FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap 300
locallyunscene writes "'We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month,' FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. 'So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?'"
It's 1996 again? (Score:2)
This sounds like back in the mid-1990's when people were giving dire prediction about the Internet being overloaded and becoming unusable.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>Once the air is saturated on the allocated frequencies, we are done
Not quite "done". We can say goodbye to over-the-air FM and TV. We already lost channels 52 to 83 that were turned-over to cellphones, and I suspect it's only a matter of time until channels 2 to 51 (including the FM band) disappear. That would not meet the FCC's "30 fold" estimate, but it would increase the available wireless spectrum by about 9 times present levels.
Lower frequency shortwave and AM radio will probably survive, simply because it's not practical to carry-around 100 foot long transmitting antennas with your phone.
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carrier frequency (Score:2)
It really doesn't make sense to trade the FM for digital. Carrier frequency isn't high enough to be of much use.
I'm rather depressed at the whole TV debacle, too. There should be room for analog TV within our culture/society. Maybe HAM?
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it's called Amateur TV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television [wikipedia.org]
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You don't need nearly as long an antenna to receive an AM signal (granted, I still suspect they're a bit big for pocket-sized phones). If you allowed that the phone could transmit in one band in receive in another then the AM bands could still be useful.
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I wouldn't grantee too much on AM/shortwave. To transmit efficiently you may want a good sized antenna but couldn't the small devices still transmit on higher frequencies, and receive on the lower frequencies with the base stations being huge still?
Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:4, Insightful)
The technology is extremely mature, very inexpensive, not (currently) patented, about as portable as it gets and it doesn't require a $50 monthly subscription to use. Sure *you* might not listen to FM radio but I and millions of other people do every day. Every car built since the 70s has an FM radio and people still listen to it every day when they drive. I get my news, in real time, from public radio between classes on my MP3 player's built-in FM tuner. Other technologies might be able to partially replace FM, but they will be massively more expensive and they will probably never achieve the reach FM has today.
Bottom line: because of the built-up infrastructure, FM is here to stay.
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Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:4, Interesting)
You could use microeletric gyroscopes to detemine orientation, and (in real time) use phased array antennas to only broadcast at the the closest tower.
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This is a physical problem. There is only so much spectrum available.
Kind of reminds me of the predictions that 9.6, then 14.4, then 28.8 were the fastest possible modem throughput on copper because it was physically impossible to squeeze any more information onto the available bandwidth.
Yet each time someone makes this assertion something else comes along.
With radio, as frequencies increase, building penetration, foliage penetration decreases. With increased cellular handset density the signal to noise floor rises and soon the phones can't hear themselves for all the shout
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ADSL bypasses the problem entirely.
Phone lines have a total bandwidth of 64k, of which something speaking through an analog line can only get 56k, with the rest being used for signalling data. There's no way to go any higher. Think of trying to play 24 bit, 96KHz music into a system that only records 8 bit at 11KHz. No matter what you put into that line, you're not getting more quality out of it.
So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely. The limit isn't in the line itself, it's
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ADSL bypasses the problem entirely. So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely.
No. Sorry that is simply NOT true.
ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
The only difference is that instead of sending sound (analog) down the wire they send electrical pulses, 1s and 0s: digital data.
Nothing changed other than someone started thinking OUT of the box. Someone told the analog engineers to take a hike.
And yet this nonsens
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Er, no.
There are two different things here: The limit of the line and the limit of the receiver at the end of it.
The limit of the receiver in an analog line is 56k. You can't dial a phone number on an analog line and then establish a connection at ADSL speeds from one end to the other. It's like this: ("=" is a fat pipe, "-" is a slow one)
The phone line might be able to handle 10mbps fine, but the DS0 you get inside the telco has a hard 64kbps limit
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>>>ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
>>>
Not only are you wrong, but you managed to be wrong three times. The old telephone wire and the new DSL is NOT the same copper pair, not the same infrastructure, and not the same physical stretch of wire. Here are the differences:
- The old telephone infrastructure was bandlimi
Obvious... (Score:2)
Massive wi-fi mesh? In fact, India already does something very similar for a very long time.
Isn't it great that so many of our mobiles already have wi-fi hardware!?
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Have cell towers and data towers be much much closer together. Then have them all be short range. And transfer the data over cables. Done, If we make 30x as many towers (these would all be tiny cheap places compared to current towers) and made more fiber hookups... Then the problem is solved without anything particularly genius. We can probably keep doing this for quite some time before it becomes a major issue.
