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Broadcasters Accuse Telecom Companies of Hoarding Spectrum
angry tapir writes "The National Association of Broadcasters, asked by the US Federal Communications Commission and some lawmakers to give up television spectrum for mobile data uses, has fired back by accusing several other companies of hoarding the spectrum they hold. In recent weeks, the NAB has gone on the offensive by suggesting that several spectrum holders, including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have not developed the spectrum they already have."
No.
IP addresses can be increased by just adding numbers to the end. It's only a problem because some vendors aren't willing to adopt a new standard because they're too cheap to invest the money.
Electromagnetic spectrum is limited by nature. It's a physical constraint.
TV Broadcasters in the U.S. freed up huge swaths of bandwidth in the 700 MHz range during the switchover to digital TV. This frequency range has a lot of very useful attributes, like being able to penetrate buildings and travel large distances - attributes that are ideal for wireless data transmission. Portions of that bandwidth was subsequently auctioned off for about $20 billion, austensibly to permit the development of new wireless services. The auction concluded a few years ago, and yet I haven't heard anything about anyone developing new wireless infrastructure around it. As far as I know, there isn't even a baseband chipset for it yet. What gives?
Yes, spectrum could be used much more efficiently. It is not however unlimited. Frequencies can't be split into smaller slices indefinitely. Lookup "nyquist rate".