Obama To Nearly Double the Available Broadband Wireless Spectrum

suraj.sun tips news that the Obama administration announced today plans to free up roughly 500MHz of the wireless spectrum for commercial broadband. From the Washington Post: "The commitment backs a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission to auction off broadcasters' and government spectrum to commercial carriers that envision their networks running home appliances, automobile applications, tablet computers and other wireless devices. White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said in a speech outlining the president's plan that freeing up more spectrum will spur economic growth through auctions of the airwaves and investment in wireless networks and technology. ... The FCC has proposed that 280 megahertz of spectrum come from broadcasters and other sources, 120 of which would come from broadcasters. The other 220 megahertz would come from the federal government's holdings managed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration."

Comments

Charge YOU?

[twoallbeefpatties]

How much are YOU getting charged to auction the spectrum off to the carriers? I don't get it. Especially since there actually is a lot of competition in the wireless market lately - it's worth noting that we're starting to see unlimited data plans on various 4G networks that rival the speeds and monthly costs of landline broadband.

Re:Oh that's nice

[vlm]

I assume this is for the people in rural area's that don't have any internet to speak of.

Plenty of areas with no cablemodems. Rural countryside is great for wireless ISP service.

But wireless ISP service, to the best of my knowledge, is not running out of RF bandwidth.

So, at least for them, more bandwidth is a solution in search of a problem?

Sequential callsign issuance sorta broken

[BenEnglishAtHome]

...call sign is assigned when they get their licence ...

Yes, but.

It bugs me that call signs are re-used. Olaf Pearson (I will not vouch for the spelling) was a friend of my fathers. He was actually employed, as a kid, in Marconi's workshop. His house in Mobile, Alabama had a room that might as well have been a radio museum when I met him some 35 or 40 years ago. He was absolutely ancient even then but it was a delight to watch him light up as he demonstrated a radio he'd built using a 5-gallon Leyden jar; the discharge of that oversized capacitor (just a burst of static, really) was used to send morse. (After a short demo, he let loose an ominous chuckle and said "We probably just knocked out TV and radio reception for a 5-mile radius!")

His call sign was W4NU; I still have one of his cards. Olaf is long since dead and someone else now has that call sign.

It always felt wrong to me that those early call signs weren't retired as the pioneers passed on.

Re:Oh that's nice

[commodore64_love]

>>>after TV stations vacated it (did they get any money back?)

(1) My reading of the article is that this is a NEW taking of spectrum - channels 32 to 51 will be removed and leased to cellphone companies. (2) The TV stations that lost channels 52 to 69 were given new spots, so they didn't lose anything. Some of the poorer "neighborhood" stations received financial handouts to convert from analog to digital but that's it
.

Re:Wow... what a worthless article

[anethema]

Yeah this is a total myth as the other poster said. Water has several peaks of absorption by frequency. The first peak is over 20GHz.

Water does absorb 2.4-2.5GHz but not especially more than any frequency around it.

Here are some charts to stare at for fun, water absorption vs frequency.

http://www.rfcafe.com/references/electrical/images/atm_absorption.gif

or

http://www.e-band.com/get.php?i.72:w.977:h.567