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What are you talking about "Buy it back"?
These companies are using this bandwidth to provide the services we need. Ever heard of a Cell phone?
The government has no need of this specturm. WE the PEOPLE do.
Buy it back from ATT and your cell phone is off the air.
In your case this may lead to considerable signal to noise ration improvement. But in the general case its a silly suggestion.
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These companies are using this bandwidth to provide the services we need. Ever heard of a Cell phone?
I disagree with the fact "we need" cell phone service.
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As you pointed out, this happened for wired connections in the past. In response, we are almost to commercial 40Gb and even 100Gb links, the latter being targeted for 40km stretches [wikipedia.org].
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>>>technology will evolve to give you more bandwidth.
No. There's a limit to how much technology can do. That's why phone lines are maxed-out at 56 kbit/s - there's no more room for expansion since it's already at the physical limit. Same applies with wireless.
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I'm getting about 7 Gbits from the phone line that used to be maxed out at 52k or so, and I can make voice calls on it at the same time as my downloads, something I couldn't do before.
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>>>Same line, different signal.
No... same line, different bandwidth. The bandwidth is the key. 4000 hertz for the phone dialup modem versus ~200,000 hertz for the DSL connection. If the DSL was forced to limit itself to the same bandwidth as a dialup modem, it would only be 64k. (This is called a "DSzero" or "DS0" line by the telephone company, also called ISDN.)
DSL also terminates your line only a few hundred feet from your house, and upgrades it to fiber or coax, whereas the original teleph
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you mena the phone line that used to be maxed out at 1200bps, then 2400 bps, then they KNEW that 9600 bps was the max ..there was JUST no way to send any more information down a single phone line. Then they KNEW 56000 bps was the max, etc..
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>>>Then they KNEW 56000 bps was the max, etc..
Ever heard of the Shannon limit? On an analog phone line, you cannot exceed 35 kbit/s (V.34). Ever heard of Nyquist theory? On a digital phone line, the 4000 hertz bandwidth sampled at 8000 times per second, times 7 bits per sample == 56000 maximum.
As Scotty on Star Trek would say, "You cannae change the laws of physics!"
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>>>I'm getting about 7 Gbits from the phone line that used to be maxed out at 52k or so
No you're not. When you upgraded to DSL, the company disconnected the telephone line (bandlimited to 4000 hertz) with a standard twisted-pair wire (no upper limit). Furthermore they disconnected your house from the old phone service, and connected it to a DSLAM which converts the short ~500 meter cable to higher-quality coaxial or fiber.
So my previous comment about the 4000-hertz wide telephone service still be
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Physically though, the spectrum is effectively infinite. With technology advanced and sensitive enough, you could send all the world's data in a second, using the same spectrum that mig
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Analog phone lines are indeed no faster than 56 kbits/second
For the sake of clarity analog phone lines are inherently limited to 2400 bits/second (bps). Better compression algorithms got us up to 56 kbps.
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Sorry for the repost, I meant to add this link explaining twisted pair:
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Networks/physical.phone.html [computing.dcu.ie]
Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:4, Informative)
Analog phone lines are indeed no faster than 56 kbits/second
For the sake of clarity analog phone lines are inherently limited to 2400 bits/second (bps). Better compression algorithms got us up to 56 kbps.
For the sake of clarity, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. 56-kbits/second is the max because that's what the analog-digital converters within the telco are set for. A DS0 phone circuit is by definition a 56k or 64k digital channel (depends on inband or out-of-band signalling). The early 2400 and 4800 limits were due to poor quality lines and equipment that just wasn't setup to go faster. This was back when most users were just doing text and fax machines were the bandwidth intensive applications.
The magic of 56k comes from the users modem being able to synchronize its timing and discrete output levels (the "constellation") to match the analog-digital converter attached to the users phone line. The server end of the circuit must be digitally connected for this to work.
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>>>phone lines are inherently limited to 2400 bits/second (bps). Better compression algorithms got us up to 56 kbps.
>>>
False. The physical limits on an analog phone line are 3,429 SYMBOLS per second, with approximately 10 bits represented by each symbol, to achieve 33,800 bits per second (V.34)
The physical limits on digital phone lines are 8000 SAMPLES per second, and 7 bits each, to yield 56,000 bits per second. The 8th bit is reserved by the telephone company, otherwise we would see 64
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>>>I think kevinmenzel illustrated the point quite well. Analog phone lines are indeed no faster than 56 kbits/second. That's why we went to a new technology, and now have DSL.
