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FCC White Space Rules Favor Tech Industry
holy_calamity writes "The FCC has come to a decision on the rules governing devices that make use of the unlicensed wireless spectrum between TV stations, with commissioner Genachowski trumpeting a new era of 'super Wi-Fi.' Most crucially, the FCC dropped the requirement that devices sense TV and wireless microphone signals. Instead, they can geolocate and use an online database to learn which white spaces are available in their area. That makes tech firms happy because it provides a software-centric alternative to developing complex new sensing hardware."
The sliver of bandwidth we get with the ISM band is really not very useful in heavy population areas. The shift to 5ghz wifi didn't seem to help as in all the cases I've used it range was borderline useless and N degrades pretty badly. In a spot where G gave me 3 or 4 mbps, N gave me the same or less.
I can't wait for the new wifi standard to use these frequencies. Now if we can get rid of broadcast television altogether and just move to an IPTV solution and be done with it.
I imagine indoor non-moving devices like routers will just need an address or zip code put in. Its cell phones, laptops, and other mobile devices that'll use GPS or the cell phone network to tell them where they are. Heck, they could broadcast the location in the headers of the wifi packets and have the client just search for them or some other dynamic approach.
Equal Protection for Black Space!
the longer wave length and smaller channel size means it has longer range but is much worse at carrying a usable data.
http://www.martinsuter.net/blog/2009/02/white-spaces-wifi-on-drugs.html
... free citywide democratic wireless mesh.
The FCC is too intrusive as it is. They can stay the hell out of my code. They can pry my tab key from my cold, dead fingers.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Are you actually claiming that Democrats favor non-regulation in general? This smells more like a step toward the free market principles being championed by the Tea Party.
Geolocation, followed by a lookup in a central server presumably administered by the FCC... So what you're saying is that my device will constantly determine my location and report it to the government. Wow, I'll take fifty of 'em.
Does this now need an inbuilt GPS?
Adding GPS to new wireless routers will cost so little that it won't matter in the least. TI makes a $5 part that is probably sufficient.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
No. The favor regulation that helps the majority of people. - VAST generalization.
The Tea Party is a bunch of idiots that have no plan to implement the changes, is funded by the Koch brothers, and has people specifically trained to disrupt rational conversation.
The things they claim to want o do? we did them,. 100 years ago. it didn't turn out so well for the vast majority of people.
Sweat shops, death traps, 10 year old working, pollution. That's the unfettered free market. People with power abusing the position.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Note specifically the part about "the rules will require devices to be capable of knowing their location and using an online database to find out which channels are active in their area". Seems that presupposes that whitespace devices for all time, or at least until the rules are changed, will need both geolocation ability and WAN connectivity. I seriously doubt that users will ever be allowed to simply plug in the operating location to the device, as that would allow the whole system to be easily circumvented. Requiring geolocation and connectivity is fine for applications embedded in a cell phone or a laptop (which already has these facilities), but standalone devices will have a pretty steep cost burden. Even in the embedded scenario, now we need some way of ensuring that the device gets a GPS fix (how frequently?) and communicates that in some standard way to the whitespace system. Hopefully client devices will be relieved of this burden by virtue of their connection to a known base, but will that restrict the usable range of the system, given that you don't want a client to wander too far from the base? Be interesting to see how all this plays out.
Interesting. Reporting to a central authority. Now I can see why they opted for this path rather than have a device check its surroundings. They benefit from making devices a bit simpler and collecting information on the useful idiots at the same time. Genius.
To be honest, I'd rather my devices have a modicum of intelligence and look around to find the best frequency to use. To do otherwise leaves the whole system open to attack. What happens if this central authority server goes down? What happens if a rogue device doesn't report to the server? I'd like my robots with eyes and ears please, not being remote controlled from D.C.
Exactly how much power do i have to pump through my wireless microphone or my guitar hero, or my router to to get it considered as a broadcast device?
-- cynicism is not something I leave to the optimist.
No one sensible favors complete non-regulation as the left claims the right wants and no one sensible favors regulation for regulation's own sake as the tea party/right claim the left wants.
Basic regulation is a requirement of our society in order for there to be a free market in the first place and for laws to be enforced. Basic regulation and oversight provide the structure for the market to exist in.
I happen to be left leaning and do think that the Tea Party in general, especially the higher echelons of the Tea Party, are far too generalized and radical in their positions against regulation. Yes reducing regulations in general for a simpler law-code, just like refactoring a program for leaner code, in general is a good thing but you have to look at WHY those regulations are there in the first place, not just who put them there, and what the effect will be if they are simply repealed.
