Crowded US Airwaves Desperately In Search of Spectrum Breathing Room 105
alphadogg writes "Ahead of a major new spectrum auction scheduled for next year, America's four major wireless carriers are jockeying for position in the frequencies available to them, buying, selling and trading licenses to important parts of the nation's airwaves. Surging demand for mobile bandwidth, fueled by an increasingly saturated smartphone market and data-hungry apps, has showed no signs of slowing down. This, understandably, has the wireless industry scrambling to improve its infrastructure in a number of areas, including the amounts of raw spectrum available to the carriers. These shifts, however, are essentially just lateral moves – nothing to directly solve the problems posed by a crowded spectrum. What's really going to save the wireless world, some experts think, is a more comprehensive re-imagining of the way spectrum is used."
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Yeah, or you could keep it simple by building an antenna with traps in it. It's worked well for a very long time and is very well understood.
Or you could use a broad-banded antenna architecture, such as a discone, cone-cone or folded dipole. Again, it's worked very well for a very long time and is very well understood.
Or you could build multiple antennas coincident in space (think Copper Catctus in miniature) and switch for frequency range by selecting which feedline you use. Need I say it? Okay, it's w
C-SPAN (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I was listening to C-SPAN a couple days ago, and the military was talking about the possibility of freeing up a lot of its reserved spectrum for emergency use that rarely gets used as long as the commercial applications using it could be shunted aside in the case of an actual emergency.
It was a pretty interesting talk, which dealt with the interaction of land, air, and space networks, and their different needs and adaptive capabilities.
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Hah,
We have never, ever, gotten spectrum back when we need it. I'm trying to test a new'ish radar, but I can't get the full spectrum allocation that we designed to because we've given it away to be "shared", but now apparently can never use it again. Do you have an extra $27M to redesign the antenna and get it flight qualified? That's just one system. At least we can still sort of test it; the european militaries have to come to the US to do any electronic warfare; they don't have any usable spectrum alloca
And here's the driver for Steerable Null / DIDO. (Score:5, Interesting)
Steerable Null (alias DIDO or pCell) (the latter being steerable null with widely separated antennas) effectively multiplies the avaliable bandwidth by the number of base station antennas (by giving each remote a signal containig the full band's bandwidth directed to it, while the similar, simultaneous, signals to the other remotes cancel out).
See the article from last week: New 'pCell' Technology Could Bring Next Generation Speeds To 4G Networks [slashdot.org].
Some posters were wondering what would be the driver for adopting it. This is it: There's no more spectrum being made - but this is a way to use it simultaneously multiple times without interference between the reuses.
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I don't really think that would help the military, since they'd be using their own towers with their own *encryption.
The signals would still be stepping on each other, since they wouldn't be hooked into the same network of towers coordinating with each other.
*Though they've been flying around drones in war zones with unencrypted feeds
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I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool. Might not be practical on a handset (at least not at frequencies below 3GHz), because there is not enough space to put adequate separation between antennas, but it could work well with tablets and other physically larger devices.
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I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool.
It IS MIMO: the special case where:
- The base station antennas are widely separated.
- The data is mapped so each remote antenna gets a particular one-spectrum-channel-worth subset of the data stream (rather than several antennas getting several spectru-channels worth, but in the form of differently phased-and-weighted sums of several carriers with mixes of the data). This allows the remobe devices to work with
Lower power towers.. (Score:2)
The solution is to build / install multiple mini-towers to replace large towers covering a larger area.
Dialling down the transmit power of both the device and tower will reduce the congestion. With fewer devices on each tower, bandwidth will increase. Also, devices will require less transmit and receive power so their batteries will last longer. And when in a more rural setting with fewer devices, service providers can still go with a larger tower to cover more area.
This is the only real solution bu
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Exactly. That would require actual investment and work instead of just looking for an excuse to fuck people and pocket more.
