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Crowded US Airwaves Desperately In Search of Spectrum Breathing Room
alphadogg writes "Ahead of a major new spectrum auction scheduled for next year, America's four major wireless carriers are jockeying for position in the frequencies available to them, buying, selling and trading licenses to important parts of the nation's airwaves. Surging demand for mobile bandwidth, fueled by an increasingly saturated smartphone market and data-hungry apps, has showed no signs of slowing down. This, understandably, has the wireless industry scrambling to improve its infrastructure in a number of areas, including the amounts of raw spectrum available to the carriers. These shifts, however, are essentially just lateral moves – nothing to directly solve the problems posed by a crowded spectrum. What's really going to save the wireless world, some experts think, is a more comprehensive re-imagining of the way spectrum is used."
Maybe now they'll actually build software-defined antennas worth a damn.
Yeah, I was listening to C-SPAN a couple days ago, and the military was talking about the possibility of freeing up a lot of its reserved spectrum for emergency use that rarely gets used as long as the commercial applications using it could be shunted aside in the case of an actual emergency.
It was a pretty interesting talk, which dealt with the interaction of land, air, and space networks, and their different needs and adaptive capabilities.
Steerable Null (alias DIDO or pCell) (the latter being steerable null with widely separated antennas) effectively multiplies the avaliable bandwidth by the number of base station antennas (by giving each remote a signal containig the full band's bandwidth directed to it, while the similar, simultaneous, signals to the other remotes cancel out).
See the article from last week: New 'pCell' Technology Could Bring Next Generation Speeds To 4G Networks.
Some posters were wondering what would be the driver for adopting it. This is it: There's no more spectrum being made - but this is a way to use it simultaneously multiple times without interference between the reuses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The solution is to build / install multiple mini-towers to replace large towers covering a larger area.
Dialling down the transmit power of both the device and tower will reduce the congestion. With fewer devices on each tower, bandwidth will increase. Also, devices will require less transmit and receive power so their batteries will last longer. And when in a more rural setting with fewer devices, service providers can still go with a larger tower to cover more area.
This is the only real solution but it requires an investment in infrastructure. From the perspective of a service provider, it is far more cost effective to convince the government to give / sell them more bandwidth. Regardless of how much bandwidth they have, they will always be begging government for more.
Ham radio operators have a lot of space allocated on the UHF/SHF bands. It is quite diffifcult to justify this allocation, given the fact that these frequencies are mostly left unused (if you do not believe this, just turn on a spectrum analyzer and give a look). Reallocating a part of these frequencies to wireless carriers could bring benefits to the whole US population, reducing the digital divide.
There's plenty of bandwidth to go around in most of the spectrum, but any of it being available rather than "oh no so clogged" is a chance for startups to possibly one day provide competition to the big four (whom are trying to become a bigger two). Or, horror of horrors, municipalities....
The solution is simple. We should move everything over to LTE. It's far more efficient than any other alternatives, often by several orders of magnitude. Deactivate the old legacy networks and switch to LTE for everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If companies have paid billions for spectrum, then the last thing that they want is more to be allocated which will simply reduce the value of their asset. Tight spectrum means one can charge more for 4G, with less competition. There must be some fierce lobbying going on.
Does anybody know how much spectrum below and above 1Gig (say) is actually available of telephony, in the USA and Australia? It seems like it is well under 10% of the available.
Spectrum should be owned by the public and rented on an annual basis to the private sector to the highest bidder.
This brings in competition that will keep companies from buying it and then sitting on their ass doing nothing with it.
Introduce a "use it or loose it" rule for spectrum allocations. Stop carriers from buying spectrum to sit on it or sell it around and around with no-one actually using it.
Charging high prices for spectrum works well at ensuring spectrum gets used. Yes, the cost gets passed on to the consumer, effectively making it a tax, but the spectrum gets used.
He just put on muliple live demos of his tech at columbia:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-wireless-tech-may-radically-transform-mobile-video-streaming
Seems pretty workable at this point.
Stop auctioning out the spectrum. If it is a national resource, allocate a bit to everyone, say 10megabytes per month broadcast to everyone in the country per person. This is free speech. Then have more broadcast on local regions. Then we can sell our bandwidth to the broadcasting companies. if we want to, or use it.