Like program code the various codes of law do often grow outdated and experience things like mission creep and over time can do more harm than good, BUT that doesn't mean that regulations and laws (after all all laws are regulations in one form or another) in GENERAL are bad.
I believe that more things need to be regulated, but they need to be regulated well, and those regulations need to be enforced.
One thing I hear from the right and especially the Tea Party is the sentiment that all government workers, all government, is incompetent and corrupt merely by virtue of working in government. I come from a family with quite a few government employees, mostly scientists and professors, and I take offence to such a notion.
We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.
We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.
We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.
I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.
A $5.00 part does not raise the price by just $5.00.
FWIW.
But this is bad news all around, and will result in havoc.
It was INTEL that insisted on this stupid approach with their version of UWB.
the problem is the baggers do not fall under the category of "sensible" and really do want the absence of government regulation, at least until such deregulation bites them in the ass then it's the government that was incompetant for not doing more to prevent it.
see the gulf oil spill for an example of this. Drill Baby Drill
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You fucking asshole. On behalf of the millions of people who get shit for internet connectivity now. Just thanks so much for your thoughtful comment. Remove broadcast TV, that means we still get shit for internet, and no TV, and no "IPTV" if your net connection is so shitty all you would see is a "buffering" message, like we get with a two inch youtube screen now.
Fucking urban elitist assholes.
No, it's actually very good news.
With the use of sensors, you have the "ABC problem". You have three collinear stations, A, B, and C. Station A is a licensed FCC broadcasting station. Station B is a receiver for that station. Station C is a frequency-hopping device that looks for an empty channel. Because station C is too far away, it cannot "hear" station A, but it is still close enough to station B to cause interference. Now granted, this is less likely when you're talking about multiple orders of magnitude difference in transmission power, but it is still possible, particularly when the transmitter might be inside a concrete structure with semi-directional leaks. This is a technologically unsolvable problem as long as you are depending on station C being able to somehow sense station A.
With geolocation, since all broadcast TV and radio stations are required by law to register with the FCC, including tower location, HAAT, a detailed map of estimated signal strengths based on topographical features, etc., you can come up with a much better idea of what frequencies are safe.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Don't know where you get the notion that these devices are reporting their location. Quite the opposite except insofar as accessing the central database through some mechanisms could potentially reveal that there is a device of that type at that IP number, which to some very limited degree, gives a crude approximation of a location.
The proposed method of operation is as follows:
Nobody, including the FCC, cares whether these white space devices interfere with each other. They're inherently designed to be frequency hopping, spread spectrum devices precisely so that this isn't an issue. Thus, the devices have no need to register their location in the FCC's database, and indeed, doing so would be the exact opposite of what is intended, which is to preserve the frequency ranges used by licensed broadcasters.
I'm assuming that what you are afraid of is that people will build devices that query the database on the FCC's servers directly. I can't imagine that this would be the case, for several reasons:
In short, I think it's safe to say that any such devices will use a cached copy of the database and will probably update their copy fairly infrequently. Even one update per month would likely be more than sufficient to guarantee compliance.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So what do you all think are the prospects for this service? Does it hold out the potential to challenge the wireline carriers like Verizon or Comcast? How about providing specialized services for businesses? Will this be a niche business, or does it hold out the potential to become a major player?
And here I was thinking we were going to have a Python vs. C-family of languages and One True Brace Style flamefest
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The problem is not that we have too many laws, but rather that the laws are not neat. In some cases, you can say that a particular task is governed by a single set of laws, but this is rare. For the most part, a task is governed by multiple subparts of thousands of different laws, and it's utterly unmanageable trying to figure out if you are violating one or a dozen of them because of the poor organization, the lack of cross-referencing, and the general failure of the code to conform to any reasonable standards of structure.
The federal code is basically like a giant app that has been patched and tweaked to the point that it scarcely resembles the original code, has little real functioning organizational structure beyond (at best) the largest functional units (titles), contains multiple pieces of code that appear to do the same thing but generate different results, and program code that jumps haphazardly through a spaghetti-programming chain of GOTO statements into arbitrary sections of the code based on outside input from the judicial system.
What we need is to make the following changes:
A law that is not constantly being reviewed for effectiveness is a bad law, period.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think all laws should not just have a sunset provision, but a testable intended effect when possible. For instance, a law requiring seatbelts would have an intended effect of "reduce fatalities due to car accidents." then when the sunset comes up, reasonably good evidence that the law is having the original intended effect must be presented.
http://notanumber.net/
actually the devices mush check the database at least daily, the TV station part is mostly unchanging, but the database also includes wireless mic users that are protected and those listing update daily. To be legal the TVBD must check the database for "today's" allowable frequencies. If the database can't be checked the TVBD must shut down till it can get a update from the database. see: http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db0924/FCC-10-174A1.pdf pg 41
I wonder how detailed their terrain model will be and the accuracy of their predictions for mountainous areas. One link mentioned using terrain data from NASA. Will they pinpoint the location accurately enough using either GPS coordinates or a precise physical address or or a ZIP+4 version of the ZIP code? Will the software know if someone is near the top of a mountain instead of down in a nearby valley?