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Yeah, it would also double the cost of cell service. You'll just have to get used to getting most of your data needs from WiFi sources. I've got WiFi at home, work, most places I go to eat. That's the more small low power towers. They just aren't run by the cell companies. Actually, look for Comcast to become a major player in this space. They've been rolling out hardware to customers that functions as a WiFi hotspot for their other customers. It would be a small matter for them to adapt that for use
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Suuuure it would, just like how it really does cost cell companies absurd amounts of money to include data in a section of the signal they already need to transmit...
Why don't they... (Score:2)
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To do what, exactly?
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You seem to forget that many academics and people in industry are also amateur operators or got their start as amateur operators. The current innovations are in SDR (software defined radio), DSP (digital signal processing) and mesh networks. Did you know that hams can operate 802.11 wireless gear at higher power and different frequencies under the FCC part 97 rules, versus the regular part 15 unlicensed operation?
Also, much of the spectrum allocation is governed by international treaty, so we can't always a
Re:Ham radio bands (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a spiteful and meaningless troll.
The record shows that Hams have repeatedly provided emergency communications when it's really needed.
Thousands of Hams regularly volunteer their equipment and time in preparedness exercises.
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Oh, God, spare me the you ain't a ham until you can do 20 WPM code holier-than-thou attitude. That's the attitude that's going to kill amateur radio, and why at age 46 I'm considered a young man by most hams. I got a no-code license and had no interest in learning Morse until I got on the HF bands and got to experience firsthand WHY it was useful. I'm still not particularly good at it, but I'm learning and hope to be really good at it one day. But if I had to learn code, I'd probably have still said "to hel
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Re:Ham radio bands (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, you demonstrate that you haven't a clue.
Read the stories behind any big disaster, the New Orleans floods, the Indian ocean and Japan Tsunami.
The mobile phone service is the first to go, mainly because of cheap construction and lack of generator backup.
The crucial issue for emergency communications, is having people available who have suitable equipment and who actually know how to set it up and use it.
To be efficient with HF radio gear you need to use it daily. Learning what frequencies, what procedures, how to build and tune a makeshift antenna, how to arrange power-supplies, generators, etc.
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Let's see...
There's this: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9228945/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/ham-radio-operators-rescue-after-katrina/#.Uw4J54UiZ8k
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A lot of the HAM activity only really pops up during disasters.
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" how to arrange power-supplies, generators, etc."
By size DUH!, everyone know you arrange them by size from Left to Right. It was question 35 on my General Exam.
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Look at Raynet [raynet-uk.net] in the UK.
Cell towers require power and connectivity, can't rely on those being there in an emergency.
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Actually the Hams don't have much bandwidth on useable frequencies.
It's the age old story, the larger alocations are at frequencies that no one wants.
And of course the ham bands belong to the people, not to big business.
Are you the type of person who would be happy with selling off all our parks ?
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You're thinking of CB. HAMS are very respectful and encouraging. There are just too many other things competing for the interests of potential new amateurs.
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You can instead see that space as an area which is open for everyone to experiment in, sometimes those areas are useful for trying out various technologies without the risk of interference to commercial services.
Most of the bandwidth consumption today are from smartphones where the users are surfing the web, which means that it's not really any productive use. There are ways to lower the load on the phone networks, and some of them are spontaneous - like wireless access points available on restaurants and o
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No, they have small slices across the spectrum. We need to keep those slices open to experimentation because of the need to be able to experiment and test a concept at different frequencies. Closing this off to experimentation stifles innovation.
Those frequencies are used all of the time but you may not be able to pick them up because of the lack of sensitivity of you receiver/antenna or they aren't being used in your area when you're listening.
On top of that, they're used for emergency communication. In my
LTE for the win (Score:3)
Re: LTE for the win (Score:2)
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They already do in most cases now. DSL/POTS are the only places they don't at this point. Cell and FIOS is entirely VOIP
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That LTE phones don't use LTE for voice is clearly a software problem. Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and a myriad SIP applications are all able to route voice traffic over IP, and that can be routed over LTE with existing phones. Getting the main voice app to do that should be a software patch.
