead of your enemy.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
>>>technology will evolve to give you more bandwidth.
No. There's a limit to how much technology can do. That's why phone lines are maxed-out at 56 kbit/s - there's no more room for expansion since it's already at the physical limit. Same applies with wireless.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Which is not as bad as a few gigabytes a month. But definitely far, far worse than millions of kilobytes per month.
I'm getting about 7 Gbits from the phone line that used to be maxed out at 52k or so, and I can make voice calls on it at the same time as my downloads, something I couldn't do before.
If there's no radio in my car, what am I supposed to listen to? And before you say "iPod" I don't want to hear the same music over and over. I want to hear new stuff. Also traffic and weather reports ("warning: tornado coming") are nice to have. I like my radio and if they take away both AM and FM, then I'm going to hurt somebody. :-| At the very least leave me AM.
>>>I turned on a shortwave and between huge swaths of static,
What? You need to get rid of that old unit, because they have digital shortwave now. It sounds almost as good as a CD, and still remains popular in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
>>>I'm getting about 7 Gbits from the phone line that used to be maxed out at 52k or so
No you're not. When you upgraded to DSL, the company disconnected the telephone line (bandlimited to 4000 hertz) with a standard twisted-pair wire (no upper limit). Furthermore they disconnected your house from the old phone service, and connected it to a DSLAM which converts the short ~500 meter cable to higher-quality coaxial or fiber.
So my previous comment about the 4000-hertz wide telephone service still being limited to just 56k is still true.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Correction: Replace "8000 hertz" with "4000 hertz"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
So you're saying it wasn't a physical limitation of the broadcast medium at all, it was a hardware limitation of the receiver.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Analog phone lines are indeed no faster than 56 kbits/second
For the sake of clarity analog phone lines are inherently limited to 2400 bits/second (bps). Better compression algorithms got us up to 56 kbps.
For the sake of clarity, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. 56-kbits/second is the max because that's what the analog-digital converters within the telco are set for. A DS0 phone circuit is by definition a 56k or 64k digital channel (depends on inband or out-of-band signalling). The early 2400 and 4800 limits were due to poor quality lines and equipment that just wasn't setup to go faster. This was back when most users were just doing text and fax machines were the bandwidth intensive applications.
The magic of 56k comes from the users modem being able to synchronize its timing and discrete output levels (the "constellation") to match the analog-digital converter attached to the users phone line. The server end of the circuit must be digitally connected for this to work.
Isn't that why our government just auctioned off billions of dollars of our publicly-owned spectrum?
The department that manages that spectrum is apparently run by somebody who has yet to discover the term "gigabytes". What could possibly go wrong?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you could solve the first point above, would that be a problem if open hotspots (or something similar) were ubiquitous?
Good luck solving soft handoff for a bus traveling at 45 km/h or 30 mph. It's the same reason cell phones don't work well on planes: they pass over too many cells per minute.
The way it's supposed to work is the companies have more customers, which means more money, which means they expand the infrastructures. I mean, it's not complicated. This is business 101 stuff here.
Yes there is Ham Radio Television
it's called Amateur TV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The main issue here isn't voice coverage but data service. Voice uses very little bandwidth. I think today's networks use codecs which compress voice to 4-12 kbit/sec.
Not only does T-Mobile typically have less spectrum than their competitors, they still have many customers on GSM, which puts them at a huge disadvantage over the other major providers who have many or all customers using (W)CDMA. Therefore, T-Mobile has much more of an incentive to move phone calls off their network.
T-Mobile is providing a service when you do this; it's not free for them. The call is transmitted over an Internet connection (that you are probably paying for) to a T-Mobile system which connects to their mobile network and then to the telephone network. For outgoing calls, T-Mobile pays for the call over the PSTN as well.
I wouldn't grantee too much on AM/shortwave. To transmit efficiently you may want a good sized antenna but couldn't the small devices still transmit on higher frequencies, and receive on the lower frequencies with the base stations being huge still?
I am not a physicist, but it sounds like you're mixing up analog approximations with digital bandwidth measurements. The frequency of EM spectrum used is determined by the accuracy of resonance on a conductor (see Radio Tuners). There's no reason an antenna can't have any electric length (see Antenna resonance) to read whatever range of spectrum might be available, and the only physical limitation is in how accurately we can transmit and receive those signals. To say that an analog medium has defined universal limits and that no technology is capable of using it more efficiently sounds like a BS assertion, i think you should cite some sources for a claim like that.
This then seems to be the same issue that traditional land based providers run into. It costs a good chunk of money to spread out that way. One of the huge gains of wireless being that the last mile is over the air and essentially free. Note: I'm not trying to be a kill joy here but it seems these companies haven't gone this route already and I think this is the reason.
