December 04, 2003
Issue 1: Spectrum
I went to this New America Foundation thingy on spectrum and DRM.
Kevin Werbach has a new paper, which I don't yet see on his web site, called "Radio Revolution." It's a good paper, and one of these days either the NewAmerica folks or somebody will have it up on the Web.
Kevin's case for a "commons" model is that the companies themselves will have to figure out how to build equipment that doesn't mess up the reception for other companies' equipment.
At this point, my technical ignorance kicks in. It sounds like creating a "highway commons" in which every vehicle manufacturer has to figure out how to keep its vehicle from endangering its competitor's vehicles. Maybe somebody, somewhere needs to set rules of the road--even if its a private owner of the highway. But maybe that's a lousy metaphor for this situation.
Another handout available today was James H. Johnston and J.H. Snider's advocacy of the wireless last mile.
Spectrum is not just a third last-mile broadband platform to compete with cable modems and DSL. It is the platform of choice.
I have taken this position myself, although I am totally ignorant about the state of play of the technology. I tried to press folks on this, including Kevin Kahn of Intel.
It seems to me that if the technology were here, then the regulatory barriers would be falling down, either to civil disobedience or to intense lobbying by the people who are ready to manufacture stuff for the new market. Kahn's comeback is that there is still a lot of research to be done, but some of the research requires access to spectrum, and in any case all of the research is risky if the regulatory environment is unclear.
Most importantly, he talks about a 5-year or 10-year time horizon for actually having cognitive radios ready for deployment. That sounds like a long time to me.
My current view is that technological uncertainty is more important than regulatory uncertainty at this point. It might be good policy for the FCC to open up another swath of spectrum to see what develops. But I don't think we know enough about what will work best to be able to be able to go beyond that in terms of resolving issues such as the question of whether a property model or a commons model is best.
Posted by Arnold at 4:22 PM |
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telecom, FCC
It's silly to think that all the old radios in the world will go away just because "computers keep getting smarter". People who believe that radio communications can work without regulation need to read Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons". Without regulation, a common resource like electromagnetic communications will become overused to the point of being useless to everyone. Now, there's plenty of underutilized spectrum, but that doesn't mean that we have to throw out the regulatory baby just to get clean bathwater.
The FCC and the predecessors of the ITU didn't exist when Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy. It came into being for a reason -- unregulated radio transmissions make radio unusable for everyone.
People who believe the oversimplification that current radio regulatory regimes are only about spectrum need to go read the regulations themselves. Regulation is really about bandwidth*power*distance, and really does take into account the fact that different frequencies have different propagation properties in our building-filled atmosphere. The "magic" of unregulated ultrawideband is that it interferes with everybody equally. This is bad. The badness is mitigated by the physical fact that the ultra high frequency portions of UWB radiation are easily blocked by natural obstacles. If UWB is regulated to use only those portions of the airwaves that are empty and easily blocked, that would work, but giving it free rein just because it can't be distinguished from noise assumes it will never succeed. If it does succeed, the noise level will be so high that even UWB will degrade.
Ultrawideband is just spread spectrum on steroids. To see how spread-spectrum doesn't magically make interference go away, try using a 2.4GHz wireless phone in an area with an 802.11b wireless network. Both use "noise-immune" spread spectrum technology, but in different ways. You'll hear a click every time the network transmits a packet. The WLAN has to retransmit whenever someone speaks. If you agree that that's interference, you've just disproved the propaganda.
Cheers,
- George
Posted by George Vogt on December 6, 2003 12:13 PM | Permalink to Comment
It's silly to think that all the old radios in the world will go away just because "computers keep getting smarter". People who believe that radio communications can work without regulation need to read Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons". Without regulation, a common resource like electromagnetic communications will become overused to the point of being useless to everyone. Now, there's plenty of underutilized spectrum, but that doesn't mean that we have to throw out the regulatory baby just to get clean bathwater.
The FCC and the predecessors of the ITU didn't exist when Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy. It came into being for a reason -- unregulated radio transmissions make radio unusable for everyone.
People who believe the oversimplification that current radio regulatory regimes are only about spectrum need to go read the regulations themselves. Regulation is really about bandwidth*power*distance, and really does take into account the fact that different frequencies have different propagation properties in our building-filled atmosphere. The "magic" of unregulated ultrawideband is that it interferes with everybody equally. This is bad. The badness is mitigated by the physical fact that the ultra high frequency portions of UWB radiation are easily blocked by natural obstacles. If UWB is regulated to use only those portions of the airwaves that are empty and easily blocked, that would work, but giving it free rein just because it can't be distinguished from noise assumes it will never succeed. If it does succeed, the noise level will be so high that even UWB will degrade.
Ultrawideband is just spread spectrum on steroids. To see how spread-spectrum doesn't magically make interference go away, try using a 2.4GHz wireless phone in an area with an 802.11b wireless network. Both use "noise-immune" spread spectrum technology, but in different ways. You'll hear a click every time the network transmits a packet. The WLAN has to retransmit whenever someone speaks. If you agree that that's interference, you've just disproved the propaganda.
Cheers,
Posted by George Vogt on December 6, 2003 12:13 PM | Permalink to Comment- George