>>>
Yes but if DSL was forced to fit inside the same bandwidth as the old dialup phone modems (4000 hertz wide), it would still only be 64 kbit/s speed. *That* was the point I was making... you can only squeeze so much data into a FIXED width of space. The universe places physical limits in what engineers can
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>>>>>>>>technology will evolve to give you more bandwidth.
>>
>>No. There's a limit to how much technology can do. That's why phone lines are maxed-out at 56 kbit/s - there's no more room for expansion since it's already at the physical limit (4000 hertz).
(Score:0, Troll)
Unbelievable. The moderators on this forum would fail basic PHYSICS 101. They can't even understand the simplicity of Shannon's Limit or Nyquist's Theorem (which state a limited bandwidth has a maxi
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Re:It's 1996 again? (Score:5, Informative)
No DSL is *not* over telephone lines. POTS (plain old telephone service) is defined as having a 0 to 8000 hertz bandwidth, hence the 56k dialup limit. The engineers have squeezed as much data as they can into that limited range.
DSL disconnects the POTS line, and replaces it with a central box (DSLAM) that converts the incoming twisted-pair and passes it along to higher-quality fiber or coax.
BTW thanks for modding me "troll" kevinmenzel.
-1 I disagree is not why moderation exists.
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Correction: Replace "8000 hertz" with "4000 hertz"
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So you're saying it wasn't a physical limitation of the broadcast medium at all, it was a hardware limitation of the receiver.
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>>>So you're saying it wasn't a physical limitation of the broadcast medium at all, it was a hardware limitation of the receiver.
No it was an EXAMPLE to illustrate what happens when bandwidth is limited. Imagine that every cellphone user is assigned 4000 hertz of space for his usage. How much data can be sent over that width? The answer is not "as much as we want". The answer is defined by the physical limits of the universe.
In the world of telephone modems 4000 hertz hits that universal
Electromagnetic spectrum isn't defined by Kb/s (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yes it is using the same physical lines (although they may have to be cleaned up to remove loading coils or branched circuits). As you pointed out though, it not the same equipment at either end. Also, calling it an 8000 hertz bandwidth is rather misleading. It's an 8-bit sample taken at a sampling rate of 8000 hertz, not an 8k wide frequency range as your wording might imply. Its the sampling rate time the sample size that gives you a theoretical 64-kilobit/second limit, but other FCC and technical iss
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I meant to say "4000 hertz" not 8000 hertz. Ooops.
.
>>>is using the same physical lines (although they may have to be cleaned up to remove loading coils or branched circuits)
Yes but the whole point of this discussion is your have a *fixed* bandwidth or spectrum. If DSL was forced to fit inside the same 4000-hertz-wide telephone line as a dialup modem, it would be no faster than 56k (7 bits timed 8000 samples/second with bit 8 reserved).
If it were possible to exceed 56k over POTS, someone would ha
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The idea I'm trying to get across is that technology is not limited to the techniques you are familiar with. So if we were limited to using the phone line as it has
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No DSL is *not* over telephone lines. POTS (plain old telephone service) is defined as having a 0 to 8000 hertz bandwidth, hence the 56k dialup limit. The engineers have squeezed as much data as they can into that limited range.
Actually that limit is digital in nature, and has nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof) in the lines themselves. I work at a university and we use phone lines to move audio from building to building. It's analog the whole way, with all switching equipment removed and everything hard wired together at the university's telecom office. It's good enough to get FM broadcast quality even running all the way across campus and back again.
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>>>I work at a university and we use phone lines to move audio from building to building.
Since telephone lines are bandlimited to 4000 hertz, what you are claiming is impossible. You would have to remove that 4000 hertz limit to carry the full 20,000 hertz audio spectrum, at which point the lines cease to be telephone wires...... they no longer meet the international specifications for POTS.
What you have is twisted-pair copper. Basically ethernet, but carrying analog audio instead of data.
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Though you would need to negotiate your slave contract discounts with your authorized, killer-robot-overlord happiness allocation unit.
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>>>technology will evolve to give you more bandwidth.
