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Congress Wants Federal Government To Sell 1755-1780 MHz Spectrum Band
GovTechGuy writes "With next year's reverse auction of TV spectrum not expected to sate the wireless industry's growing demand for mobile broadband, lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration to auction the 1755-1780 MHz band, which is considered especially desirable for mobile phone use. However, the Pentagon and other federal agencies are already using those airwaves for everything from flying drones and surveillance to satellites and air combat training. They say it would take ten years and $18 billion just to vacate the band so it can be sold."
However, the Pentagon and other federal agencies are already using those airwaves for everything from flying drones and surveillance to satellites and air combat training.
All the more reason to hand it over to civilian mobile phone use.
You think they'd just stop flying drones, call off air combat training, and neglect to send up replacement satellite hardware?
There should be free for all bands for signals with low total radiated power (say 10mW) to be emitted with relatively high EIRP (a few Watts), i.e. highly directional signals. This should allow for much better use of the scarce bandwidth and spur innovation in beam forming.
Capitalists vs Warmongers!
lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration
lobbyists are turning up the heat on Congress.
Fixed that for you.
Hint: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000076 [AT&T profile at opensecrets]
Will the next show about a murderer that only kills 'bad people' be ready by then?!
Make it public airwaves and give it to the ham radio operators. It's time they gave back some spectrum to us that has been stolen over the years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and go a lobby yourself.
That is what it is going to take - every ham operator.
It's completely unfair - big corps can hire lobbyists to pester Congress and give them gifts and individuals are just drowned out.
You ham guys will get nothing and rest assured, more of your spectrum will be taken.
Years later, after you fire up that shiny new iPhone, the Air Force suddenly realizes they forgot to re-tune a batch of HARM missiles. Fortunately, nothing of value was lost.
Have gnu, will travel.
Come on, this is a jobs program.
1) Force the DoD to vacate the band. To do this the DoD needs $$Billions for new equipment to do this. This creates jobs, especially in the congressman's district pushing the legislation through. This gets the congressman re-elected by a happy electorate so we can perpetuate more gridlock.
2) Sell the bandwidth to Wireless Carriers who are immensely profitable (At least 2 out of the four are) to generate billions of dollars in revenue. That means the Feds can then hire more bureaucrats at the IRS to keep an eye on Tea Party folk.
3) The consumers get screwed with the bill, always.
Frankly, I don't think bandwidth should ever be auctioned off, it should be leased.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I hate this policy, of selling our public bandwidth to private corporations. I just hate it.
Airwaves are public. The Government should not be selling property that belongs to all of us. Leasing or licensing bandwidth for some specific period of time is one thing, but transferring ownership is another. We should not "privatize" this.
I am dismayed to see so many politicians and technical types just accepting actions like this, without any policy discussions taking place -- beyond closed-door meetings at the FCC, which are not shared with the public.
tt77
It should read:
Congressional 'contributors' want federal government to sell 1755-1780 MHz Spectrum band
lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration to auction the 1755-1780 MHz band
I figured it was only a matter of time before Congress pushed to sell off 1776 to the highest bidder. They've been pushing to sell off the Post Office's business for the last 6 years by forcing a financially sound organization into insolvency (see paragraph 3 here). Why not sell off American Independence itself and Common Sense while they're at it? It's like we gave the keys to our house to service employees and they're auctioning off the contents to lobbyists through the front door to the highest bidder, keeping the profits for themselves.
Of course not. Evil people want to be evil as much as possible. There's no reason we should help them though especially when the frequencies could be used for beneficial uses. I say boot them off now. The world would be a better place for it while their ability to create new enemies hell bent on revenge with each drone strike is impaired, and secondly, new public data services would be profitable and useful for the public. It's a win win for humanity. Congress will definitely not go that route.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sex, drugs and fartgas. All the electromagnetic spectrum should be given to CUBA for radio broadcasts to enlighten the poor suffering people living under the despotic murderous rule of Wall Street.
Obviously, someone is paying these CONgressMEN to push for the sale, my questions are who and for what purpose?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
This is how Software Defined Radio wins.
How does SDR help here? And how do you know they aren't already using it for things like drones? The virtue of SDR is that one receiver/demodulator can handle many different modulation and coding schemes. It does not help the antennas and RF circuitry handle a wider range of carrier frequencies.
Evil people want to be evil as much as possible. .
Please tell me you are joking. Or that you are 12 years old and feel that comic books are a accurate portrayal of the world or something. Nobody, other than a tiny fraction of one percent of insane people, wake up in the morning and actively set out to do "evil" things. Most people try to do what is good from them or a group of "their people". That group can be a family, country, religion, race, or even a company. Obviously in the case of brutal dictators, they are more concerned with their own benefit. But even so, they don't believe what the do is evil. They just feel what ever they do to keep power is a necessity to stay in power.
It's startling when you look at a chart of frequency allocation and see how much is allocated to DOD, maritime, and obselete tech. Meanwhile you have everyone and their neighbor competing over 11 channels for Wifi.
Nobody, other than a tiny fraction of one percent of insane people, wake up in the morning and actively set out to do "evil" things.
