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A Case Against Further Government Spectrum Auctions
dkatana points out an article arguing that the governments should stop further auctions of 4G spectrum because it reduces infrastructure investment from carriers and makes net neutrality more difficult to regulate. Quoting:
The FCC recently raised more than $34 billion for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is good news for the treasury coffers, but government auctions threaten the ability of the FCC and similar agencies to manage the spectrum, impose net neutrality rules, and allow new businesses to compete.
Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please, blocking access or charging huge fees to others. Issues such as speed throttling and preferential access come to mind. If governments insist in auctions of the newly available frequencies, it could hurt the industry and potentially destroy any possibility of negotiating universal access and net neutrality.
Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please, blocking access or charging huge fees to others. Issues such as speed throttling and preferential access come to mind. If governments insist in auctions of the newly available frequencies, it could hurt the industry and potentially destroy any possibility of negotiating universal access and net neutrality.
I tried. But somehow I got dumped here. Soulskill, can you at least check the links on your own goddamned web site?
Back on track - so the government is just selling the spectrum without any preconditions, rules, regulations? The FCC? Whose regulations on simple things spans tens of pages of dense type?
Really?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"but government auctions threaten the ability of the FCC and similar agencies to manage the spectrum, impose net neutrality rules, and allow new businesses to compete."
Where I mention the ongoing government/corporate conspiracy and get modded down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is the same silly logic FCC chief Wheeler used to in his blog post back when he advocated the T-Mobile + AT&T merger. It basically sums up as this:
"It we just give them some stuff then they will be ok with us regulating them"
How about the FCC just do it's fucking job? Regulation should not require give and take with the industry, that's exactly how regulation can go wrong.
meep
I want analog TV back. The digital cliff can be awful. (Not to get rid of digital, but to supplement it.)
Spectrum is a natural monopoly (for that particular spectrum). Much in the way that real estate is a natural monopoly (for that particular patch of land). Giving a private party ownership in perpetuity of a natural monopoly breaks capitalism. A recurring cost needs to be added to encourage effective use. Property taxes accomplish that for real estate (when used properly, and not hijacked by the government as a source of revenue). If the property taxes are appropriate for the location, people making effective use of the land are able to pay it with little pain. People not making effective use of the land (e.g. a strawberry farm in the middle of a city) are unable to pay, and thus are encouraged to either change how they're using the land to generate revenue more appropriate for the location's potential, or to sell the land to someone who can/plans to generate such revenue.
The same needs to happen with spectrum. The government shouldn't be selling it. It should be leasing it. Every 5-10 years, it should reappraise how much revenue all spectrum is generating, and the annual lease amount raised to something commensurate with that revenue potential. Companies which are doing a thriving business with that spectrum will be able to pay the increased lease. Companies sitting on the spectrum just to keep it out of the hands of their competitors will indirectly be paying their competitors (via the government, which should use the funds for enforcement and to encourage development of technologies that use spectrum). And companies struggling will be forced to adopt newer (hopefully better) business models to use the spectrum, or be forced to sell to someone else who can. If they can't make it work, someone else should be given the chance.
You can even get fancy to thwart corner cases. e.g. To discourage sitting on spectrum to block competitors, tie the annual lease to the amount that the spectrum is used. If it's utilized 75% or more, you get the normal lease. If it's 50%-75% utilization, you pay 1.5x the rate. If it's 25%-50% utilization you pay 2x the rate. Less than 25% utilization and you pay 5x the rate. To discourage monopolization of large amounts of spectrum by a few companies, increase the annual lease depending on how many blocks you're leasing. But it all hinges on leasing spectrum instead of auctioning it off.
It's the money, stupid.
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in the last decade a bunch of companies bought frequencies and sat on them and never used them only to resell them at a profit
His current acts are nothing more than a demonstration of where his loyalties are.
He'll expect to be handsomely rewarded when he returns to corporate America.
Ain't crony capitalism grand?
... puts the spectrum under the FAA.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please
They might believe that regardless of how much they pay for the spectrum. Or they might not believe it but still act like they do. Both of which are irrelevant, because as long as there are rules, enforcement will be necessary, so just be prepared to enforce them and to hell with companies who are claiming they bought more than they paid for..