People didn't like my 56k/4000-hertz-wide telephone example, so I'll try a different tactic: Bandwidth is FIXED. You can change the datarate inside that fixed bandwidth, but that is limited by Shannon's Limit (analog) and Nyquist's Theorem (digital). Engineers can not violate the physical maximums placed upon us by the universe.
Spectrum auction (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that why our government just auctioned off billions of dollars of our publicly-owned spectrum? So that companies could sell it back to us in the form of a three-year contract?
"thousands of megabytes" (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't that why our government just auctioned off billions of dollars of our publicly-owned spectrum?
The department that manages that spectrum is apparently run by somebody who has yet to discover the term "gigabytes". What could possibly go wrong?
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Re:Spectrum auction (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who is somewhat involved with actually using some (12MHz) of that recently-auctioned 700MHz spectrum, please allow me to say the following:
It's not vast. And it's not pretty. In fact, it's generally useless for common Internet access on any sort of grand scale:
700MHz is cool because people can use it at long distances from the central tower without much concern about their own antenna orientation. But once folks actually start to populate the network and, you know, use it, it gets hairy.
The correct answer, of course, is to ratchet down power and use more (and perhaps smaller) towers. But by the time you increase density enough that it becomes useful for any sort of popular usage, you've got so many towers/picocells/whatever that a mesh of bog-standard 802.11G starts looking far more practical.
*sigh*
Wireless technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the real world of physics.
Wired and optical technologies will ever be superior to wireless, by the simple fact that they're essentially 1D lines running through 3D space, whereas a typical wireless signal is a 3D signal in 3D space - a single frequency gives a fixed bandwidth to a single user in a given ~volume~.
Advanced tricks allow increased sharing, but the fundamental limitations remain.
Consider the volume of a typical wifi base station .. now imagine filling that volume with OC192 cabling. As they say on the "intartoobs", "pwned".
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I wish people would stop pretending that wires are secure enough use unencrypted. It's like they never heard of beige boxing.
security? (Score:2)
security is not unimportant.
Get spectrum used by obsolete technolgies (Score:2, Insightful)
Shortwave: Numbers Stations: Spies (Score:3, Interesting)
Shortwave? Does anyone actually listen to it?
Spies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station [wikipedia.org]
One man's static, is another man's coded instructions.
So you admit to listening to shortwave static and Cuba Radio? What a give-away.
I'm not sure about Canadian News, but I'm sure some charges could be trumped up for you listening to that.
As for the Jesus folks, Bibles make excellent One Time Pads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad [wikipedia.org]
I think shortwave will be around for a bit, even if only spooks listen to it.
Re:Get spectrum used by obsolete technolgies (Score:4, Insightful)
If you took the entirety of the AM and FM radio space, you'd have about as much frequency space as a single wifi channel, which would be spread over a fairly large area due to the signal propagation properties. Shortwave would be even worse in that respect.
In short, it would not be very useful.
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> AM and FM radio. Who listens to the radio anymore?
I do, among about 230 million others in the US. Americans spend more time listening to FM radio than to Internet radio, MP3 players, or CDs.
> Shortwave?
For "mobile devices"? There are a few problems with that...
> I turned on a shortwave...
One you bought at Best Buy for $9.95? With a loop antenna? A real performer, no doubt.
Re:Get spectrum used by obsolete technolgies (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's no radio in my car, what am I supposed to listen to? And before you say "iPod" I don't want to hear the same music over and over. I want to hear new stuff. Also traffic and weather reports ("warning: tornado coming") are nice to have. I like my radio and if they take away both AM and FM, then I'm going to hurt somebody. :-| At the very least leave me AM.
>>>I turned on a shortwave and between huge swaths of static,
What? You need to get rid of that old unit, because they have digital shortwave now. It sounds almost as good as a CD, and still remains popular in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
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Millions of people listen to FM radio. Sheesh, are slashdotters experiences of people really so narrow that that you assume that the geek segment of the population is the only one? Yes, let's get rid of that to add a tiny amount of extra space for people to watch Youtube videos on their mobiles.
There's a better case for re-using the old analogue TV spectrum, but only because it's been replaced with a functionally equivalent but more bandwidth-efficient system. Broadcast radio hasn't.
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Okay - FM is 20 megahertz wide and AM is about 1 megahertz wide, so we're talking the equivalent of 3.5 television channels.
According to the ATSC spec, that's just 70 Mbit/s of datawidth.