You could use microeletric gyroscopes to detemine orientation, and (in real time) use phased array antennas to only broadcast at the the closest tower.
I can see OTA TV going away (ATSC is horrible for mobile reception and cable/satellite work for almost all other purposes) but I predict an uprising if analog FM radio is ever taken away. Right now if you go to any dollar store you will probably find at least 1 FM radio. My car, alarm clock, emergency flashlight, MP3 players, (dumb last-gen) cellphone, and home theater receiver all have FM radios built in. It is possibly the most ubiquitous mass communications medium if you go by the number of receivers per capita.
The technology is extremely mature, very inexpensive, not (currently) patented, about as portable as it gets and it doesn't require a $50 monthly subscription to use. Sure *you* might not listen to FM radio but I and millions of other people do every day. Every car built since the 70s has an FM radio and people still listen to it every day when they drive. I get my news, in real time, from public radio between classes on my MP3 player's built-in FM tuner. Other technologies might be able to partially replace FM, but they will be massively more expensive and they will probably never achieve the reach FM has today.
Bottom line: because of the built-up infrastructure, FM is here to stay.
What if this signature were clever?
ADSL bypasses the problem entirely.
Phone lines have a total bandwidth of 64k, of which something speaking through an analog line can only get 56k, with the rest being used for signalling data. There's no way to go any higher. Think of trying to play 24 bit, 96KHz music into a system that only records 8 bit at 11KHz. No matter what you put into that line, you're not getting more quality out of it.
So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely. The limit isn't in the line itself, it's in the endpoint. ADSL sends a signal through the line that gets received by special hardware sitting before the telco phone equipment which handles a much higher frequency range.
ADSL bypasses the problem entirely. So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely.
No. Sorry that is simply NOT true.
ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
The only difference is that instead of sending sound (analog) down the wire they send electrical pulses, 1s and 0s: digital data.
Nothing changed other than someone started thinking OUT of the box. Someone told the analog engineers to take a hike.
And yet this nonsense about maximums persists.
I just told you in the GP post that adsl can do 24Mbits/s on a single pair of plain old telephone wire.
You turn right around, stick your fingers in your ears, sing LA LA LA loudly so that you can't hear men and and insist that there is ONLY 64k of total bandwidth on those same wires.
(And some fool mods you informative).
Recent months have seen stories on Slashdot about even higher speeds achieved on plain old copper wires. Gigahertz speeds.
This is why this whole thread about inadequate bandwidth is totally nonsense. New technology and totally different ways of using what we already have will continue to produce ever more information density in the same radio spectrum.
Instead of discrete channels formerly used, we are already seeing spread spectrum transmission pumping huge volumes thru common bandwidth in unlicensed spectrum.
Some of those technologies are in the lab today. Some haven't even taken shape in any one's mind yet. And still more await the prerequisite inventions that always give birth to new technology.
But one thing is certain. There is a LONG way to go before we even come close to "saturating the airwaves."
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Er, no.
There are two different things here: The limit of the line and the limit of the receiver at the end of it.
The limit of the receiver in an analog line is 56k. You can't dial a phone number on an analog line and then establish a connection at ADSL speeds from one end to the other. It's like this: ("=" is a fat pipe, "-" is a slow one)
The phone line might be able to handle 10mbps fine, but the DS0 you get inside the telco has a hard 64kbps limit (of which you get to use 56k) and no encoding technology will change that.
The reason ADSL works is because it's not going through that bottleneck:
The telco samples 8 bits at 8000 Hz, so there are frequencies that won't get through it, ever. ADSL works by sending frequencies the telco won't transmit through the phone line, but the DSLAM can use them. Notice how modems haven't budged an inch since they reached 56k. There's simply nothing left to squeeze out.
Your phone line also has a very definite physical limit, which is why ADSL performance depends on the kind of line and its length, and the DSLAM is probably located at some junction near your house. This is the reason why people are starting to get fiber at their house. It's also precisely what the FCC is talking about here -- the medium itself has a limit and no encoding is going to change that. Better encodings simply get closer to the ultimate physical limit, and modern encodings are pretty much perfect already.
>>>ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
>>>
Not only are you wrong, but you managed to be wrong three times. The old telephone wire and the new DSL is NOT the same copper pair, not the same infrastructure, and not the same physical stretch of wire. Here are the differences:
- The old telephone infrastructure was bandlimited to 4000 hertz. DSL is not.
- The old telephone copper traveled miles-and-miles, and was very poor quality due to that long distance.
- DSL is terminated just a few hundred feet from your house (before the signal degrades), and then upgraded to high-quality fiber or coax which carries the signal over long distances. DSL is 99.9% fiber/coax with just a little bit of copper at the end.
- QED not the same system or infrastructure or copper (since DSL is mostly carried by fiber).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Go right ahead. Don't hold back.
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