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FCC planning to open up 1200 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed / Wi-Fi usage [pdf]

206 points by tradertef 7y ago

Taniwha 7y ago
The real question is really "why isn't most of the spectrum like this?" - people sharing it rather than it being sold off to private holders to be owned
- wahern 7y ago
  To understand the thinking find a copy of the 1959 paper "The Federal Communications Commission" by Ronald Coase. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927 https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927 (pay-walled). It's the thesis behind the modern property-rights spectrum regime, and has bled over into many other federal regulatory regimes. As interpreted by many modern, mostly conservative, regulators and scholars, the idea is that by giving private property rights in spectrum you incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies. There's plenty to critique, especially as it applies to spectrum. See, for example, the famous Salon.com article summarizing David Reed's arguments: "The myth of interference" (2003), https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ But if you want to understand your adversaries' thinking, Coase's paper is the place to start.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    > incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies. As with software patents, I think there's an argument to be made that this is no longer true. Digital modulation schemes are leagues more efficient than older analog techniques, both in terms of power and bandwidth. Spread spectrum schemes in particular are even reasonably resistant to being plopped on top of each other. The spectrum ownership scheme allows established players to sit around on their asses using loud, inefficient modulation schemes with huge dead zones in between channels because they don't need to do any better than that. I think radio technology would be better across the board if spectrum were open, and if people had to compete by using better, more efficient, more interference-immune modulation schemes, or risk getting stepped on by someone else. If we had a system like this, the noise floor would just slowly increase in heavily used parts of the spectrum, rather than what we have now, which is a whole bunch of legally mandated quiet zones punctuated by huge narrow carrier spikes. The technology to do this exists... you can go buy a broadband SDR and put together a system like this in GNU radio fairly quickly for experimental purposes, but it's not really legal to actually use this anywhere.
    - namibj 7y ago
      The thing is, that the QoS and power efficiency of e.g. LTE isn't attainable if you have uncontrolled interference. It's a general issue with far-side crosstalk.
      - wahern 7y ago
        Interference is largely a property of the specific scheme. 5G schemes are better than LTE when comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. aggregate bandwidth on the same bands in the same geographic area), whatever comes after 5G will continue moving the ball forward, and the theoretical limitations on how much further we can keep kicking the ball are still out of sight. Thus the question isn't what regulatory regime is best for squeezing the most out of LTE, but rather what's the optimal pace of radio communications evolution and how to achieve it. That's a drastically different type of question that almost certainly has a drastically different answer, or at least a much more complex answer.
        namibj 7y ago
        Then make it so that frequencies don't get blocked for this long. Make it so that a company has to re-bid every once in a while for spectrum. Instead of just giving it away or making it all free-reign.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      The ideal spectrum allocation scheme would be a by-the-minute rental. Whenever anyone wants to use spectrum, their device automatically bids and gets allocated whatever size slice of spectrum and transmit power they ask for. Then the device maker or the user pays the bill at the end of the year, perhaps with some minimum free amount each year per person, which could cover all except the biggest spectrum users. If you didn't like the government allocation scheme, you could rent your own block and do your own sub-allocations, for example some kind of packetized system with microsecond long packets wouldn't want to have to contact a government server for every 1 microsecond allocation. That gives a strong incentive to use efficient allocation schemes.
  - ethn 7y ago
    Coase actually argues in that paper, in true UChicago fashion that the spectrum should be completely unregulated in a free market for private efficiency. He’s actually arguing against the FCC. As he also touches on in The Nature of a Firm. Read Section 5 of the paper you’ve linked.
