Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FCC Chief: 300MHz More Spectrum By 2015

Posted by Soulskill on from the we-want-it-all dept.

itwbennett writes "On Thursday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski laid out plans to make 300MHz more spectrum available by 2015. Among the blocks that will be auctioned in the AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) band is a band between 1755MHz and 1780MHz, where a commercial user would share the spectrum with current government users." Genachowski's full speech (PDF) is available online.

3 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. What I can't figure out... by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How is it that Europe has no problems using their existing spectrum allocations, while the USA seems to be resorting to insane band fragmentation?

    The European 2100 MHz band isn't THAT big...

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    1. Re:What I can't figure out... by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, band fragmentation benefits the carriers. Phones made for one carrier cannot be used on the other, and hence discourages customers from switching to another carrier. No wonder the carriers are keen on spectrum fragmentation.

  2. C=B*log2(1+SNR): It's not just a good idea... by Erich · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It's the law!

    And you're getting very close to the Shannon limit with turbo codes. LTE isn't much more spectral efficient as compared to HSPA+, but it has wider frequency bands and so can get more peak speed to customers.

    So you can increase the amount of spectrum you have, with the current infrastructure, to get more capacity. That will buy you a few years of network traffic increase.

    But eventually you have to figure out how to get less capacity demand and more SNR. There's really only one way to do that: change the infrastructure topology. And that has lots of problems.

    It's kind of like we're near "Peak Bandwidth".

    --

    -- Erich

    Slashdot reader since 1997