We could buy some from our friends too. We would need DVR like capabilities to piece together TV shows, if people don't like NBC, they won't sell them their bandwidth.
This would provide a bit of income to everyone too.
It would also give annonymous receipt of messages (key to free speech) to the masses... so I don't think this will happen.
If we can track who recieves messages, there is no point to having free speech, because nobody will listen.
-Aaron Peterson glowingwire.com
I click on this link for a spectrum auction, and get FOXCOMM, SDR, and FPGA tripe. Really? Do you even know what secondary use is (to those yelling about amateur radio.)
This was especially rich:
"it is more than twenty years that I do not see anything new invented by a radio amateur that predates an innovation coming from industry or academics."
Try building your own.
So just like with wireline, why is this even a problem? Why don't we have a the government owning/controlling the entirety of the spectrum and have service providers simply provide service across ALL bands? Why are we chunking it up for private companies to "own"? It would seem to me that if all spectrum were available, everyone would win. More devices per tower, fewer towers needed, more competition in the marketplace. The simple fact that you have to be able to purchase spectrum to even join the game means the end-game is yet another monopoly.
I don't really think that would help the military, since they'd be using their own towers with their own *encryption.
The signals would still be stepping on each other, since they wouldn't be hooked into the same network of towers coordinating with each other.
*Though they've been flying around drones in war zones with unencrypted feeds
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Amateur Radio has 56MHz of prime spectrum real estate it doesn't need or even use.
There is 420-450Mhz, which propagates very well even though it requires somewhat larger antennae. 30Mhz is three blocks for cellular delivery.
There is another block from 902-928 that maybe 5 amateurs use nationwide.
So, there's 56Mhz, 5 whole blocks and then some, which could grow cellular data delivery capacity by leaps and bounds.
Keep your grubby dirty filthy hands off of the Ham Bands.
There is plenty for the commercial world to use, boo hoo they don't like paying for it, if you are making money off of the public airwaves, then you pay dearly for it. I just wish the FCC charged for the use of airwaves yearly to commercial entities. Huge parts of bands are unused but sat on for "future use" by commercial groups.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Please take a look here:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/...
Every block where you see "Amateur" _not_ in all CAPS, Amateur Radio is a secondary use and not the primary licensee. You can see that there are no blocks that are allocated primarily to Amateur use that would be useful to cellular carriers.
420-450, 902-928, 1240-1300 are all government property that Amateurs are allowed to use provided they do not cause interference to the primary licensee.
If government didn't have a use for that spectrum, it certainly would have been sold already - certainly before going through all the trouble to move OTA TV to HD and reclaiming that spectrum.
Seriously, think logically for a minute. If the government could have opened up over 100Mhz of spectrum to cellular carriers by simply displacing a few hams, rather than upending the entire broadcast TV industry, that's the way it would have been done.
I was wondering if you ever considered changing the layout of your blog? Its very well written; I love what you've got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. bubblegum casting
I just upgraded my wifi to a dual-band base station so that I could use some of that sweet 5GHz space. I live in a suburban neighborhood (built in the '70s, so not even one of those super-cramped Krap Box neighborhoods they make these days) and I can see at least eight other SSIDs at any time.
After all, I've gotta watch those ATSC .ts streams from my MythTV on my laptop.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Excepting perhaps T-Mobile, the cellular industry seems dominated by executives who think rarely and depending too much on marketing. There's simply no way to fill the potential demand for spectrum in high-population-density cities given that the useful bandwidth is limited. For handheld devices, the antennas need to be small, which limits the frequencies to above about 700 MHz. And to get decent building penetration, the frequencies can't be too high, which limits them to about 2 GHz.
Some of the problem could be solved by creating smaller and smaller cells, putting them on every street corner and in the dead center of high-rise buildings. But for that, the installation, backhaul and maintenance costs get high, not to mention keeping those cells up in a major power outage.
One solution that seems little explored is smartcasting. Use bandwidth on digital TV stations to broadcast to smart chips on cell phones. Then the cell companies would have, for no more than bandwidth fees, powerful transmitters on tall towers that are deliberately designed to penetrate urbane areas. Almost everything that multiple users need could be broadcasts, with chips in smartphones knowing what to store. Media feeds, software upgrades, and especially the video sports and news could go out that way. And it could be easily encrypted for paid subscribers.