    - wahern 7y ago
      Yes. But the explicit premise in that section is that there are exclusionary property rights in the spectrum protected by traditional property and contract law, and that contiguous ranges of spectrum can be subdivided and sold exactly analogously to a piece of land. For example, he explains that while there are technical interference issues at the edges of spectrum bands whereby the user of one range could incidentally interfere with the user of another range, the same type of problems occurs with land (e.g. nuisance) and are similarly manageable with a traditional property rights regime. In Coase's view the government shouldn't be auctioning spectrum for limited times or with strings attached, as we commonly do now. (What the FCC does now is a quasi-Coasean spectrum regime.) In Coase's view spectrum usage would be most efficient by selling all spectrum (from 0-infinity) in a one-time auction to the single highest bidder. That bidder could (and, crucially, would in Coase's view) then subdivide and sell the spectrum according to market demand. Coase's logic is solid; it's the premises that are problematic. First, it ignores transaction costs, or at least assumes they're de minimis. Even before the Law & Economics field took off (which is the field Coase most influenced), it was understood that one of the purposes of legal rules was to minimize transaction costs. Sometimes a market is made more efficient by specifying a fixed rule, and even more often by specifying a fixed default rule, then by permitting perfect contractual freedom. Of course, this begs the question of when you can know whether to intervene. But that's the only legitimate question, not whether you should ever intervene. In Coase's time his argument was more practical as widespread independent and even individual broadcast usage wasn't a commercially realistic scenario; transaction costs would always be born by economic behemonths and therefore would be de minimis relative to their price. But that's not Coase's actual argument; his actual argument is categorical and absolute, and that's how most modern proponents (IME) apply it as well. Secondly, the notion of spectrum rivalrousness is contentious. If something isn't rivalrous, a property regime is unnecessary and usually strictly inefficient.[1] Without getting into the science (and I'm not an electrical engineer so I'd just make mince of things), as a practical matter spectrum usage is only partly rivalrous (rivalrous mostly deriving from the technical environment, not from the fundamental character of spectrum, as with physical goods and real estate). Your ability to enjoy maximal channel bandwidth between two physical points is limited by how sophisticated your transmitter and receiver, and ultimately by computational power, not by coincidental usage, per se. (Not unless someone is actively trying to screw you.) As WiFi has born out, we're all in an arms race for buying and using the latest, greatest gear. In one sense this is just a convoluted price signaling scheme--the people most in need of bandwidth just pay for fancier equipment--that might be less efficient than a simple property regime. But arguably in practice this process plays out slowly enough (especially with moderate power limits, carve outs for emergency use, etc) that these transaction costs are far less than the transaction costs we see in a market where we expect Verizon's or AT&T's spectrum usage rights to trickle down to ad hoc groups and individuals of spectrum users in the same way William the Conqueror's lands in England were slowly subdivided until every Englishman could build his own castle. Nobody will ever sell me rights to spectrum for use within a 10-meter or even 100-meter radius, even though it's possible and would open up a tremendous wealth of opportunities. Cordless phones (POTS, not cell) and WiFi could only have happened with unlicensed (i.e. unowned) spectrum, in contradiction to Coase's argument. [1] Exception--if food wasn't rivalrous because we all had free Star Trek-style replicators I imagine obesity would be an even worse problem than it is today, we'd be more sickly, and so we'd probably want to impose costs to maximize aggregate wealth. (See soda tax.) And if we did that we might want to make those costs transferable (e.g. carbon credits) rather than centrally figuring out the most efficient price for each individual.
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  - upofadown 7y ago
    I think that in practice the idea of privately owned spectrum really came into its own with the original scheme used for analog cell phone service. The incumbent phone companies were given their own exclusive spectrum and the competitive cell phone company (originally there was only one) got their own exclusive spectrum. This A band, B band system actually worked fairly good compared to the sort of thing happening with the landline monopolies. Obviously the system couldn't be expanded to a market with more than two entities without causing a lot of inefficiency. The regulators did this expansion anyway and that led to the insanity we have today.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  I like that idea. Are there plans for making it work? Some things like FM radio couldn’t work that way? Or could they?
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  - state_less 7y ago
    I think fears are overstated and used as a pretense to sell off spectrum to private entities, which can provide private investors a handsome reward for their monopoly on the spectrum. Consider "junk" unlicensed WiFi spectrum (i.e. 2.4ghz). Normally private owners would argue, "We can't allow anyone to broadcast, it'll be overcrowded. We need a gatekeeper to solve this." In reality, yes it can be overcrowded in dense areas, so packets still get sent, but at a lower rate. This creates demand and people start gravitating to less crowded, unlicensed spectrum (i.e. 5.2ghz) for crowded indoor use scenario. It's more bandwidth and better attenuation with your neighbors. Consumer radios are also certified to only produce so much power on the spectrum which adds additional safeguards. So the free market and a dash of radio certification/regulation ends up providing an efficient decentralized communication medium. With other shared mediums, we police the spectrum (e.g. light, sound, etc...). If a user starts blasting out FM, or too much 2.4gz and so on, it can be detected, traced and prosecuted. It's 2020, we don't need FM, we need high speed IPv6 radios and improved routing tables/algorithms. Lift FM channels into the digital realm and let's get on with it.
