FCC Chief: 300MHz More Spectrum By 2015 60
itwbennett writes "On Thursday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski laid out plans to make 300MHz more spectrum available by 2015. Among the blocks that will be auctioned in the AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) band is a band between 1755MHz and 1780MHz, where a commercial user would share the spectrum with current government users."
Genachowski's full speech (PDF) is available online.
What I can't figure out... (Score:4, Insightful)
How is it that Europe has no problems using their existing spectrum allocations, while the USA seems to be resorting to insane band fragmentation?
The European 2100 MHz band isn't THAT big...
Re:What I can't figure out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, band fragmentation benefits the carriers. Phones made for one carrier cannot be used on the other, and hence discourages customers from switching to another carrier. No wonder the carriers are keen on spectrum fragmentation.
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every carrier has free on contract phones and cheap phones. and there is a used market for every carrier's phones
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You missed the other point. Take your phone, go to another carrier (even if it were compatible) there is still no financial upside... You don't get any discount in service for bringing a device vs buying one subsidized. Therefore, the ETF is the only thing they need to enforce to discourage you from moving. Otherwise, you can just get a similar phone for very little money after switching. If you think the $200 for a "nice" phone is a barrier, you are fooling yourself because the long term cost of the d
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There is *no* mobile contract in the US priced anything close to that. I know. I just looked. I came back from a couple weeks in the UK. I spent about USD30 on a 3 network SIM + top-up. Had phone and internet service for my stay. A month of unlimited internet on 3 is about USD25. It's even cheaper for reasonably limited data (i.e. more than you get in the US on average).
The closest I could get in the US was on T-Mobile and that was USD65/mo for phone/data.
The US does not do much for keeping our teleco
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The closest I could get in the US was on T-Mobile and that was USD65/mo for phone/data.
Straight Talk's unlimited everything is $45 / month. Virgin Mobile is $35 / month. Boost is $50 / month. MetroPCS is $40 unlimited 3G coverage. All of these are still a lot more expensive than the $25 unlimited plan, but it's not as large a gap as $65 vs $25.
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Thanks for the tip. I was unaware of Straight Talk. Straight Talk is the only one of the lot that is GSM / SIM-based. The others are CDMA and non-SIM based. They all require that you buy one of their phones because CDMA phones are not really network portable. They are also mostly useless for non-US residents or us world travellers.
That said, I am now seriously thinking about ditching my T-Mobile contract for Straight Talk. Worst cast is I go back to T-Mobile monthly.
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Many consider migrating to prepaid carriers at the end of their contracts. There is no lump sum to be paid to anyone, just one month in advance. With LTE I was hoping that this will become more and more popular. But I was wrong, phones support frequencies only on the carrier they are on. So at the end of the contract, people dont pay $600 to get a new phone to get prepaid, they just renew with one of their post paid providers.
I would say the lack of phone interoperability is much bigger deterrent th
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Many consider migrating to prepaid carriers at the end of their contracts. There is no lump sum to be paid to anyone, just one month in advance. With LTE I was hoping that this will become more and more popular. But I was wrong, phones support frequencies only on the carrier they are on. So at the end of the contract, people dont pay $600 to get a new phone to get prepaid, they just renew with one of their post paid providers.
I would say the lack of phone interoperability is much bigger deterrent than ETF.
Prepaid carriers exist for every single major network, so nothing is stopping you from taking your ATT, Sprint, Verizon, etc. phone and going to one... Prepaid carriers are making a decent living but the big providers are still raking in money faster than they know how to spend it. The biggest disadvantage of a prepaid is that anyone with three or more lines is almost always better sticking with a major carrier because prepaid ones dont give breaks for multiple contracts (there is no contract).
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Most prepaid providers are MVNOs of major networks (the major networks prepaid plans are a joke). Most MVNO agreements prohibit them from allowing phones that have been on major phone networks. The only one I know on Verizon is pageplus, and their plans are for people who dont need data. Sprint devices, until recently can be used only on Sprint directly. Recent new MVNOs have managed to get rid of these clauses in their contracts. But still they are very very few. The only one I know is Ting. You can lookup
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One is, obviously, add more spectrum.
The other is add more towers and reduce transmit power, to reduce noise, crosstalk, and the band in other locations.
Europe has much denser populations than most of the US, and other areas very sparse.
The US, on the other hand, has vast areas of middle ground that is suburb hell.
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Problem with your argument is, the places where the carriers are bitching about insufficient spectrum (and the first places they roll out new bands) are densely populated cities.
Not in my back yard (Score:2)
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Cell towers can and are cleverly disguised, and its easy to put them on tall buildings in ways that don't make them super-obvious.
Re:Not in my back yard (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. It's next to impossible for anyone (even a person that knows they're there) to identify the antennas for Verizon's cell site on top of Cornell's Barton Hall.
Of course, the rather distracting Force12 HF antenna belonging to W2CXM helps a bit... But even without the Force12, the Verizon antennas (sector antennas painted to match the stone of the building) are nearly impossible to spot.
In any built-up area it's really easy to hide a cell site.
