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Crowded US Airwaves Desperately In Search of Spectrum Breathing Room

Posted by Soulskill on from the running-out-of-ether dept.

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."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Ham radio bands by ctrl-alt-canc · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

    1. Re:Ham radio bands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Shortwave/VHF bands allocated to them should be enough for this purpose. UHF/SHF allocations have been in the past justified as "experimentation" but, to be fair, 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.

    2. Re:Ham radio bands by N1EY · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Ham radio is full of no code technicians that wear orange hats. They claim to be experts. Yet, they spend much of their time as handheld radio programmers. Massachusetts has said effectively, "NO MORE!" Ham radio runs the Boston Marathon net. This is the last thing in Mass. RACES has been terminated. Official co-operation with the Government has been effectively concluded. Only private organizations are making any compacts with the ARRL ARES organization. -------------- From one of the last extras to pass code.