- jrockway 7y ago
  The reason why WiFi has poor performance in dense environments is because there is no central coordinator for spectrum usage. Stations pick a random frequency and start talking. If another station is talking when you want to send a message, your station will wait indefinitely for the channel to be free. The result is that you get random latency spikes; your VoIP call just gets dropped, you get disconnected from your online game, your video call freezes up. There is no concept of determining what's best for everyone; anyone sending a message checks if the channel is clear and goes about their business. This all sounds somewhat fair, but the problems really start when not all the stations can hear each other. Station A can hear Station B and Station C. Station C starts sending a message to station A. Station B can't hear Station C, so starts sending a message to station A. The result is that both messages are lost and the effective channel capacity goes to zero. This is obviously a big problem. The fundamental problem is that radio is very much half-duplex. Only one station can use a certain amount of spectrum at a time; if someone is using it, you can't. It causes problems everywhere; with WiFi, with air traffic control, etc. Centralized frequency allocations get around this with better protocols. All the stations know about each other, and can be told when they can transmit by a centralized coordinator (TDMA is an example of such a protocol). As a result, each station has a predictable amount of airtime, and therefore guaranteed bandwidth and latency; no time is wasted with two stations talking over each other. (There are other sharing schemes that are more interesting and popular than naive time-sharing; CDMA, spread-spectrum, and GPS's "Gold Codes" are all interesting reading.) The easiest way to implement this is not to write a standard and then ensure that everyone buys a standards-compliant device, but rather to give chunks of spectrum to companies, and have companies distribute devices that work they way they want. It's easier for the regulatory agency ("pay us money and do whatever you want"), and doesn't cap innovation. Verizon can collect your phone tomorrow and give you a new one if they want to use whizbang new technology. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it is of course a compromise. (Faster innovation, less government interference with technology... but at the cost of making it impossible to start a cell phone provider on your own.) I guess my TL;DR is: it's not that simple. You could let everyone do whatever they wanted. That's how it was in the early days. People used spark-gap transmitters that generated so much noise that there was effectively only one half-duplex channel for the entire planet to use. Regulators saw that that wasn't going to scale and invented spectrum allocations, and here we are today. It's not perfect, but technology is improving how we used the unlicensed bands. (I am not as up to date as I want to be on WiFi specifically, but if you look at the amateur radio community, it's routine these days to communicate around the world with 5-10W of power. 20 years ago, it would have taken two orders of magnitude more power and 20x the bandwidth to do with voice what we do with FT8 today. People are still idiots, though, and generate plenty of QRM. It only gets worse when people without licenses start operating the radio stations.)
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  If you've tried using 2.8ghz WiFi in a crowded apartment building, you'd already know why: tragedy of the commons.
  - bobbiechen 7y ago
    The microwave at my house would reliably murder my wi-fi connection whenever you turned it on, which was great fun while playing real-time multiplayer games.
    - m463 7y ago
      I think a microwave oven only hits part of the 2.4 ghz wifi spectrum and if you can lock what channel you're on you can avoid it.
      - ansible 7y ago
        That only works if the microwave oven in question stays within a very narrow band. Some of them don't.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    To an extent, but that entire band is only 75MHz wide. There are only 2-4 proper channels, and it has twice the range of 5-6GHz, which puts you in competition with an order of magnitude more hot spots.
- pkaye 7y ago
  Could it be they were allocated before things like OFDM and CDMA were practical to share the spectrum?
- grahamburger 7y ago
  As an operator of large wireless networks I prefer to purchase licensed spectrum over using shared bands every single time. It's hard to overstate how much more reliable and performant the network can be when there is some assurance you won't be interfered with.
  - anfilt 7y ago
    I would concur, but there are not many non-licensed bands. So all sorts of traffic is more congested in those. If there were more unlicensed bands I think it would probably improve those use cases. I think both types are quite important.
- sipjca 7y ago
  This is one of the things I have trouble understanding too. It’s a complex issue, but it seems like it would be best opened to the public where next generation radio technologies can evolve. I don’t think 5G/LTE will go away but there may be new technologies which are more open and integrate within the existing frameworks. I imagine some kind of public mesh net/CDN that goes out to LTE/5G only when necessary to access information not in the local context. I wrote more here: https://wiki.cjpais.com/brain-dump/march-15th-22nd-2020/radio-spectrum-allocation https://wiki.cjpais.com/brain-dump/march-15th-22nd-2020/radi... Edit: I’m very glad the FCC is doing this. This is a great step forward. Looking forward to experimenting with this spectrum
wahern 7y ago
I'm curious how Ajit Pai squares his faith in the property rights-based Coase Theorem approach to spectrum management with increasing the unlicensed bands. It's probably a dissonance a politician (despite his background, that's what Pai effectively is, now) can't be bothered with.