There is a website which predicts what channels I should be able to receive from where I live. My location is at a typical elevation compared to other nearby addresses. At this location in Arizona, it says that I should be able to receive 1 digital channel and 9 analog channels. I actually get 1 digital channel and only 6 analog channels. However, my one digital channel and two of the analog channels are actually different channels from what was predicted. It does not mention getting NBC and CBS on analog channels.
Presumably, the software and terrain models used for these devices, will give much better predictions. But, I still wonder about the accuracy of unusual locations such as mountaintops.
In case you were wondering, some smaller cities and towns (such as where I live) get their antenna reception from old mountaintop translators which were not required to make the digital transition. I am still watching analog TV from a rabbit ears antenna.
It just shifts the problem. A will not be interfered with, but D, another white space transmitter will interfere with C just fine because the database says that channel is open.
http://whitespaces.msresearch.us/api.html Although just a research service, it answers a few questions raised in the comments thus far: 1) Does it support microphones? Yes; microphone broadcasters presumably will temporarily register their use of bandwidth via a service call. 2) Does it take into account geography? Yes; it supports several geolocation databases, and builds a predictive model of coverage based on the user's position.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Unless it changes in the new order, devices acting as clients will not have to perform geolocation lookups. The central tower does all of the channel lookups and assignments for everything under it, essentially.
-John
The FCC will not run the databases. Multiple independent companies will. You can apply to be a database administrator and choose what services to offer, what to charge, etc. Free market.
Replacing sensors with a poorly updated database? It almost sounds like they want to nuke everything which is not WiFi based.
Wow. They're out of their frigging minds, then. I hope they're starting to build their server cluster now. If you think a site like CNN.com is high bandwidth, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's the whole point of white space transmitters, though. As unlicensed transmitters, they are required to not interfere with licensed transmitters. The purpose of the regulations are to prevent those who are paying for exclusive rights to license spectrum (broadcasters) from being interfered with by freeloading unlicensed use of the spectrum.
As far as one unlicensed transmitter interfering with another unlicensed transmitter, the FCC doesn't care. CFR part 15 says that such unlicensed transmitters must be capable of working correctly in spite of any outside interference. They solve this through techniques like spread spectrum signaling, frequency hopping, etc. As it is right now, lots of Wi-Fi hot spots interfere with each other. Does that mean that Wi-Fi doesn't work? No, it works pretty well. Why? Because the technology was specifically designed to be robust against interference. Thus, the FCC doesn't need to care if there are multiple unlicensed devices on the same frequency. More to the point, the density of the population will likely require that they allow multiple white space services to share the same frequencies unless they're opening up a lot more spectrum than I think they are.
Being able to protect white space users from one another is the absolute farthest thing from anyone's minds, including the FCC and the hardware manufacturers. It is far easier to be robust against interference than to try to prevent it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Put another way, Wi-Fi-enabled devices are predicted to cross the 200 million mark within 4 years. Multiply times even a ten megabyte file, and they'd be passing almost 2 petabytes of data per day. I don't think they've thought this through. That's about a tenth the traffic of Google or Steam. They're either completely s**t-for-brains stupid or they're trying to guarantee that this fails....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
IF they had maintained the listen and back off requirement IN ADDITION TO the avoidance of licensed channels, they wouldn't be as likely to interfere with each other.
I fully agree that they should avoid interfering with licensed transmissions.
The problem is that introduces a lot of work load into the system, which is arguably highly overstressed as it is.
A big problem is that our system is based on common law, meaning that how a particular law has been applied in the past, precedent, directly affects how it is applied in the present.
In other words there are real laws on the books that were never written, and our system is supposed to work that way. The founders were very aware of common law and what it meant.
It's only overstressed because the people running the show are too busy grandstanding and politicking to actually get anything done. If Congress operated at even a tenth the efficiency of an equivalently sized body in private enterprise, they'd have plenty of time to get stuff done. Instead, they're too busy fighting with each other to do what we're paying them to do.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's okay, so long as the way it is applied makes sense based on the law, and so long as the law is written in such a way that the intent of the law is clear. Sadly, that latter part is quite often not the case in practice.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
For most applications, wired mics are better than
wireless. Sometimes the wire is even a feature.
What would Roger Daltrey do with a wireless mic?