According to the HDR spec, you get 300kbit/s per 0.2 spacing, or about 32 Mbit/s.
Trivial.
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And since we're on the topic, why did you not bring up the 802.11n protocol, which can accommodate 288 Mbits/s in a 20 MHz channel?
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>>>older techniques, but how does that relate to whatever spec is going to be rolling out
Alright. Well technologies improve, yes, but there's still a physical maximum imposed by our universe. 21 megahertz == ~330 Mbit/s according to Nyquist's Theorem. So killing-off AM and FM would free-up enough bandwidth to serve three maybe four users.
carrier frequency (Score:2)
Go take a look at bandwidth versus carrier frequency.
What always happens... (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?
The same thing that always happens: The telecoms cry like babies and the consumers get less for equal or greater cost.
Re:What always happens... (Score:4, Insightful)
amateur radio (Score:2)
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There are international treaties to observe. HAM spectrum won't disappear quickly.
What about the Spectrum ? (Score:2)
Yes, all those mobile devices have wireless and yet the venerable Spectrum [wikipedia.org] still has none. No fair !
Dynamic frequency negotiation (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no radio engineer, but it is my understanding that there's been a bit of work on dynamic frequency negotiation that allow devices to find frequencies that are and aren't being used (or what levels of noise there are). I've just started looking into Software defined radio [wikipedia.org] and the more esoteric (and horribly-named IMO) Cognitive radio [wikipedia.org] that theoretically provides the (artificial) intelligence to perform such negotiation. The theory is that this approach makes more efficient use of the same spectrum while improving communication for those devices because their I/O is very flexible. And, the devices are hackable in software, which is fun for the whole family.
If there are any radio people in the room, speak up.
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>>>allow devices to find frequencies that are and aren't being used
Yeah there's already been tests using these devices on the TV Band. What they found was the device could detect strong local stations, but not the low-level signals from 40 miles or more distance, so they started broadcasting over top existing TV stations, thereby interrupting viewers' reception. The idea was rejected by the FCC in early 2008.
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I believe that they have since been convinced that the study was flawed and are reconsidering.
Economics (Score:3, Interesting)
It's pretty simple, really. If the company makes money on each connection, and reinvests part of that profit, then the service network overall grows more capable. More towers, more frequencies, more bandwidth.
Assuming that the phone companies are smart enough to reinvest a portion of their profits - at my company we invest heavily in growth, and have at any time about 5x-10x capacity headroom, along with fully redundant backup schema for D/R. A few times, we've leaned on that extra infrastructure - while not cheap, it's cheap insurance.
Why would cellular networks be any different?
Dynamic Allocation (Score:3, Insightful)
> What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile
> broadband on their laptops or netbooks?
You finally admit that it isn't 1920 anymore and give up on centralized static global allocation?
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No, you drop the power and use more cells.
Are Silos The Problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
"'We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month,' FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. 'So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?'"
Is the problem all the silos? Suppose every house with a land-line connection also had a wi-fi hub that was open. I think the bandwidth problem would not exist.
We'd be left with the "how can we profit on this" problem and the "how can the FBI spy on this" problem, but those don't seem nearly as important as the "how can we make information access ubiquitous and fast" problem.
Re:Are Silos The Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
802.11 based systems aren't good at many things that existing cellular systems are. It doesn't have soft handoffs and doesn't work well when the same network has adjacent cells using the same channel. For 2.4 GHz 802.11, there are only 3 non-overlapping channels.
802.11 can't support devices at the same distances / similar power as modern cellular networks.
Re:Are Silos The Problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
802.11 based systems aren't good at many things that existing cellular systems are. It doesn't have soft handoffs and doesn't work well when the same network has adjacent cells using the same channel. For 2.4 GHz 802.11, there are only 3 non-overlapping channels.
Good info
802.11 can't support devices at the same distances / similar power as modern cellular networks.
If you could solve the first point above, would that be a problem if open hotspots (or something similar) were ubiquitous?
You'd still need long distance for low population areas, but there isn't a spectrum crunch out there. The spectrum crunch is where population density is high -- which is where large numbers of land-line connected wireless repeaters of some sort seem to be able to solve the problem.
Admittedly, this is way outside of any kind of existing feasible business model -- but peculiar new problems seem like a decent place for peculiar new solutions.
I am genuinely curious what you think -- I think it would serve us all well if we could figure out a workable solution.
