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How the New Spectrum Bill Would Harm the Tech Community

Posted by Soulskill on from the segregating-the-ether dept.

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.'"

4 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Unlikely to be "the next Wi-Fi" by RedLeg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Unlikely to be "the next Wi-Fi" by vlm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For a closer to home example, compare the activity level and product sales for ham radio "2M" 144 MHz and "70cm" 432 MHz bands which have more or less world-wide allocations, vs the 222 MHz band which has much less use and almost no retail available equipment because its mostly a USA only band.

      I'm guessing the the political decision makers, and the commentators, don't know anything about RF, or pretty much don't know much at all other than where their paycheck comes from.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  2. Only in America... by WoollyMittens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.

  3. Re:this is the whole point of auctions by WoollyMittens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.