I'm not a fan of the carriers for the obvious reasons, but I have to play Devil's Advocate here and remind you all of how much money it costs to deploy equipment in all that spectrum. This is the reason why coverage is great in cities and poor in the countryside. Look how much spectrum T-Mobile and Sprint have over a huge geographical area and yet deploy over only a tiny percentage of it; supposedly T-Mobile will deploy more in rural areas where they can get 700 MHz spectrum, but I'll believe that when I see it. Likewise, in lesser (ranked 101+ or so?) metro areas, their network is a mess of technologies with 2, 3, and 4G all in the same city, and only barely-working 2G in some areas, including one (Kingman, Arizona) where T-Mobile is severely oversubscribed yet they won't put a dime into improvement.
So here's an idea I've had for years: pay less money for spectrum in exchange for current-technology coverage over your ENTIRE license area rather than just the big cities. I can't count how many people would love decent internet access and can't get it because the spectrum is all owned by companies who refuse to actually install equipment there: this practice should be illegal.
Sure, the leasing idea is probably the better one, but the roll-out cost of keeping up with the technology is far in excess of that. Also note that this argument isn't just about the cell/mobile bands but also all the other bands, especially as the phone companies continue to gobble up everyone else's spectrum--even us ham radio operators, where I expect the 9cm band (and possibly the 23cm band) will disappear within the next decade or two.
Oh, also, have any of you read how hard it will be coordinating with government stations on the AWS-3 band? There are numerous places where the band will likely never be able to be used by a carrier even though they're licensed for it.
Finally, remember that any price increase will ALWAYS be passed on to the customer--even phantom charges when they can get away with it ("Government Regulatory Recovery" charges, anyone?).
Digital engineers know almost nothing about RF. That's why BPL failed, that's why that asshat plan for broadband phones right next to the GPS frequencies failed. Not just that it failed, but non one who was remotely competent thought it would ever work.
Faith based and "hope for the best" engineering have never worked.
There's not a lot of spare spectrum left, kids. And anything that goes into it has got to play well with others.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
What government? this is internet incase you forget.
Lease it to them for 20 years with an ability to renew at higher costs for 20 more. If they're using it effectively and still making money, they can keep it, otherwise it goes back to the public.
So that $34 Billion will keep the US National debt from increasing for 11 whole days. Good job guys!
The biggest gains in wireless spectrum use for the public have been the open-access unlicensed uses like Wifi and Bluetooth at 2.4GHz, and to a lesser extent 5.8 GHz, plus 900 MHz (typically cordless phones), 433/etc. (telemetry stuff), and other low-power apps. Yes, mobile phones running on dedicated frequencies have also been important, but we'd get more public value by letting the public have access to the spectrum for shared access, even though the FCC wouldn't get a bunch of cash from selling it off.
Also, the high-priced spectrum auctions of the past result in high-priced services to the public because the carriers have to make back their money, while unlicensed use resulted in development of cheaper and cheaper hardware to take advantage of the free bandwidth.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The auction process led to extremely high prices paid to the European and US governments by cellular companies, who turned them into high-priced mobile phone services to the public (nobody sat on them, except maybe a few companies who bought them for resale, and they quickly turned them around for a profit.)
But unlicensed use means that everybody gets to use them, like you with your wifi at home, at work, and at the coffee shop where you hang out, or your car radio talking to your phone over Bluetooth, or your wireless thermometer telling you what the temperature is outside, and lots of similar uses that are only constrained by the physics of sharing the spectrum and the Moore's Law driven decreases in costs of equipment to use them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
$1Billion per year for every percent of the total area not fully covered.
Laughably wrong on both counts. We're interested in infrastructure that is used by as many consumers as possible. That's the purpose of a market. And relying on a clueless bureaucracy like the FCC to enforce so-called "neutrality" is like passing a law that pi is an integer.
So if we give out more spectrum this will make it harder for data to be treated equally. Sounds more like Comcast et. al saying, hah! you see because we were granted spectrum and this dude (or these dudes) on the Internet said that it will make Net Neutrality harder to regulate, that is why in the future, our plans are to not follow Net Neutrality will pan out. Then when that happens, everybody is like "Why can't we have Net Neutrality" and Comcast et. al will say "Yeah, weren't you listening to those Internet dudes?" In other words they pay somebody to say that this will happen and then they make it happen, and then cite "natural causes" as a way to operate in contrast to Net Neutrality. Same thing with the "AT&T will delay 1Gb lines because of 'Net Neutrality'"...who is writing their training manual?
