Slashdot Mirror
How the New Spectrum Bill Would Harm the Tech Community
An anonymous reader writes "One version of new spectrum legislation poses a threat to unlicensed wireless, which is where technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate. Your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies are safe, but the future of the proposed White Spaces broadband also known as Super Wi-Fi, and new unlicensed spectrum is in doubt under the draft bill. And hiding in those unlicensed airwaves could be the next Wi-Fi. 'The draft bill says that in order for unlicensed spectrum to win out over a licensed bidder, an entity or a group of people would have to collectively bid more than a licensed bidder would. This would be akin to having a group of people who want more unlicensed airwaves going up against Verizon or AT&T. As a reminder Verizon spent $9.63 billion on spectrum licenses in the last auction while AT&T spent $6.64 billion. The legislators may have envisioned Google playing a heroic role here and thus enabling the government to make some extra money in a spectrum auction as opposed to just letting such potentially lucrative spectrum become a public radio panacea regulated by the FCC.'"
Interesting spectrum, but all other obstacles aside, it's not likely to become "the next Wi-Fi", and therefore be as widely deployed or successful.
Wi-Fi as we all know it today falls in the ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) bands which are defined by the ITU, and are (with some channel-by-channel exceptions) internationally universal. In other words, your US Wi-Fi card will work and be (mostly) legal to operate in lots of the rest of the world.
This lets the chipset and device manufacturers build a small number of chips and devices, and handle the regulatory country-to-country differences in software, thus achieving great economies of scale, which means cheapass consumer price points for the devices.
There would seem to be a lot of obstacles to making that happen with this chunk of spectrum.
Red
So there's an opportunity cost X $ to leaving this spectrum public and there's a hard-to-calculate benefit Y $ to doing so. Suppose Y is significantly greater than X. Then the government can raise taxes by X and leave the spectrum open. This gives the government the same amount of funding while benefiting the economy by Y-X $. Making these kinds of decisions the right way is what ultimately separates third and first world countries. If the government is truly worrying about generating income, instead of what actually benefits the economy, then that's because irrational sentiments somewhere are constraining the government's ability to make the right decisions. There's also the possibility that X Y, in which case this shouldn't be done. The question is, are X and Y really the center of this discussion, as they should be?
This is a not-surprising consequence of an idea from the 1980s to sell spectrum. Before that the FCC essentially gave vast swaths of spectrum away for mere licensing fees. That made a few people, particularly in television, enormously rich. Farmers have to buy their land. Manufacturers have to build their factories. But the big three TV networks got an enormously valuable resource for almost nothing. The same thing happened with the first few rounds of cellular licensing. The early ones were judged on the 'merit' of their proposals. By the fourth round, the FCC was using a lottery. I worked for McCaw cellular and Craig McCaw became a billionaire playing that lottery.
Selling spectrum brings in money, and there are few things that make politicians happier. But it also means that spectrum uses that don't bring in money directly, as here, don't interest most of those in Congress. That's what is happening here. The real social and economic value of more unlicensed spectrum doesn't matter as much to most of those in Congress as how much money selling might put into their budgets.
Of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.
You're implying that if you don't pay 10 billion you won't use them for something that produces revenue? Using them to produce revenue doesn't mean they're used for something that benefits society. Comparing the USA to Russia is useless.
$10 Billion is a small price to pay for an oligopoly on mobile services. IMHO the price is paid in order to stop others from entering the market.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Verizon spent $9.63 billion on spectrum licenses in the last auction while AT&T spent $6.64 billion
Using 310 million as the current US population, that's about $52.50 for every person in the country. That's over $136 for the average household. If we say that 10% of households will adopt the new technology, then they would need to add $1,360 to the cost of every router.
I think I'll stick with 802.11, thanks.
You're implying that if you don't pay 10 billion you won't use them for something that produces revenue?
I think he was saying "If it's less, companies would try to reserve a lot more to deprive their competitors of it, and then not do anything with it."
Which does sound likely. I'd guess that's a symptom of putting way too much of the spectrum up for sale for exclusive use. I'd also guess that those involved in approving the sale are thinking "$$$" rather than "Are we cheating the public by selling off a public resource to private interests?"
Comparing the USA to Russia is useless.
In soviet Russia, comparison is between the US and YOU!
Unfortunately, the proposed legislation would require all future spectrum allocations to be auctioned to the highest bidder. There seems to be the belief that some white knight like Google will come forward and pay billions for spectrum and then set it free for public use and innovation. Or that companies like Intel and Microsoft and Google and Cisco are getting a free ride by using this "free" spectrum. In reality, we the public are getting the benefit. It is our spectrum, and sure we can sell off most of it to big cellcos like AT&T and Verizon and Clearwire to help pay off the national debt, but we need to keep a small portion public.
If anyone is thinking that little rural WISPs operating on a shoestring are going to all chip in a few dollars to keep a little spectrum unlicensed, and collectively will outbid the big cellos, that just isn't going to happen.
One argument I see is, we already have WiFi and Bluetooth and DECT, why do we need any more unlicensed spectrum? Same as what drives the cellcos. We need more public spectrum for higher speeds and more users, and we need spectrum below 1 GHz to penetrate trees and buildings. Otherwise, some people in less populated areas will never get high speed Internet. Some in industry and the media want to call services based on TV whitespace spectrum "Super WiFi", and while this may be a cool sounding name, it doesn't help anyone understand what it will do or why it is needed. Currently the only unlicensed spectrum below 1 GHz that can be used for hardcore non-line-of-sight transmission is 900 MHz, specifically 902-928 MHz. That 26 MHz isn't enough to provide high speed service to more than a handful of subscribers, and there is so much interference from stuff like smartgrid and adjacent paging bands that 900 MHz isn't very useful. The freeing up of TV whitespace spectrum is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a little more spectrum that can go through trees and buildings. AT&T and Verizon can have their exclusive use licensed spectrum in the 700 MHz band, but the public needs to save a little for nonexclusive, noncorporate use.
A second argument I see being made, is that companies that make devices using WiFi and other unlicensed bands are making tons of money and should be paying for use of the spectrum. But there is a chicken and egg problem here. Look at your cellphone. AT&T and Verizon buy 700 MHz spectrum, put up LTE towers, and have phones designed for them. But will there be LTE roaming? Apparently not. The phone and spectrum are for exclusive use on their network. Would that model of innovation work for everything? No. Look instead at your 802.11n wireless router, laptop, tablet, or even your proprietary cellphone which connects to WiFi hotspots. All that equipment is interoperable, in fact it works internationally. The spectrum and the technical standards were defined in an open, non-exclusive manner, and as a result thousands of companies innovated and brought products and services to market that benefit us all immensely.
A third argument is that certainly a white knight moneybags corporation will come forward and bid against the big cellcos to keep some spectrum unlicensed. Or some collective group will do so. Is this like selling naming rights to a stadium? I guess it could happen. Like the consortium that bid on the Nortel patents to keep them from going to a patent troll. But it seems more likely that the high bid will always be from a bidder that wants exclusive use. This is a very dangerous game. it is like selling off Yellowstone or the Gr