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FCC Will Auction 5G-ready 3.7-4.2GHz and mmWave Spectrum (venturebeat.com)
Jeremy Horwitz, writing for VentureBeat: Speaking at the Mobile World Congress today in Barcelona, Spain, U.S. FCC chairman Ajit Pai today announced that the commission is prepared to quickly make 5G-ready wireless spectrum available in two critically important ranges: Mid-frequency, including both 3.5GHz and 3.7-4.2GHz ranges, and high-frequency, including 24GHz and 28GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) ranges. Pai suggested that the FCC is ready to auction the spectrum in the near future, but requires Congressional cooperation by May 13 to make the 24GHz and 28GHz allocations happen.
I'm wondering how I'm getting screwed.
You're comparing apples (aka "raw speed") with zephyrs (access to specific web sites at that raw speed without paying specifically for reasonable access that web site).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
5G will enable you to stream 4k or 8k to your phone. Do you really need 8k on a six inch screen ? Can you see the difference ? 5G will require micro cells with a tower on every street corner. To service those towers you'll need fiber to every street corner ( although that would help fiber access to the home ). Think about how much it would cost to run fiber to everywhere you now can get a 4G signal, when it's too expensive for telcos to provide most rural areas with real broadband. 4G is overkill for the needs of most phones, namely voice, and messaging, and sufficient for streaming movies in better resolution than you can see on a six inch screen. How many consumers will willingly shell out more $$$ for a phone that is only marginally better than the one they have and then only in the city core where 5G has been rolled out ? Your expensive 5G phone would fall back to 4G when you travel outside the city center. The money required to provide 5G in the most densely populated areas would provide far better service if instead were spent on infilling more 4G towers so the existing bandwidth could be shared among fewer customers.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
If the FCC was really serious about getting WISP's off the ground, They would ditch these auctions that tend to go to the highest bidder and sit unused and open the Spectrum to unlicensed, WISP only, long range use.
Most WISP's out there today are using the 2.4 and 5GHz bands because their unlicensed, unfortunately their also used for WiFi traffic as well. These wreak havoc with WISP equipment especially in dense populations, and it's only getting worse as cable companies started packing 5GHz WiFi in their modems that broadcast 80MHZ of spectrum regardless if wireless is being used or not.
A clear, WISP Equipment only, spectrum block would not only help out smaller wireless ISP's with their Point to Multi point deployments, but also give business other options of connectivity between buildings besides fiber runs, since most point to point microwave setups are built around Point to Multi-point Wireless Spectrum allocation.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
It's very likely that this decision will cause interference with C Band satellite signals which down-link in the 3.7 - 4.2 GHz band. These satellites provide video feeds to television stations and cable systems world wide. Strong ground based signals in the same band will overload the low noise LNBF on C Band satellite TVRO dishes.
This is very disturbing since I recently pulled the plug on cable and rely heavily on Free To Air (FTA) video feeds from C Band domestic satellites in the USA. https://www.lyngsat.com/freetv...
So it'll be Verizon, AT&T and XFINITY Wireless pulling net neutrality shenanigans instead of... Verizion FiOS and AT&T DSL/Fiber and Comcast XFinity wired services?
At most, you're looking at adding Sprint or TMobile as one extra option.
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