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Citigroup Questions Whether US Spectrum Shortage Exists
alphadogg writes "For more than two years, the U.S. mobile industry has warned of an upcoming spectrum shortage, but two analysts at Citigroup don't buy it. AT&T, trade group CTIA and even officials with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission have talked frequently about a coming spectrum crunch, as mobile customers move to data-sucking smartphones and tablets. Smartphones use 24 times the spectrum compared to standard mobile phones, and tablets use 120 times the spectrum, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech on Tuesday. But Citigroup analysts Jason Bazinet and Michael Rollins questioned what has become the conventional wisdom in the mobile industry. The U.S. has plenty of spectrum for mobile broadband, but much of it is in the wrong hands, they said."
How is that measured??
I did to make this post.
Must be true.
They should have sold the frequencies by market area (city, zip-codes, etc.) and not nation-wide.
That's the real crux of the problem.
Now we have large nation-wide companies holding up frequencies in large swathes of the country because they're dedicating their efforts in specific markets where they can charge more.
Had the FCC sold the frequency on a market basis and required it to be used within a reasonable time frame, we wouldn't have these issues.
They really don't need it.
I guess they mean any hands but the ones that hand them lots and lots of money.
According to the report, the "wrong hands" with control of spectrum that isn't being used or is underutilized are:
Almost all of the above spectrum is in the less-desirable 2 GHz+ ranges. Clearwire may be underutilizing, but Lightsquared and Dish haven't gotten to launch their services yet so you can't really say it's underutilized when it's still in process of being developed.
All in all, this report actually seems to make the case of the big carriers that there is still a shortage of "good" (especially less than 1 GHz) spectrum for broadband. Much of that is locked up by the broadcasters for stuff that is comparatively useless (anyone watching UHF television still these days?) versus having it available for mobile broadband.
"95% of all Slashdot
To the people who make the decisions, that's the exact same thing as a shortage. They don't see a changing of hands as a viable option. They are not generally willing to consider it. If something is perceived as finite, limited, and scarce then you can continue to justify what you charge for it. The rest is a matter of regulatory capture by the proxy of campaign contributions.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Citi's report is not wrong, but how they go about counting things is naive at best. The crux of the matter is that there's a lot of crap spectrum that carriers basically got for free or close to it. But before we get too far ahead, let's answer an easier question: what is good spectrum.
Case in point, 194MHz of the spectrum Citi says is available is above 2GHz: "Citigroup's description of 194 MHz available in the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) and Educational Broadband Service (EBS) bands between 2.4 and 2.7 GHz". This also goes hand-in-hand with Citi's weird method of counting spectrum in use: they're multiplying it by the percent of the population that the spectrum covers. "The two used averages to come up with spectrum use estimates; if a carrier has a 10 MHz nationwide block, but is only delivering service to half the U.S. population, the report considers that 5 MHz of used spectrum, Rollins said."
Ultimately the carriers are being wasteful at times, but not nearly to the degree that Citi says they are. The carriers need more national allocations if they're to run a 3rd network simultaneously, and those allocations need to be at least 40MHz wide so that they can operate two sets of wideband (10MHz) LTE channels. Smaller allocations mean that they're going to have to use smaller channels, and that's going to greatly limit network performance.
Obvious troll is obvious.
We bought it so our competition can't use it. Even tho we're not going to do anything with it anytime soon either. We didn't want any other company to use this chunk of spectrum.
Like many problems... These problems can be traced back to the FCC being how they are.
I'm pretty sure I'm feeding a troll here, so I'm not even trying to comprehend the reasoning needed to conclude that government taking control of frequencies and selling them to licensed corporations is cool, but government reserving a few frequencies to licensed members of the public that government is supposed to be serving is a horrible thing.
The factual question is fair enough, though, so:
In the range of interest for cellular communications (say, 1m to 0.1m, or 300 MHZ to 3 GHz), there's 186 MHz of ham allocations, or about 7% of the spectrum.
Photons don't interact with each other, and don't "fill up" anything. What is at issue, is our poor usage of the spectrum, and insistance on treating it like exclusive property. Any number of people can communicate on the very same frequencies, and in the very same space, just as long as there is a way to distinguish the communications. Fortunately, nature provides each device with a unique "address": its location in space. As technology improves, we can continue to make ever better use of the same spectrum--or at least we could if legislation didn't actively prevent it.
In essence, it comes down to building more towers, and I'm not aware of any unsurmountable barriers to a company with the will and cash. Of course, it is easier to just prop up the model of artificial scarcity with prices to match.
Rather than clinging to the outdated concept of a scarce spectrum, regulatory agencies should start giving it back to the public, and encourage the proper use of it. Highly dense, low-power, ultra wide-band communications. It is the natural evolution of wifi: per-home micro-cells attached to home fibre, running open Internet protocols. We could easily have extremely high-performance ubiquitous wireless networking, if massive corporations weren't so busy propping up artificial scarcity and walling everything off.
