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Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion
An anonymous reader sends word that the 2014 wireless spectrum license auction has surpassed $34 billion. "A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission's history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it's not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years."
Either way you cut it, it's just another tax that gets paid by the end consumer, a big fat windfall for consolidated revenue.
I think a much better way would be for companies to bid based on the value they bring to the end consumer public, with the company that promises the best value winning.
If that company fails to deliver within some reasonable time frame, the spectrum should be passed on to the next best offer.
Value wound be measured based on dollars per GBit that they agree to offer the end service for. (voice calls really should be priced this way too, these days - now everything is digital)
if it really isn't practicable to implement something like the above, lt'd be nice to at least see the money spent on a fibre roll-out or other physical media based infrastructure.
I wonder what provisions the government put on the license. Perhaps something about infrastructure to aid in surveillance?
/Tinfoil?
I suggest we regulate it like most power/water/sewage companies are regulated - there's a single (very profit- and performance-regulated) company that is responsible for the infrastructure - towers, transceivers, and backhaul in this case. Carriers would then be able to lease access to spectrum from that company with little/no barrier to entry.
Just because you can't see most of the infrastructure it doesn't mean that you shouldn't manage it wisely like any other infrastructure, be it water/sewer pipes or power distribution lines.
I'd love to see this model applied to telephone/fiber/CATV and cellular towers - imagine being able to actually select an internet provider from a wide array of competing companies instead of being locked in to the one that your municipality made the best $$$ deal with.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This is a free zero cost medium. The spectrum should be opnened up to everyone with power being the only limitation. We are told over and over the spectrum needs to be regulated because of interference yet for all intents and purposes there is nothing in physics that limits information density until you get to the quantum level. Wireless carriers have zero incentive to combat interference when they have a monopoly on the spectrum. They just charge more. It's also obvious to many engineers that mesh networks are more efficient. But mesh networks decentralize authority and therefore affect revenue so meshing is not likely to be popular with incumbent carriers. All those billions will ultimately be paid for be the consumer while the incumbents have zero incentive to innovate. We should take the spectrum away from business people and give it to engineers who can actually do something with it.