Smartcasting would not even need to be limited to smartphones. It could also be used in tablets and laptops. Anything that numerous users might want could be available for subscription, paid or free. And if parts of that feed are lost, then and only then could cellular feeds be used to fill in that gaps.
Having the best feeds come with that monthly contract could also be a plus for a cellular company in the marketing wars. And it wouldn't require even a tiny scrap of new spectrum or a single new tower.
I wish there was some way to unify the spectrum used by carriers so there wasn't so much wasted spectrum. With 4 major cell carriers you need 4x the spectrum for any given footprint.
Why can't this same total spectrum be used by all the carriers simultaneously, with some kind of back-end accounting determining what proportion of the tower costs are paid by each carrier, depending on subscriber mix?
Why don't they use the Smart meters attached to people's houses?
I come here for the love
The jury may still be out on this due to it's claims of 'unlimited', etc. But have a look:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-...
As a colleague once opined, "There is no more spectrum. It's physics. That's it, that's all."
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Here in the DFW area at least half of the OTA TV stations are just "infomercials." Why waste this spectrum on TV spam? Why not use it for something useful like watching cat videos on mobes?
Why can't this same total spectrum be used by all the carriers simultaneously, with some kind of back-end accounting determining what proportion of the tower costs are paid by each carrier
That's sort of how MVNOs already work: one of the big four carriers owns the spectrum and the towers, and a bunch of smaller carriers lease them.
nobody is using 902-928 MHz, 1,240-1,300 MHz, 2,300-2,400 MHz or 3,300-3,500 right? Give them to the cell phone operators.
i don't think satellites or telecommunications microwave towers use those frequencies
I don't see any records. no news stories about ham radios and the thousands of hams that regularly volunteer their equipment and time in preparedness exercises. just asking.
my satellite phone stayed up during hurricane Sandy and the big earthquake on the east coast.
Is there a region this spectrum is not digital? We could likely fit a thousand digital stations in that same airspace.
I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool. Might not be practical on a handset (at least not at frequencies below 3GHz), because there is not enough space to put adequate separation between antennas, but it could work well with tablets and other physically larger devices.
www.wavefront-av.com
I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool.
It IS MIMO: the special case where:
- The base station antennas are widely separated.
- The data is mapped so each remote antenna gets a particular one-spectrum-channel-worth subset of the data stream (rather than several antennas getting several spectru-channels worth, but in the form of differently phased-and-weighted sums of several carriers with mixes of the data). This allows the remobe devices to work with a single antenna that can move around independently of the others.
There's no reason the signal can't be mapped so that a device with two or more sufficiently separated antennas can receive roughly as many spectrm-channels worth of bandwidth as it has antennas.
Might not be practical on a handset (at least not at frequencies below 3GHz), because there is not enough space to put adequate separation between antennas, but it could work well with tablets and other physically larger devices.
You called it. The separation doesn't need to be all that large (if the device is positioned near enough to the base stations that it "sees" adeqiate separation of the base antennas). But it does need to be at least in the ballpark of a quarter wavelength or more, even in the best of cases.
Spreading the component antennas of the MIMO base station out to different cell towers expands the area where MIMO tricks can be fully utilized in proportion - at the cost of requiring precise synchronization of local oscillators among the various antenna sites (and precise compensation for relative sway of the cell towers). But it doesn't require any changes at the remote end of the link - those antennas need the same separation for a given frequency and given perceived angular separation of the base antennas, regardless of the distance to the base antennas. (Spreading them further just means the remote can resolve smaller apparent angles, and thus work in more-than-spectrum mode further from the set of base stations.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In NYC the NOAA weather station has been offline since this past summer. There was a promise to turn it on if there was an event but we've had tornado warnings, blizzards, deadly cold, floods and yet not a peep from the station. Why is it turned off? They claim its causing interference with their new radios. That being said do you honestly think the government can handle dispersal of radio spectrum properly?
Start by moving all the public safety users out of the UHF T-Band (470-512 MHz), or at least require them to make the most of the 700mhz spectrum that was allocated solely to them before allowing any new licenses or renewals in that band. Then perhaps look at the utilization of the 800mhz public safety allocations and see how well they're being used and if there is space for any of them in the 700mhz band. If public safety is going to get new allocations without giving any up, that's crap.