- tastygreenapple 7y ago
  What's the dissonance? By granting the public the rights to use more spectrum, one can imagine greater adoption and usage of the spectrum.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Well, here's a dissenting opinion by Pai from several years ago where he opposes unlicensed usage of UHF white space spectrum. https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pdf https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pd... The cynic in me notes that unlicensed, Mhz-range spectrum would have been a game changer and created a serious challenge to incumbent cellphone and broadband companies. Unlike Mhz spectrum, the 5Ghz spectrum he mentions (as an alternative) in that old opinion and the 6Ghz spectrum in the recent notice is limited to private usage within a building. You can't do anything long range, not even from down the block--at least not in a commercially viable way. Using unlicensed Mhz spectrum you could provide competitive broadband directly from the street (if not further), removing all the expense of leasing or running wires to people's homes or paying extremely costly fees to incumbent cellphone companies. I reconsider what I said about dissonance: there is none. His past and current positions are consonant with the view that rivalrous spectrum usage is best resolved by auctioning private property rights in spectrum--the classic Coase approach. By effectively being limited to within structures, 6Ghz spectrum isn't rivalrous even from a person in Pai's perspective. Note: I went to George Mason Law school which has a faculty that's extremely active in the FCC spectrum debate, and I know Pai is intellectually (and in some cases personally) friendly with some of that faculty. The faculty are vehement advocates for private spectrum auctions. I've had more than one intense debate advocating for more unlicensed spectrum usage and none of them were the least bit kind to that approach. But that was 10 years ago; perhaps opinions have softened since then.
ohazi 7y ago
At 6 GHz. This is super exciting. I have a huge backlog of fun wideband radio projects (radar, spread spectrum, etc.) that I've never been motivated enough to start because it would technically be illegal.
- wbl 7y ago
  Get a ham license and they become legal.
  - m463 7y ago
    can you do encrypted communications with a ham license? (does spread spectrum qualify?)
    - freeqaz 7y ago
      Unfortunately, you can't. It's silly[0]. [0]: https://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its-the-intention-thats-not/ https://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its...
      - tlrobinson 7y ago
        Your link isn't arguing that encryption being prohibited is silly, it's arguing that proprietary protocols like D-STAR are effectively "intended to obscure the meaning of the communication" (for profit rather than secrecy) and shouldn't be allowed.
        paulgerhardt 7y ago
        My understanding was under one interpretation encryption was always permitted by the FCC on ham bands over 50mhz but by a 2:1 majority common wisdom within the community (and the ARRL itself) hadn't come around to this line or reasoning[1]. Specifically encryption is not allowed if it's "for obscuring meaning except for the following circumstances" of which authentication and securing network operations are two. I would want some legal precedent or an amendment to the code before weighing on this too heavily to see which of the two interpretations takes priority. That article isn't the final word but it's interesting following the work of the broadband-hamnet folks - particularly in Texas[2]. They mostly say one can't use encrypted traffic. They are however relaying IP traffic but imply one shouldn't use https. During National Emergencies (like now?) a lot of the rules around call signs, power, and presumably encryption fall by the wayside. In practice it looks like the FCC grants per disaster waivers[3]. [1] https://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Legal.pdf https://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encrypti... - the lede is buried on page 3 [2] https://hotarc.org/mesh/ https://hotarc.org/mesh/ [3] http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-grants-temporary-waiver-permitting-use-of-pactor-4-for-hurricane-response-and-relief http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-grants-temporary-waiver-permitt...
jeppesen-io 7y ago
This is fantastic. For urban living, in appartments, 5Ghz is great in part because of the shorter range. Roughly speaking, how many WIFI chanels does 1200 Mhz give? How does this compare to 5Ghz?
- zaroth 7y ago
  Historically the channels were 20MHz. More recently 40MHz and I don’t know if ac goes wider? 1200MHz of bandwidth is a lot.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    80MHz is common, 160MHz exists.
- tradertef 7y ago
  Roughly 2-3x more channels compared to 5 GHz.
kingbirdy 7y ago
> the full 1,200-megahertz available in the 6 GHz band Can someone explain this to me? Doesn't 1 GHz = 1,000 MHz?
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  One is frequency, the other is bandwidth. So 1.2 GHz of band width in the 6GHz band. The actual frequency band is 5.925 GHz to 7.125GHz[1] which is 1.2GHz from bottom to top (that is how "wide" the band is) That spectrum is broken up into channels that can be up to 160 MHz wide which allows for a lot of data all at once, but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does do don't think of it easily covering your house. [1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf
  - wyldfire 7y ago
    How wide is/are the existing 2.4/5 GHz ISM band(s)?
    - ChuckMcM 7y ago
      40Mhz and 20Mhz
      - herpderperator 7y ago
        and 80 MHz and 160 MHz
      - dboreham 7y ago
        Wrong. 20MHz is the channel width (bonded together to make 40, 80 and 160MHz aggregate channels). There are three non-overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz band (so 60) and "many" in the existing 5GHz allocation. In some countries there's an extra usable channel in 2.4GHz. Once you bloat up to 160MHz (which is needed to achieve the highest marketing speeds) it is hard to find clear gaps in today's 5GHz because it isn't contiguous.