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Many phones already support this, it's called VoLTE. However, it also requires support from the network itself as well, I think at&t and verizon support it, I know t-mobile doesn't.
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Agreed 100%. I considered network support to be a given if the software on the handset were updated to do this. Alternatively, you could (provided you have the data plan for it) use it against a third-party server. It would be analogous to running VoIP for your home phone even though your ISP might offer phone service.
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LTE's coverage has little to do with the LTE technology itself, and more to do with the very high frequencies that are usually used for LTE, because the lower frequencies were already in use (the higher the frequency is, the shorter the range and wall penetration will be)
Once the older technologies like EDGE and HSPA are deactivated, it will free up the lower frequencies for LTE, and LTE's range and wall penetration ability will automatically improve
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LTE is already behind. But yes, in order to keep up with usage and utilization, more efficient communication methods are needed.
That and the latest news from carriers seems to be their solution in fixing the problem will be to provide their base stations with greater banwidth to handle the LTE traffic. If anything that suggests that they're sitting on their ass raking in cash and being slow to react to their customer's demands. They can claim there isn't enough airwave bandwidth, but when their solution
Spectrum owners would not want more allocated (Score:1)
Does anybody know how much spectrum below and above 1Gig (say) is actually available of telephony, in the USA and Australia? It seems like it is well under 10% of the available.
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TV is by far the biggest user.
If we had continued with a universal broad-band fiber network (aka NBN) it would have been possible to switch off free-to-air television.
Of course big media was terrified of exactly that.
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And force everyone to pay monthly for all TV. Finally getting those damn freeloaders from watching TV for free.
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The way to make broadcast more efficient is by forcing TV stations to actually spend money. They need multiple lower power transmitters across the coverage area instead of a single Megawatt station blasting as hard as possible. Tat way you could get far more TV stations on the same amount of bandwidth. But TV stations already are all about milking every penny possible without upgrading. Most TV stations refused to update to HD until the analog sunset was about 12 months away.
Spectrum should be rented (Score:3)
Spectrum should be owned by the public and rented on an annual basis to the private sector to the highest bidder.
This brings in competition that will keep companies from buying it and then sitting on their ass doing nothing with it.
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It is that way already in the US. Cable co's leased lots of spectrum and sat on it. If it is cheaper than having to compete they will do it.
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Instead of the highest bidder, why not making all infrastructure accessible, with cost associated to traffic and bonuses for the amount of work done on the infrastructure itself? Big players can stay big leveraging the amount of work done, little players can pop up everywhere, every hotspot can be configured to offer guest access, so airwaves are used for those actually travelling, all the rest get wifi to the nearest eth hub.
Part of the answer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Introduce a "use it or loose it" rule for spectrum allocations. Stop carriers from buying spectrum to sit on it or sell it around and around with no-one actually using it.
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Non-transferable renting would also work. Sunk costs are easier to ignore than ongoing ones.
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Then how do you account for all the spectrum that Verizon bought but never used?
Last I heard, they were in negotiations with t-mobile to sell some of it, but I bet Verizon still makes a profit on the sale, for doing nothing more than hoarding spectrum
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It may not be registered on a ham operator, but it may still be that it is tested by one that is employed by a large corporation.
Why? (Score:2)
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Those allocations do not belong to Amateur Radio. Amateur Radio is a secondary use on both of the bands that you mention.
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Actually, on the 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5Ghz bands Amateur radio is the primary allocation and unlicensed devices are secondary. In theory Hams could amplify WiFi radios to 1500 watts and knock out every hotspot in town. In practice that would be unwise to do anything that would cause interference to all those “secondary users."
There are lots of 900MHz users out there, including pagers and telemetry from things like gas wells and power meters.