Handoff how many times per minute? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you could solve the first point above, would that be a problem if open hotspots (or something similar) were ubiquitous?
Good luck solving soft handoff for a bus traveling at 45 km/h or 30 mph. It's the same reason cell phones don't work well on planes: they pass over too many cells per minute.
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If a 802.11-derived network was designed to provide the features of a modern cellular network, it will retain little in common with 802.11. It's not possible to avoid centralized coordination of all access points; otherwise, you'd just be switching between different Internet connections every hundred feet or so.
It's already possible to have low-powered base stations that are connected t
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The main issue here isn't voice coverage but data service. Voice uses very little bandwidth. I think today's networks use codecs which compress voice to 4-12 kbit/sec.
Not only does T-Mobile typically have less spectrum than their competitors, they still have many customers on GSM, which put
Over Hyped (Score:2, Interesting)
In a congested, high user area wouldn't the telephone companies be able to turn the power down on the cell towers and then add more towers closer together? This way you can get more users in a given space, right?
I admit, I know little to nothing when it comes to radio waves, but I do know back in the 90's pre DOCSIS cable ISPs did not limit their users speed, or at least the ISP I was on. Often times the 'pipe' would fill up. The case and effect was slower bandwidth speeds for me but since it was on the ISP
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Re:Over Hyped (Score:4, Interesting)
Cable companies:
DOCSIS provides 38 mbit shared downstream iny 6 MHz. In optimal conditions, current HSDPA tech provides up to 14.4 mbit shared downstream using 5 MHz, and real world results will frequently be less than that.
scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is not as bad as a few gigabytes a month. But definitely far, far worse than millions of kilobytes per month.
Demand management (Score:2)
We'll fix the problem by keeping all those toys off the air much of the time. Laws will be passed such that if you so much as look at a wireless device while driving, it'll be confiscated.
There. Problem solved.
I'll tell you what happens.... (Score:2)
Networks start to clog up and Americans will start being fed b.s. about 'needs' to manage network traffic despite the horrible scope of network bandwidth/proliferation in the US relative to other industrialized nations, namely Korea/Japan.
ISP's stated they could double bandwidths at the cost of $6/home, but that option is easily avoided at the benefit of saving $6/home and blaming straw men.
UWB (Score:2)
Or, it should have been UWB, but Intel had to get their egos all tangled up in things and screw that one up.
Hello? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Our Military (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't look like the US military uses much of the wireless spectrum... am I missing something?
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Hive Networks sound interesting, is that like a Borg's subspace interlink node?
Re:The FCC is at fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Get rid of the public airwaves and work on letting the market come up with standards -- frequency hopping software radios, hive networks, whatever. It'll be more efficient, cheaper, and it'll provide for much more competition.
er... this is where cellphones are already heading. hell... they are already there.
Today, we still are wasting a significant portion of bandwidth on broadcasting when the future is point to point communications along with some form of P2P crowdcasting.
crowdcasting/p2p is going to evolve significantly. We are already near the cusp i think, given how much traffic is already p2p. Sooner or later p2p is going to be metered and restricted and paid for. As soon as that happens crowdcasting is dead in the water. It only works as long as everyone has 'unlimited bandwidth' right now the market is working out that 'we have a lot, but its not unlimited, but we won't meter it yet because we have enough that most people don't need to know its not unlimited and unlimited is easier to sell... so we'll just deal with the blowback when the very small number people run us into the limits.
Let something like 'crowdcasting video' catch on to the point that it can replace 'broadcast tv', where everyone anywhere watching a TV show is simultaneously p2p serving it back on to the network... at the point the jig is up; and the bandwidth meters will go up.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A daisy chain type mesh setup? Oh hell no! There is no way I'm going back to setups like that. Anyone remember apple talk?
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>>>Today, we still are wasting a significant portion of bandwidth on broadcasting when the future is point to point communications along with some form of P2P crowdcasting.
>>>
Soooo..... it will take about 1000 times more wireless/cellphone spectrum to do what broadcast TV does in just 300 megahertz. Point-to-point sounds horribly inefficient to me?
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Not really. Old GSM is horribly inefficient compared to WCDMA or CDMA, and simply using the same technology won't make all the providers decide to build one big wireless network or allow roaming between any network at any location.
At any point in the past 6 years or so, there have been 2-3 GSM networks and 3-4 CDMA networks in my area. The GSM phones are technica
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Go right ahead. Don't hold back.