    - 7y ago
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
The practical impact to my knowledge is very high bit rate communications (many gigabits?) at short distances and indoors.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ksec 7y ago
  On a 2x2 160Mhz capable devices you are looking at 2.4Gbps, that in real world should be closer to 1.6Gbps. So not really many gigabits, but good enough for most of us.
- tradertef 7y ago
  Also helps with congestion in dense places like apartment complexes, stadiums etc.
cnxsoft 7y ago
That's for whwat is called "WiFi 6E" https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-brings-wi-fi-6-into-6-ghz https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-br...
fulafel 7y ago
Is this going to become a widely adopted Wifi/etc band or is it US-only?
- eqvinox 7y ago
  Your guess is as good as anyone's; it's US-only but I would expect some other countries / regions to follow for at least part of the band if not all of it.
rmac 7y ago
the real question is "when" i've lost faith over the years after buying into whitespace and cbrs; when neither happened in meaningful ways. The FCC is a shitshow
- tradertef 7y ago
  Formally be approved on April 23. New devices should be available late summer. CBRS and TVWS requires database which takes many years to craft.
ksec 7y ago
Other than the 1200Mhz [0] from the 6Ghz Band, the requirement of 6Ghz Certification ( New WiFi Chip, Antenna, and FCC Certs ) means that WiFi 6E brings opportunity to fix everything that went wrong with WiFi 6. The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz. Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2. I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems. [0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work. [1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-bluetooth/bcm4389 https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-blue...
- stefan_ 7y ago
  It just hit me that all of what is now sold as WiFi 6 does not in fact have a 6 GHz radio. The incompetence is breathtaking, it's been a year since they revamped all of their naming and it's already fucked again.
  - AlphaSite 7y ago
    I’m not sure that ghz and version number were ever intended to be interchangeable, were they? I think if it happened it would be a happy coincidence.
    - tradertef 7y ago
      True, it is coincidence IEEE 802.11 --> Wi-Fi 1 IEEE 802.11b --> Wi-Fi 2 IEEE 802.11a --> Wi-Fi 3 IEEE 802.11n --> Wi-Fi 4 IEEE 802.11ac --> Wi-Fi 5 IEEE 802.11ax --> Wi-Fi 6 IEEE 802.11ax in 6 GHz --> Wi-Fi 6E IEEE 802.11be --> Wi-Fi 7 Has nothing todo with GHz frequency.
  - willidiots 7y ago
    The intent of "Wi-Fi 6" is to start versioning Wi-Fi numerically (i.e. the next major rev will be Wi-Fi 7) instead of the IEEE's ever-lengthening 802.11 alphabet soup. It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.
jokoon 7y ago
Would that allow SDR? If yes, that would be a game changer...
nisa 7y ago
Good. Let's see if this actually happens and if Europe follows (I doubt the whole 1200MHz are free here, at least not on paper) The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band. At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities. But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...
- vageli 7y ago
  > But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps... But isn't the spectrum owned by the government? There is no compelling profit motive for government-provided services. The sale vs granting to the public likely had to do with the revolving door between interest groups and government.
- upofadown 7y ago
  Nit... "White space" spectrum is where you use the unused TV channels in a particular area. The 600-900 MHz spectrum has no TV in it anymore and and is just regular spectrum that various wireless phone providers have government granted monopolies on. They got exclusive access to that spectrum in return for large financial kickbacks.
- tradertef 7y ago
  802.11 is inefficient? What are you talking about. It is more efficient than cellular systems in terms of bits/second/Hertz. Unlicensed does not mean inefficient. Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.
  - nisa 7y ago
    > 802.11 is inefficient? CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹ https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-magical-feature-in-the-802-11ax-standard.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-...
oliv__ 7y ago
Great, some more wifi to add to the electrosmog soup we already live in. When are we going to start taking into account the health effects?
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  We already do. There aren’t any.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    To be pedantic, there are the thermal effects, which is why the EIRP is limited to a number low enough that the normal blood circulation can take away the extra heat, even in more sensitive parts like the eyes.
zeckalpha 7y ago
Title is a bit misleading, this is not about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band
- tradertef 7y ago
  Title does say "of", 1200 MHz of spectrum. It does not say in 1200 MHz band.
wyldfire 7y ago
Do most routers and other wifi devices need a new frontend to leverage the new band? Or could they conceivably receive a firmware update to unlock this?
- tradertef 7y ago
  New front-end hardware is required. Bunch of companies already announced equipment availability.

206 points by tradertef 7y ago

The real question is really "why isn't most of the spectrum like this?" - people sharing it rather than it being sold off to private holders to be owned

wahern 7y ago
To understand the thinking find a copy of the 1959 paper "The Federal Communications Commission" by Ronald Coase. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927 https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927 (pay-walled). It's the thesis behind the modern property-rights spectrum regime, and has bled over into many other federal regulatory regimes. As interpreted by many modern, mostly conservative, regulators and scholars, the idea is that by giving private property rights in spectrum you incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies. There's plenty to critique, especially as it applies to spectrum. See, for example, the famous Salon.com article summarizing David Reed's arguments: "The myth of interference" (2003), https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ But if you want to understand your adversaries' thinking, Coase's paper is the place to start.