5GHz is still somewhat quiet in most areas, but with 802.11AC a
Stay out! (Score:2)
Keep your grubby dirty filthy hands off of the Ham Bands.
There is plenty for the commercial world to use, boo hoo they don't like paying for it, if you are making money off of the public airwaves, then you pay dearly for it. I just wish the FCC charged for the use of airwaves yearly to commercial entities. Huge parts of bands are unused but sat on for "future use" by commercial groups.
For those of you calling for Ham Radio's head (Score:4, Informative)
Please take a look here:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/... [doc.gov]
Every block where you see "Amateur" _not_ in all CAPS, Amateur Radio is a secondary use and not the primary licensee. You can see that there are no blocks that are allocated primarily to Amateur use that would be useful to cellular carriers.
420-450, 902-928, 1240-1300 are all government property that Amateurs are allowed to use provided they do not cause interference to the primary licensee.
If government didn't have a use for that spectrum, it certainly would have been sold already - certainly before going through all the trouble to move OTA TV to HD and reclaiming that spectrum.
Seriously, think logically for a minute. If the government could have opened up over 100Mhz of spectrum to cellular carriers by simply displacing a few hams, rather than upending the entire broadcast TV industry, that's the way it would have been done.
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Yup. Hams don't really have all that much spectrum, especially in the regions everybody cares about (low enough in frequency that you don't get multipath/directionality, high enough that you don't need a backpack and whip antenna). Sure, there is some space that others could use, but it isn't all that much.
I think a better solution is getting municipal wifi and such deployed so that people don't need huge gobs of data for when they're just sitting in one place or because they don't want to hand the local
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That's basically the same thing. Lots of local-area stations with a backbone is the result of reducing the listening area of each one.
It just doesn't work well for very mobile devices, because if you used WiFi for a phone in a car it would be connecting to a new base station every few seconds. It works great for phones when you're sitting down and eating.
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Since when does the US military give up ANYTHING?
They won't even give back the land they took from Japan and Germany during WWII, what makes you think they would give up something as valuable as radio frequencies.?
I feel their pain (Score:1)
I just upgraded my wifi to a dual-band base station so that I could use some of that sweet 5GHz space. I live in a suburban neighborhood (built in the '70s, so not even one of those super-cramped Krap Box neighborhoods they make these days) and I can see at least eight other SSIDs at any time.
After all, I've gotta watch those ATSC .ts streams from my MythTV on my laptop.
Some way to unify carrier use of spectrum? (Score:2)
I wish there was some way to unify the spectrum used by carriers so there wasn't so much wasted spectrum. With 4 major cell carriers you need 4x the spectrum for any given footprint.
Why can't this same total spectrum be used by all the carriers simultaneously, with some kind of back-end accounting determining what proportion of the tower costs are paid by each carrier, depending on subscriber mix?
MVNOs (Score:2)
Why can't this same total spectrum be used by all the carriers simultaneously, with some kind of back-end accounting determining what proportion of the tower costs are paid by each carrier
That's sort of how MVNOs already work: one of the big four carriers owns the spectrum and the towers, and a bunch of smaller carriers lease them.
pCell to the rescue? How timely ... (Score:2)
The jury may still be out on this due to it's claims of 'unlimited', etc. But have a look:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-... [kurzweilai.net]
As a colleague once opined, "There is no more spectrum. It's physics. That's it, that's all."
AM/FM (Score:2)
Is there a region this spectrum is not digital? We could likely fit a thousand digital stations in that same airspace.
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AM broadcast spectrum is about 1 MHz, or about 3.5 Mbps using typical digital modulations. AM antennas need to be very long to be very efficient, so realistic mobile devices may only get 1 Mbps or less. Also AM propagates easily, so it will be tough to have small cells with reasonably powered transmitters.
FM is about 20 MHz, or about 70 Mbps theoretically. They also have a long wavelength, but not anywhere as bad as AM, but worse than TV channels 7-13.