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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 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/...
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. That would require actual investment and work instead of just looking for an excuse to fuck people and pocket more.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
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.
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."