Verizon Reveals Plans For "C Block" Airwaves

eldavojohn writes "Now that Verizon has beaten Google in the 'block C' spectrum auction, what are they going to do with it? Well, as of today they've revealed their plans for world domination: they plan to speed up wireless internet connections. It may come as no surprise that they'll also be making this available for other manufacturer's devices. AT&T plans to do the same with their auction winnings, 'AT&T was second to Verizon, winning $6 billion in spectrum licenses, which it also plans to use for high-speed Internet service. But its executives said they didn't bid for the portion subject to the open-access rules. The parts it did land cost AT&T nearly three times as much per unit of spectrum than the portion Verizon bought.'"

How about raising the quality of voice calls?

[magnamous]

One of the most obnoxious things to me about my cellphone service (Verizon) is how crappy voice calls sound compared to a regular telephone. It's nice to be able to use the internet on one's phone, but it would be nice if the feature of the phone that I'm using 90% of the time were to sound at least as clear as a landline. And with the signal transmitted digitally, I can't imagine that it would use up that much of the new available bandwidth...

Verizon picked up some A&B to go with the C bl

[AtariDatacenter]

What I thought was interesting is that in some big markets, Verizon purchased some A block or B block, and in some cases, both. That's in addition to their C block. They're clearly looking to make sure that they're going to have a lot of available bandwidth.

NYC, Chicago, and LA, they ended up with A, B, and C block purchases. In some other large markets (Washington DC, Dallas, SanFran) they picked up either an A or a B in addition to their nationwide C block.

So they're certainly thinking about capacity and customer density for their future networks.

I kind of wonder, though, to what extent they've squeezed the amount of bandwidth that AT&T is going to have in those major cities. I don't have the details on their previous acquisitions to know for sure, but Verizon certainly took some potential capacity away from them.

Re:Radio spectrum to be used...

[kesuki]

actually the wiki says 22 MHZ and there are 13 channels with 2mhz apart from each other and many devices can produce interference.. (microwaves most notably, other 2.4 ghz stuff like phones etc s well)

so they can't get the full 54 mbits because of interference.

so if they were using the same technology and had less interference they would get roughly 150 mbit/second a far cry from the 500 mbit suggested by vague non specific wiki's on broadcast technologies.

I'd think the 700-800 mhz bandwidth is significantly clearer than the widely used 2.4 ghz
it was originally slotted as channels 52-69 UHF

since there are no wireless b/g/a/n devices, no wireless(handset not cell) phones, no microwaves...

Well, going back to square 1, with the video stream size, I said 24 gigabytes for good transcoded 1080p streams of 110 minutes, that suggests the 3mhz digital TV signal (1080i ) is squeezing 14.54 megabits /second or

  106 megabits per 22 mhz of bandwidth This is assuming that digital TV went from analog tv's 3.5 mhz per channel to an assumed 3 mhz per channel. the wiki CLEARLY states it's less.. the only other option is that they're using mpeg-4 technology.

which would drop the file size roughly in half, to tada 53 mbit/second per 22 mhz of bandwidth.

I'd say this means digital TV is all using mpeg-4 encoding. either that or TV channels are so clear due to FCC regs that they get double the bandwidth of a polluted 2.4 ghz frequency