- ohazi 7y ago
  > incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies. As with software patents, I think there's an argument to be made that this is no longer true. Digital modulation schemes are leagues more efficient than older analog techniques, both in terms of power and bandwidth. Spread spectrum schemes in particular are even reasonably resistant to being plopped on top of each other. The spectrum ownership scheme allows established players to sit around on their asses using loud, inefficient modulation schemes with huge dead zones in between channels because they don't need to do any better than that. I think radio technology would be better across the board if spectrum were open, and if people had to compete by using better, more efficient, more interference-immune modulation schemes, or risk getting stepped on by someone else. If we had a system like this, the noise floor would just slowly increase in heavily used parts of the spectrum, rather than what we have now, which is a whole bunch of legally mandated quiet zones punctuated by huge narrow carrier spikes. The technology to do this exists... you can go buy a broadband SDR and put together a system like this in GNU radio fairly quickly for experimental purposes, but it's not really legal to actually use this anywhere.
  - namibj 7y ago
    The thing is, that the QoS and power efficiency of e.g. LTE isn't attainable if you have uncontrolled interference. It's a general issue with far-side crosstalk.
    - wahern 7y ago
      Interference is largely a property of the specific scheme. 5G schemes are better than LTE when comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. aggregate bandwidth on the same bands in the same geographic area), whatever comes after 5G will continue moving the ball forward, and the theoretical limitations on how much further we can keep kicking the ball are still out of sight. Thus the question isn't what regulatory regime is best for squeezing the most out of LTE, but rather what's the optimal pace of radio communications evolution and how to achieve it. That's a drastically different type of question that almost certainly has a drastically different answer, or at least a much more complex answer.
      - namibj 7y ago
        Then make it so that frequencies don't get blocked for this long. Make it so that a company has to re-bid every once in a while for spectrum. Instead of just giving it away or making it all free-reign.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    The ideal spectrum allocation scheme would be a by-the-minute rental. Whenever anyone wants to use spectrum, their device automatically bids and gets allocated whatever size slice of spectrum and transmit power they ask for. Then the device maker or the user pays the bill at the end of the year, perhaps with some minimum free amount each year per person, which could cover all except the biggest spectrum users. If you didn't like the government allocation scheme, you could rent your own block and do your own sub-allocations, for example some kind of packetized system with microsecond long packets wouldn't want to have to contact a government server for every 1 microsecond allocation. That gives a strong incentive to use efficient allocation schemes.
- ethn 7y ago
  Coase actually argues in that paper, in true UChicago fashion that the spectrum should be completely unregulated in a free market for private efficiency. He’s actually arguing against the FCC. As he also touches on in The Nature of a Firm. Read Section 5 of the paper you’ve linked.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Yes. But the explicit premise in that section is that there are exclusionary property rights in the spectrum protected by traditional property and contract law, and that contiguous ranges of spectrum can be subdivided and sold exactly analogously to a piece of land. For example, he explains that while there are technical interference issues at the edges of spectrum bands whereby the user of one range could incidentally interfere with the user of another range, the same type of problems occurs with land (e.g. nuisance) and are similarly manageable with a traditional property rights regime. In Coase's view the government shouldn't be auctioning spectrum for limited times or with strings attached, as we commonly do now. (What the FCC does now is a quasi-Coasean spectrum regime.) In Coase's view spectrum usage would be most efficient by selling all spectrum (from 0-infinity) in a one-time auction to the single highest bidder. That bidder could (and, crucially, would in Coase's view) then subdivide and sell the spectrum according to market demand. Coase's logic is solid; it's the premises that are problematic. First, it ignores transaction costs, or at least assumes they're de minimis. Even before the Law & Economics field took off (which is the field Coase most influenced), it was understood that one of the purposes of legal rules was to minimize transaction costs. Sometimes a market is made more efficient by specifying a fixed rule, and even more often by specifying a fixed default