8 ms·

Honest question, what are the purposes of these licenses/fees other than to take money from citizens? If a village in the middle of nowhere builds this infrast

Honest question, what are the purposes of these licenses/fees other than to take money from citizens? If a village in the middle of nowhere builds this infrastructure to serve their own community what could go wrong without licensing?

vvanders 10y ago
My naive understanding is it's to pay for enforcement of interference. Not sure how far LTE bands go but UHF/VHF will propagate ~80mi radius if placed on a high enough vantage point.
grandalf 10y ago
The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. License fees benefit the public. Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy licenses altruistically. I think we're seeing Facebook being willing to invest in tech and potentially license fees because the ROI of having Facebook in a village can be estimated and offering this hardware looks like a worthwhile investment. While this sounds like a cynical perspective, it is not. Suppose a typical company would analyze the ROI and conclude that if the payout doesn't happen in 2 years it is not worth it. Facebook may be considering a 10 year ROI and thus may be acting both selfishly and also taking on infrastructure risk that has suffered from market failure until 2016 since no providers of first world infrastructure have opted to invest. In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment, and all risks could be accurately hedged, allowing all available capital to be fully utilized.
- paavokoya 10y ago
  >In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia. In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste. In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted). Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Optimizing social welfare (regardless of time window) through regulation isn't capitalism at all.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        It's American capitalism. We just lost our way. "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be ﬂourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
        grandalf 10y ago
        Exactly, just as democracy is a way to maximize the power of the average person, capitalism is a way to maximize her economic freedom.
- stjacobs 10y ago
  , , El Daz,, rref b TV rrrTV, Rev, r
- GregBuchholz 10y ago
  >The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
  - __jal 10y ago
    I assume that you consider the link to refute the 'scarce' part. It doesn't.
    - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
      It is often useful to support statements such as these.
      - Johnythree 10y ago
        A fellow by the name of Claude Shannon wrote a book about it. Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way. And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off. Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
        GregBuchholz 10y ago
        Scarcity by itself doesn't seem a significant enough aspect to warrant the FCC regulation that we have though. Think of other scarce resources like platinum. If ultra-wide band (or similar) technology was used back in the 1920's, I don't think the push for regulation would have been as strong, since jamming / interference wouldn't have been a driver. I think we've got a technical solution to the original social problem, it is just that it arrived 100 years later. https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-commission-fcc https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
        grandalf 10y ago
        This is an interesting point. Using spread spectrum techniques would increase the cost of the radio hardware involved, and might hinder adoption. Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jcrawfordor 10y ago
Primarily, the fees are 1) a supply-demand response to spectrum contention (spectrum space ideal for use by mobile services is highly competitive in developed countries), and 2) go to fund expensive compliance regimes, like the expense of certification testing. This is required by industry and regulatory bodies to ensure that one manufacturer's lax quality does not adversely impact devices made by other manufacturers, which can unfortunately easily be a problem with modern radio. At the end of the day, it's a response to the tragedy of the commons problem, designed on the theory of making the commons a lot less common (exclusively licensing sections of spectrum to approved users).
Johnythree 10y ago
One of the myths is that spectrum "in the middle of nowhere" is unused. Most third world countries have enthusiastically adoped mobile phones and have leap-frogged the creation of landline networks. The result of this is two-fold: The Radio Spectrum is heavily used, and also very inefficiently used as so much traffic which should be carried by landlines is forced onto mobile networks. If you've traveled in remote areas of Thailand, Cambodia or even Laos, you'll be aware of the incredible penetration of mobile phones and even the Internet.
- wmf 10y ago
  OTOH, it sounds like this project is aimed at places that do not currently have any cellular coverage.
  - Johnythree 10y ago
    Such as? If they don't already it will because of local unrest and lawlessness, not from the lack of local entrepreneurs.

vvanders 10y ago

My naive understanding is it's to pay for enforcement of interference. Not sure how far LTE bands go but UHF/VHF will propagate ~80mi radius if placed on a high enough vantage point.

grandalf 10y ago

The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. License fees benefit the public. Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy licenses altruistically. I think we're seeing Facebook being willing to invest in tech and potentially license fees because the ROI of having Facebook in a village can be estimated and offering this hardware looks like a worthwhile investment. While this sounds like a cynical perspective, it is not. Suppose a typical company would analyze the ROI and conclude that if the payout doesn't happen in 2 years it is not worth it. Facebook may be considering a 10 year ROI and thus may be acting both selfishly and also taking on infrastructure risk that has suffered from market failure until 2016 since no providers of first world infrastructure have opted to invest. In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment, and all risks could be accurately hedged, allowing all available capital to be fully utilized.

paavokoya 10y ago
>In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia. In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste. In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted). Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Optimizing social welfare (regardless of time window) through regulation isn't capitalism at all.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      It's American capitalism. We just lost our way. "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be ﬂourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
      - grandalf 10y ago
        Exactly, just as democracy is a way to maximize the power of the average person, capitalism is a way to maximize her economic freedom.
stjacobs 10y ago
, , El Daz,, rref b TV rrrTV, Rev, r
GregBuchholz 10y ago
>The spectrum is a public good, and it is scarce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
- __jal 10y ago
  I assume that you consider the link to refute the 'scarce' part. It doesn't.
  - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
    It is often useful to support statements such as these.
    - Johnythree 10y ago
      A fellow by the name of Claude Shannon wrote a book about it. Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way. And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off. Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
      - GregBuchholz 10y ago
        Scarcity by itself doesn't seem a significant enough aspect to warrant the FCC regulation that we have though. Think of other scarce resources like platinum. If ultra-wide band (or similar) technology was used back in the 1920's, I don't think the push for regulation would have been as strong, since jamming / interference wouldn't have been a driver. I think we've got a technical solution to the original social problem, it is just that it arrived 100 years later. https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-commission-fcc https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
        grandalf 10y ago
        This is an interesting point. Using spread spectrum techniques would increase the cost of the radio hardware involved, and might hinder adoption. Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jcrawfordor 10y ago

Primarily, the fees are 1) a supply-demand response to spectrum contention (spectrum space ideal for use by mobile services is highly competitive in developed countries), and 2) go to fund expensive compliance regimes, like the expense of certification testing. This is required by industry and regulatory bodies to ensure that one manufacturer's lax quality does not adversely impact devices made by other manufacturers, which can unfortunately easily be a problem with modern radio. At the end of the day, it's a response to the tragedy of the commons problem, designed on the theory of making the commons a lot less common (exclusively licensing sections of spectrum to approved users).

Johnythree 10y ago

One of the myths is that spectrum "in the middle of nowhere" is unused. Most third world countries have enthusiastically adoped mobile phones and have leap-frogged the creation of landline networks. The result of this is two-fold: The Radio Spectrum is heavily used, and also very inefficiently used as so much traffic which should be carried by landlines is forced onto mobile networks. If you've traveled in remote areas of Thailand, Cambodia or even Laos, you'll be aware of the incredible penetration of mobile phones and even the Internet.

wmf 10y ago
OTOH, it sounds like this project is aimed at places that do not currently have any cellular coverage.
- Johnythree 10y ago
  Such as? If they don't already it will because of local unrest and lawlessness, not from the lack of local entrepreneurs.