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Reminds me of a german cell provider who errected a new tower and immediatly got complains from people who couldn't sleep anymore or had other effects from the evil radiowaves. The company collected the complains over a couple of weaks before announcing that they hadn't even switched it on yet.
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Yea, and oil wells too...
Go out to Fl and Ca, and you can find cell towers designed as cacti/church steeple, or an oil well in what is in effect a shell designed to look like a small office building.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2564/4118297426_6f3fee3505_o.jpg [flickr.com]
http://cutenessapproved.com/2008/08/cell-towers-in-disguise/ [cutenessapproved.com]
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They stuff 'em in church steeples. The church gets a new roof, and desperately needed cash, and the churchgoers get a better connection when texting with God.
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Actually the church would have the worst coverage, as the antennas are directional. I guess like theaters, not having coverage in a church is a good thing.
Re:70CM (Score:5, Informative)
I don't normally respond to trolls, but this is a government band and hams have secondary usage of this. It won't happen.
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Also don't they serve as a great medium to distribute information during disaster events and the like?
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Yes, we do. I figured to hit him with an easier argument that the military uses that band as well. The portion between 420 and 430 MHz is used for Land Mobile Radio (think Taxis cabs, busses, and other businesses) in Canada and the Hams can't use it north of Line A (CONUS) or east of Line C (Alaska). There are other geographical restrictions in that band.
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How about we take back some of 87.8 MHz to 108.0 MHz instead, since we're trolling?
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Might as well... There's little of value in that band anyway.
Nevermind any technical issues that might be at play.
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Any allocation of spectrum for analog broadcast radio seems difficult to justify in the modern era. No one would consider creating the AM or FM bands if we were setting up things from the ground up now.
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Good policy (Score:2)
This is all good policy. I wish the FCC were being more aggressive about reallocated spectrum but at the very least this is a step in the right direction.
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Or is it? It's "government primary, commercial secondary" spectrum, which means the commercial use has to give way to government use. (A lot of the lower spectrum is like this - very little is actually dedicated to one entity or sector).
So the government has a right to the band (it's the government's to begin with) and they're letting commercial interests
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The government under the Communications act of 1934 can grab any spectrum for national defense reasons: 47 U.S.C. 606 (c), (d) . All of it is under ultimately government control, with commercial use being secondary. That isn't a change.
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Why? (Score:4, Funny)
640 KHz ought to be enough for anybody.
Re:Why? 640 KHz (Score:1)
I remember when we used to string between two tin cans and we used morse code.
Now get off my lawn
Balkanization ... (Score:2)
This is just more and more balkanization of the North American mobile market [baheyeldin.com].
Why don't we see this "different network, different frequencies" problem elsewhere in Europe and Asia?
This is cool since u don't get Internet 2 wifi (Score:1)
All major EU and US (and Canada I think) campuses are getting Internet 2 secure wifi 802.1x ... but not you.
Tell me when you get more than 1000 mbps baseline. You're playing catchup.
C=B*log2(1+SNR): It's not just a good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
And you're getting very close to the Shannon limit with turbo codes. LTE isn't much more spectral efficient as compared to HSPA+, but it has wider frequency bands and so can get more peak speed to customers.
So you can increase the amount of spectrum you have, with the current infrastructure, to get more capacity. That will buy you a few years of network traffic increase.
But eventually you have to figure out how to get less capacity demand and more SNR. There's really only one way to do that: change the infrastructure topology. And that has lots of problems.
It's kind of like we're near "Peak Bandwidth".
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The cell co's have tons of licensed, dedicated bandwidth, yet and they can't even match the speeds of WiFi access point scattered all across the country. Sounds like cell co's are being EXTREMELY inefficient when it comes to spectrum reuse.
More bandwidth for Sprint to fail at (Score:2)
Awesome.
Why not repurpose the AM Radio band? (Score:2)
Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access? It's been technologically obsolete for many years; FM is far superior in terms of sound quality (though even it is getting long in the tooth) and FM is just as widely supported, if not more so. All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Re:Why not repurpose the AM Radio band? (Score:4, Informative)
The AM band is very small.
FM VHF isn't very big spectrum either. You don't need a large carrier to move voice signals.
The fact these systems carry a long way works against them too. The line of sight / local bounce propagation from the microwave bands allows for a much higher density of cells that are all synchronized. More transmitters means more bandwidth / spectrum re-use. If the transmitters see each other with stronger signals, your noise floor and interference go up, and your throughput goes down.
Physics is a bitch sometimes.
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Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access?
What obsolete AM band?
All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Spoken like a true city dweller where there are lots of FM stations ready to serve your every need, and a fast network connection to serve everything you can't get off the FM.
1. Band allocations are based on international treaty. Certainly any band that has the potential for international coverage is. One state cannot just decide to use a chunk of spectrum for whatever it wants.
2. The "obsolete" (but still actively used) AM radio band is only 1.2 MHz wide, about. 530kHz to 1.7MHz.
I'm going to go out on a limb here... (Score:2)
does US gov't have the right to auction bandwidth? (Score:1)