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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."
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.
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.
Seriously, FPGAs are cheap, why the hell not?
http://www.aaronrogier.net
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.
Actually the Hams don't have much bandwidth on useable frequencies.
It's the age old story, the larger alocations are at frequencies that no one wants.
And of course the ham bands belong to the people, not to big business.
Are you the type of person who would be happy with selling off all our parks ?
This is a spiteful and meaningless troll.
The record shows that Hams have repeatedly provided emergency communications when it's really needed.
Thousands of Hams regularly volunteer their equipment and time in preparedness exercises.
Again, you demonstrate that you haven't a clue.
Read the stories behind any big disaster, the New Orleans floods, the Indian ocean and Japan Tsunami.
The mobile phone service is the first to go, mainly because of cheap construction and lack of generator backup.
The crucial issue for emergency communications, is having people available who have suitable equipment and who actually know how to set it up and use it.
To be efficient with HF radio gear you need to use it daily. Learning what frequencies, what procedures, how to build and tune a makeshift antenna, how to arrange power-supplies, generators, etc.
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!
You can instead see that space as an area which is open for everyone to experiment in, sometimes those areas are useful for trying out various technologies without the risk of interference to commercial services.
Most of the bandwidth consumption today are from smartphones where the users are surfing the web, which means that it's not really any productive use. There are ways to lower the load on the phone networks, and some of them are spontaneous - like wireless access points available on restaurants and other public places. The cells for wireless access points are relatively small, so even though that band is crowded it's generally not a problem with interference.
This also brings up an alternate way of mitigating the bandwidth problem, and that is to create smaller cells for the mobile phone networks in "hot" areas like shopping centers and transportation hubs.
It's when the resources are limited that invention of new more efficient ways are inspired.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It may not be registered on a ham operator, but it may still be that it is tested by one that is employed by a large corporation.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
" how to arrange power-supplies, generators, etc."
By size DUH!, everyone know you arrange them by size from Left to Right. It was question 35 on my General Exam.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Those allocations do not belong to Amateur Radio. Amateur Radio is a secondary use on both of the bands that you mention.
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.
Look at Raynet in the UK.
Cell towers require power and connectivity, can't rely on those being there in an emergency.
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
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.
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.
Actually, on the 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5Ghz bands Amateur radio is the primary allocation and unlicensed devices are secondary. In theory Hams could amplify WiFi radios to 1500 watts and knock out every hotspot in town. In practice that would be unwise to do anything that would cause interference to all those “secondary users."
There are lots of 900MHz users out there, including pagers and telemetry from things like gas wells and power meters.
5GHz is still somewhat quiet in most areas, but with 802.11AC and dual band routers becoming the mainstream products it’s going to get eaten up too.
Let's see...
There's this: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9228945/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/ham-radio-operators-rescue-after-katrina/#.Uw4J54UiZ8k
No, they have small slices across the spectrum. We need to keep those slices open to experimentation because of the need to be able to experiment and test a concept at different frequencies. Closing this off to experimentation stifles innovation.
Those frequencies are used all of the time but you may not be able to pick them up because of the lack of sensitivity of you receiver/antenna or they aren't being used in your area when you're listening.
On top of that, they're used for emergency communication. In my state (Montana) ham radio operators stepped up and help to save millions of dollars in property damage and quite possibly lives by allowing fire fighters to coordinate their efforts when the county's repeaters got burnt down. This was recognized by state government and hams were exempted from distracted driving laws so they could continue to operate mobile.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Is there a region this spectrum is not digital? We could likely fit a thousand digital stations in that same airspace.
You seem to forget that many academics and people in industry are also amateur operators or got their start as amateur operators. The current innovations are in SDR (software defined radio), DSP (digital signal processing) and mesh networks. Did you know that hams can operate 802.11 wireless gear at higher power and different frequencies under the FCC part 97 rules, versus the regular part 15 unlicensed operation?
Also, much of the spectrum allocation is governed by international treaty, so we can't always act unilaterally on spectrum. We need to keep these narrow slices of spectrum open for future innovation.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Yeah, or you could keep it simple by building an antenna with traps in it. It's worked well for a very long time and is very well understood.
Or you could use a broad-banded antenna architecture, such as a discone, cone-cone or folded dipole. Again, it's worked very well for a very long time and is very well understood.
Or you could build multiple antennas coincident in space (think Copper Catctus in miniature) and switch for frequency range by selecting which feedline you use. Need I say it? Okay, it's worked well for a very long time and is very well understood.
Or we could use a plain vanilla antenna tuner. Worked well, long time, well understood, yada yada.
I don't want to detract from the idea of building SDA's that are "worth a damn" but let's get real here: we have approaches that do work, and should be employed until we get there. Until then, using an SDA makes you a beta tester.
www.wavefront-av.com
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
Non-transferable renting would also work. Sunk costs are easier to ignore than ongoing ones.
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
Yes, they volunteer. I spoke with more than one Katrina "volunteer" who was turned away from the site. Sure, one ham can call another, and have that one call 911 and hope the information gets back to the people that actually matter. But the actual responders don't want them underfoot. Many of the preparedness exercises are held by volunteer organizations, but when a real emergency hits, they are turned away. How many preparedness exercises you refer to were organized by FEMA or the National Guard? You know, the people on the ground when the big ones hit, throwing up roadblocks and turning away self-styled survivalists with radios.
Learn to love Alaska
Oh, God, spare me the you ain't a ham until you can do 20 WPM code holier-than-thou attitude. That's the attitude that's going to kill amateur radio, and why at age 46 I'm considered a young man by most hams. I got a no-code license and had no interest in learning Morse until I got on the HF bands and got to experience firsthand WHY it was useful. I'm still not particularly good at it, but I'm learning and hope to be really good at it one day. But if I had to learn code, I'd probably have still said "to hell with it."
A lot of the HAM activity only really pops up during disasters.
You're thinking of CB. HAMS are very respectful and encouraging. There are just too many other things competing for the interests of potential new amateurs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Then how do you account for all the spectrum that Verizon bought but never used?
Last I heard, they were in negotiations with t-mobile to sell some of it, but I bet Verizon still makes a profit on the sale, for doing nothing more than hoarding spectrum