rule, then by permitting perfect contractual freedom. Of course, this begs the question of when you can know whether to intervene. But that's the only legitimate question, not whether you should ever intervene. In Coase's time his argument was more practical as widespread independent and even individual broadcast usage wasn't a commercially realistic scenario; transaction costs would always be born by economic behemonths and therefore would be de minimis relative to their price. But that's not Coase's actual argument; his actual argument is categorical and absolute, and that's how most modern proponents (IME) apply it as well. Secondly, the notion of spectrum rivalrousness is contentious. If something isn't rivalrous, a property regime is unnecessary and usually strictly inefficient.[1] Without getting into the science (and I'm not an electrical engineer so I'd just make mince of things), as a practical matter spectrum usage is only partly rivalrous (rivalrous mostly deriving from the technical environment, not from the fundamental character of spectrum, as with physical goods and real estate). Your ability to enjoy maximal channel bandwidth between two physical points is limited by how sophisticated your transmitter and receiver, and ultimately by computational power, not by coincidental usage, per se. (Not unless someone is actively trying to screw you.) As WiFi has born out, we're all in an arms race for buying and using the latest, greatest gear. In one sense this is just a convoluted price signaling scheme--the people most in need of bandwidth just pay for fancier equipment--that might be less efficient than a simple property regime. But arguably in practice this process plays out slowly enough (especially with moderate power limits, carve outs for emergency use, etc) that these transaction costs are far less than the transaction costs we see in a market where we expect Verizon's or AT&T's spectrum usage rights to trickle down to ad hoc groups and individuals of spectrum users in the same way William the Conqueror's lands in England were slowly subdivided until every Englishman could build his own castle. Nobody will ever sell me rights to spectrum for use within a 10-meter or even 100-meter radius, even though it's possible and would open up a tremendous wealth of opportunities. Cordless phones (POTS, not cell) and WiFi could only have happened with unlicensed (i.e. unowned) spectrum, in contradiction to Coase's argument. [1] Exception--if food wasn't rivalrous because we all had free Star Trek-style replicators I imagine obesity would be an even worse problem than it is today, we'd be more sickly, and so we'd probably want to impose costs to maximize aggregate wealth. (See soda tax.) And if we did that we might want to make those costs transferable (e.g. carbon credits) rather than centrally figuring out the most efficient price for each individual.
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- upofadown 7y ago
  I think that in practice the idea of privately owned spectrum really came into its own with the original scheme used for analog cell phone service. The incumbent phone companies were given their own exclusive spectrum and the competitive cell phone company (originally there was only one) got their own exclusive spectrum. This A band, B band system actually worked fairly good compared to the sort of thing happening with the landline monopolies. Obviously the system couldn't be expanded to a market with more than two entities without causing a lot of inefficiency. The regulators did this expansion anyway and that led to the insanity we have today.
mrfusion 7y ago
I like that idea. Are there plans for making it work? Some things like FM radio couldn’t work that way? Or could they?
- deleted 7y ago
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- state_less 7y ago
  I think fears are overstated and used as a pretense to sell off spectrum to private entities, which can provide private investors a handsome reward for their monopoly on the spectrum. Consider "junk" unlicensed WiFi spectrum (i.e. 2.4ghz). Normally private owners would argue, "We can't allow anyone to broadcast, it'll be overcrowded. We need a gatekeeper to solve this." In reality, yes it can be overcrowded in dense areas, so packets still get sent, but at a lower rate. This creates demand and people start gravitating to less crowded, unlicensed spectrum (i.e. 5.2ghz) for crowded indoor use scenario. It's more bandwidth and better attenuation with your neighbors. Consumer radios are also certified to only produce so much power on the spectrum which adds additional safeguards. So the free market and a dash of radio certification/regulation ends up providing an efficient decentralized communication medium. With other shared mediums, we police the spectrum (e.g. light, sound, etc...). If a user starts blasting out FM, or too much 2.4gz and so on, it can be detected, traced and prosecuted. It's 2020, we don't need FM, we need high speed IPv6 radios and improved routing tables/algorithms. Lift FM channels into the digital realm and let's get on with it.
