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."
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.
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.
Re:C-SPAN (Score:2, Interesting)
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 allocation left.