"Remote Garage Door Openers"
These work in the 300 - 400 Mhz range (good for building penetration), but are always used at relatively short range. Surely we could assign these systems a frequency in a less "desirable" band and get over the issue of building penetration by merely boosting the power of the transmitters.
There's a useful chart of US radio frequencies at the Department of Commerce NAtional Telecommunications and Information Administration Office of Spectrum Management (.pdf)
Is shitty bank planning on starting a shitty internet service to go with their shitty wok and shitty airline?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So...this is Citigroup, the security experts, right? So now they are wireless frequency allocation experts too???
Maybe the same hackers that stole all that account information, made off with some frequencies while they were at it!
I guess I have to ask why do they even need 7% of that since they have a bunch outside of that range and it is a limited and dying hobby?
just wondering, and trying to not be a troll about it
...I'm quite aware of the move to reclaim bandwidth from the USA terrestrial stations. I've seen the cry and hue that the NAB (and members) and put forth, but I've always wondered why they just don't come out and say "You bastards MANDATED that we change over to digital, and now you want us to give back bandwidth on a capability and capacity we had to spend millions on.", or something similar.
Why haven't they just come out with that tack? It is the unspoken sentiment, yet no one seems to have the balls to say it.
more nodes=more bandwith
the users themselves ARE the network
Artificial scarcity to increase profits is not really a new concept
I have been seriously considering lobbying my Congressman to consider changing the top 20 channels of Citizens Band radio to a digital Citizens band format, where every device that uses the bandwidth would have to function like a WiFi AP Bridge. This sort of network would still function even when there is a disaster and the local Cell towers go down. It would also create some competition to the CelPhone companies and eventually the Cable companies. It's just a thought at the moment but I'm planning on doing research into it's feasibility and if it looks possible starting a grass roots political movement.
it's ok, he's taking them back.
I think the real problem is the size of cell's in population centers.
If you like to have more spectrum in some area's create more smaller cell's.
There is no spectrum shortage, the frequency of electromagnetic radiation goes all the way to infinity.
Speaking of Spectrums, is 'Uncle Clive' still alive?
I guess I have to ask why do they even need 7% of that since they have a bunch outside of that range and it is a limited and dying hobby?
just wondering, and trying to not be a troll about it
Limited and dying by whose measure? There's a world of amateur radio that exists outside of the United States. In fact, that's often the reason people get into the "hobby", to talk to those from other countries.
Personally, I like the fact that there's a global communications medium available at all times that is completely outside of the comparatively fragile mainstream networks, that is dependent upon no physical infrastructure whatsoever, not even satellites, and cannot be easily blocked or jammed by government. Remember what happened during Katrina: cell phones went offline almost immediately, along with Internet and regular telephones as CO batteries died and generators ran out of fuel. HAMs were communicating worldwide during the whole crisis.
And it isn't just the United States where amateur radio has come in very handy. It would be a mistake to try and eliminate those "hobbyists" (rather a demeaning term to apply to some very accomplished, dedicated and useful people) and furthermore it would require some international accords anyway: the spectrum is used worldwide.
And no I'm not a HAM, but I play one on TV.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
well that's all well and good, and I always hear "when the bombs drop" arguments, but if this cellphone crap is that big of a crisis its not like that 7% represents every signal radio could use, reclaiming that 7% would not totally banish ham's from the air...
And I think its a dying hobby cause when I read QST they act like its a moon landing if someone under the age of 50 participates in an activity
On the other hand its not like that 7% is really going to help that much but when your in a "crisis" as they make it out to be, every drop counts right?
AKA: Son of Enron.
Have gnu, will travel.
There is no spectrum shortage. Europe and Asia have no spectrum shortage, despite being more densely populated (generally), and all having the same handsets work on all networks. The decisions to buy a handset and the decision which network to subscribe to are totally separate. You buy the handset outright. No subsidy. No strings attached.
The urge to have balkanized networks is driven purely by networks wanting to fragment the market and put obstacles to their customers leaving for some other network.
I wrote about this re: Canada, and it applies to the USA as well. The only two markets that tie customers this way, and people accept it.
Read Mobile phone carriers lobby for more balkanization by asking for more "spectrum" and More balkanization and monopoly in Canada's mobile phone market.
This should be stopped!
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... just a shortage of infrastructure. One of the basic principles of cellular networks is that you can increase capacity by building more cells and reusing spectrum in the spatial dimension. You can repeat the process almost infinitely; when you reach the point where walking around a room would switch you to a different cell you have gone too far. And for moving vehicles the limit is reached a bit sooner because the handoffs have overhead; a cell handoff every second would probably bring the network to a standstill. But the vehicles are probably using less bandwidth than the stationary users (even if you ARE watching a movie in your car you're probably not watching it in HD), so you could built a mixed network with high-bandwidth, high-density cells for stationary users and larger-range, lower-bandwidth cells for mobile. Before anybody says "but that would cost too much!", I'm only talking about TECHNOLOGICAL feasibility. It might cost too much to build the additional cells and/or be politically infeasible to build them. But note that RF exposure from the new smaller cells isn't as serious a problem as it might seem; they will be closer to your house (bad) but operate at lower power levels (good).