True enough but sadly they're the very same tiny minority who covet power the most. Even if only an even tinier fraction of them are smart enough to accumulate it, accumulate, they do; look at history... or into the soulless eyes of a Washington D.C. politician.
they took away reliable OTA TV to sell off the spectrum and some squatters just started using it, tough shit
Government usage of RF spectrum has a reputation of being grossly inefficient. In this entire band, which could easily support tens of thousands of cell users in an area, if not hundreds of thousands, the federal government might have a dozen or two users. Instead of using bandwidth packing digital and spread spectrum modes, they tend to use older more wasteful radio services, which are more prone to interference from other users. About the most efficient usage typically attained is analog trunked systems, which share RF space, but are still prone to interference. The even worse thing about the trunk systems are that they are usually more to prevent citizens from their civil right to listen to public service communication, instead of any good faith effort to conserve/share RF space.
In other words they are using radio space worth hundreds of millions of dollars to operate what is essentially the equivalent of couple of smart phones.
Those older technologies might be more wasteful in spectrum use... they most of the time are technologically less sophisticated which means easier to maintain in wartime.
An AM radio is much simpler to build and operate than your latest incarnation of an 'industry standard' 'packet switched' consumer communication device with built in audio compression. The latter needs several black boxes called 'microprocessors' and other hard to replace stuff. The former needs only a hand full of analog semiconductors or a few tubes. For some things, bandwith is not the primary concern. Also, many of those black boxes mentioned earlier don't mix very well with 'space'.
Stalin murders 10s of millions of his own people. Mao. Murders even more than Stalin.
US "invades" Vietnamese ostensibly (according to its detractors) to prevent Communism from spreading (the domino theory), and the inevitable massacre of civilians which would occur. The later argument was laughed at until the "Killing Fields" became known. (Yes the Khmer Rouge were Cambodian and were put down by the Vietnamese. Good for them!!)
The US props up dictators for all sort of Realpolitik reasons: the same as did/do the PRC (China), the USSR, France, England and all other political powers before (and those that will come). Some dictators (the Shah of Iran were far better than their successors).
And this makes the US the "most violent oppressive nation on earth." Iran, Turkey, Syria (even before the civil war), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Myanmar are less oppressive than the US? What!?!
Fuck Bush, Fuck Obama. I say that without fear without the slightest concern that the US government will care in the slightest.
The US isn't perfect, but "the most oppressive?" Are you saying that because you disagree with the Iraq war? Yes, we should have acted differently but what about the mistakes of the UN, Saddam Hussein and Russia in the build up. (The UN by not giving a damn about it's sanctions and lines-in-the-sand being ignored , Saddam bluffing and acting like a blow-hard, and Russia giving Saddam aid and *apparently* moral support, indicating the US was bluffing and wouldn't invade.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
This fits in very well with Obama's agenda. After all he just nominated a Telecom lobbyist to head the FCC, and that nomination is expected to sail through the Senate largely unopposed due to the insane amount of money Telecom has put into the last few elections.
Don't forget that Obama promised there would be no lobbyists in his administration.
It's all about getting the Interwebs to all those free Obama phones.
I think you're confusing 1700 mhz with 700 mhz .
Allow the federal agencies using it to optionally rent it out for a fee.
Table-ized A.I.
Except that they already have extensive allotments on much more valuable (lower frequency) radio spectrum for analog communication anyways, ie. 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm... Higher frequency spectrum is more interesting for data transfer due to higher available bandwidth, and less interesting for analog radio due to limited range.
Most communications with satellites is in the form of high bandwidth digital data, so I would say these "black boxes" (they are called radios) evidently work super tops in space. Communications satellites are equipped with linear transponders, which simply rebroadcast whatever they hear over a large range of frequencies to a different large range of frequencies. They do not care what the mode is, whether analog, digital, or exotic spread spectrum.
We are talking about 25mhz of super valuable broadband data spectrum. It is an enormous allotment, and in any enterprise besides government the operators could not afford to use it at less than 100%.
The US props up dictators for all sort of Realpolitik reasons
By that argument, you can defend any action whatsoever. Hitler and Stalin didn't kill millions of people for the sake of it, or out of sadism, they did it as part of their political programs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Mobile operators dont need more bandwidth. They can build more towers and the problem is solved cell phones automatically reduce power output and prevent themselves from interfering with each other.
...the same as did/do the PRC...
Why did you use an italic 'L' there? Oh...
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Dude!!! Falling behind in technology? And you're on slashdot!?!
The US is not the only country in the world. Europe and Japan had to rebuild after WWII. China went through it's horrors under Mao; rejected communism in deed, if not in name and is now rising to where it *should* be. Obviously the US share of world technological progress is becoming smaller. But, falling behind in technology. No.
We're leaders in biotech, at the forefront of nanotechnology and 3D printing. No. We're not falling behind.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I'm not saying realpolitik is good. I don't think we should have propped up any dictator. I don't think we should be giving foreign aid. But to call the US the most "oppressive" nation on earth for doing what every other power does smacks of bias to me. Again this does not mean that I approve of realpolitik.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Which is more important: Military using 1755-1780 MHz to protect the country, or allowing a teenager to text 50 times a day to her friends? I vote for the military, or at least until the bad guys all go away.
Some people don't capitalize anything, just as they use silly acronyms or shortcuts instead of full words. Wait a few years, you won't recognize English, nor be able to communicate with your kids.
Remember the flap last year over Lightsquared wanting to use a space comms band, for terrestrial service. The band is next to the GPS frequencies, would have made GPS essentially useless. And we all know how much we use GPS for everything from finding your way to Grandma's house to landing airplanes. Fortunately, the application was denied (just barely), but the threats to frequencies will continue, if we do not stay vigilant.