Society use your Sciences
Should the government sell all our natural resources in exchange for some cash now? Sure, our spectrum is finite, but so are all our other resources...if we just sell them all to companies, we'll be better off, right? Right?
Maybe not. Maybe we shouldn't sell natural resources, maybe we should RENT them.
How about having the government properly regulate the peoples' bandwidth instead of just acting as an auction house and industry lobbyist. (Wheeler was and the last guy now has his job! tag team!)
Government should digitize and drive everything as packets. Become the infrastructure like the highway system. Charge rates for bandwidth use so anybody could be a cell company - since it just costs for packets over the network. Same with TV as well-- in fact, TV should have been done in a similar way. Sure it would have delayed the transition.... perhaps this is the next generation transition we should be designing today! Wide band devices which can use all the TV and cell bandwidth to send IPv6 packets or something similar. At least we could have physics and science manage the system instead of whatever the owners can hack together in their purchased space.
Note: I realize with the use of the loaded word "socialist" I've just lost most American readers.
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This is good news for the treasury coffers, but government auctions threaten the ability of the FCC and similar agencies to manage the spectrum, impose net neutrality rules, and allow new businesses to compete.
Right. Because as soon as the FCC deposits the checks, they automatically waive their ability to enforce regulations on the use of the spectrum. Or, on the other hand, you know, maybe not.
Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please...
Right. Because their lawyers are illiterate buffoons who have no idea what the regulations are governing the use of the spectrum on which they are bidding billions of dollars. Or, on the other hand, you know, maybe not.
Seriously, are dkatana and soulskill really this fucking retarded??? (Not to mention the author of the actual article...)
Why can we not open the spectrum up to competition? Why does only one carrier get to dominate a set of frequencies? AFAIK there is nothing in physics that for a practical purpose puts a limit on information density in space. Interference is a problem because they choose to use an antiquated non-meshed infrastructue. The only reason our phones can't talk to each other directly is because of a bad network design. There's no reason we couldn't use these long range phone frequencies so that every device could form an ipv6 semi non centrailzed meshed network that costs next to nothing to run. Why are we still doing it the old fashioned way? Let's open up the spectrum. It's not finite like the FCC says it is.
I agree. Auctioning creates a "pay to play" system. Spectrum is a fixed resource - it should be allocated based on social policy - not based on who can pay the most. And when someone pays for it, they have every right to feel that they "own" it - and that undermines the government's ability to manage it: to adjust rules as situations change over time. Auctioning a fixed public resource is nothing less than prostitution of our public assets.
Do away with the silly auctions, all that they do is cause the cost to be passed down to the subscribers, which is by definition, a hidden tax. It is much more efficient for everybody and creates better competition amongst providers if the government retains ownership and nationalizes the entire spectrum, and along with it the mobile access network infrastructure, as a wholesaler only. Then, the providers compete with their various offerings, and coverage is efficiently managed with the maximum bandwidth available to any subscriber regardless of the network provider they subscribe to.
The same can be applied to Wireline access networks. This is all in-line with Australia's plans for the National Broadband Network which was a brilliant plan until it was railroaded by conservatives with corporate interests in mind.
The only problem I foresee with this is the cost involved in 'repatriating' the access networks from the incumbent telco's and also complications between retailer and the national wholesaler when it comes to troubleshooting access network issues. Hopefully the government can put this operation out to tender to a competent operator that is not affiliated with any of the retailers in any way.
At a bare minimum small blocks of the sold spectrum should be opened up for non/minimally regulated open uses, much like what has happened with the frequencies used by routers, wireless cameras/microphones, etc. Most of the frequencies that have been opened up for such uses are the crap that no one else wants or are limited to such low power levels as to be useless for decent applications. I recently had a local fixed wireless ISP check my house for connectivity, despite being surrounded by towers they couldn't get a signal since the frequencies they use can't go through a few leafs. At the same time I have fine mobile communications, including 3G internet connectivity despite the nearest tower being considerably more distant than the wireless ISP towers.
Yeah, why Spectrum?
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