jrockway 7y ago
The reason why WiFi has poor performance in dense environments is because there is no central coordinator for spectrum usage. Stations pick a random frequency and start talking. If another station is talking when you want to send a message, your station will wait indefinitely for the channel to be free. The result is that you get random latency spikes; your VoIP call just gets dropped, you get disconnected from your online game, your video call freezes up. There is no concept of determining what's best for everyone; anyone sending a message checks if the channel is clear and goes about their business. This all sounds somewhat fair, but the problems really start when not all the stations can hear each other. Station A can hear Station B and Station C. Station C starts sending a message to station A. Station B can't hear Station C, so starts sending a message to station A. The result is that both messages are lost and the effective channel capacity goes to zero. This is obviously a big problem. The fundamental problem is that radio is very much half-duplex. Only one station can use a certain amount of spectrum at a time; if someone is using it, you can't. It causes problems everywhere; with WiFi, with air traffic control, etc. Centralized frequency allocations get around this with better protocols. All the stations know about each other, and can be told when they can transmit by a centralized coordinator (TDMA is an example of such a protocol). As a result, each station has a predictable amount of airtime, and therefore guaranteed bandwidth and latency; no time is wasted with two stations talking over each other. (There are other sharing schemes that are more interesting and popular than naive time-sharing; CDMA, spread-spectrum, and GPS's "Gold Codes" are all interesting reading.) The easiest way to implement this is not to write a standard and then ensure that everyone buys a standards-compliant device, but rather to give chunks of spectrum to companies, and have companies distribute devices that work they way they want. It's easier for the regulatory agency ("pay us money and do whatever you want"), and doesn't cap innovation. Verizon can collect your phone tomorrow and give you a new one if they want to use whizbang new technology. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it is of course a compromise. (Faster innovation, less government interference with technology... but at the cost of making it impossible to start a cell phone provider on your own.) I guess my TL;DR is: it's not that simple. You could let everyone do whatever they wanted. That's how it was in the early days. People used spark-gap transmitters that generated so much noise that there was effectively only one half-duplex channel for the entire planet to use. Regulators saw that that wasn't going to scale and invented spectrum allocations, and here we are today. It's not perfect, but technology is improving how we used the unlicensed bands. (I am not as up to date as I want to be on WiFi specifically, but if you look at the amateur radio community, it's routine these days to communicate around the world with 5-10W of power. 20 years ago, it would have taken two orders of magnitude more power and 20x the bandwidth to do with voice what we do with FT8 today. People are still idiots, though, and generate plenty of QRM. It only gets worse when people without licenses start operating the radio stations.)
Rebelgecko 7y ago
If you've tried using 2.8ghz WiFi in a crowded apartment building, you'd already know why: tragedy of the commons.
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  The microwave at my house would reliably murder my wi-fi connection whenever you turned it on, which was great fun while playing real-time multiplayer games.
  - m463 7y ago
    I think a microwave oven only hits part of the 2.4 ghz wifi spectrum and if you can lock what channel you're on you can avoid it.
    - ansible 7y ago
      That only works if the microwave oven in question stays within a very narrow band. Some of them don't.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  To an extent, but that entire band is only 75MHz wide. There are only 2-4 proper channels, and it has twice the range of 5-6GHz, which puts you in competition with an order of magnitude more hot spots.
pkaye 7y ago
Could it be they were allocated before things like OFDM and CDMA were practical to share the spectrum?
grahamburger 7y ago
As an operator of large wireless networks I prefer to purchase licensed spectrum over using shared bands every single time. It's hard to overstate how much more reliable and performant the network can be when there is some assurance you won't be interfered with.
- anfilt 7y ago
  I would concur, but there are not many non-licensed bands. So all sorts of traffic is more congested in those. If there were more unlicensed bands I think it would probably improve those use cases. I think both types are quite important.
sipjca 7y ago
This is one of the things I have trouble understanding too. It’s a complex issue, but it seems like it would be best opened to the public where next generation radio technologies can evolve. I don’t think 5G/LTE will go away but there may be new technologies which are more open and integrate within the existing frameworks. I imagine some kind of public mesh net/CDN that goes out to LTE/5G only when necessary to access information not in the local context. I wrote more here: https://wiki.cjpais.com/brain-dump/march-15th-22nd-2020/radio-spectrum-allocation https://wiki.cjpais.com/brain-dump/march-15th-22nd-2020/radi... Edit: I’m very glad the FCC is doing this. This is a great step forward. Looking forward to experimenting with this spectrum

wahern 7y ago

I'm curious how Ajit Pai squares his faith in the property rights-based Coase Theorem approach to spectrum management with increasing the unlicensed bands. It's probably a dissonance a politician (despite his background, that's what Pai effectively is, now) can't be bothered with.

tastygreenapple 7y ago
What's the dissonance? By granting the public the rights to use more spectrum, one can imagine greater adoption and usage of the spectrum.
- wahern 7y ago
  Well, here's a dissenting opinion by Pai from several years ago where he opposes unlicensed usage of UHF white space spectrum. https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pdf https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pd... The cynic in me notes that unlicensed, Mhz-range spectrum would have been a game changer and created a serious challenge to incumbent cellphone and broadband companies. Unlike Mhz spectrum, the 5Ghz spectrum he mentions (as an alternative) in that old opinion and the 6Ghz spectrum in the recent notice is limited to private usage within a building. You can't do anything long range, not even from down the block--at least not in a commercially viable way. Using unlicensed Mhz spectrum you could provide competitive broadband directly from the street (if not further), removing all the expense of leasing or running wires to people's homes or paying extremely costly fees to incumbent cellphone companies. I reconsider what I said about dissonance: there is none. His past and current positions are consonant with the view that rivalrous spectrum usage is best resolved by auctioning private property rights in spectrum--the classic Coase approach. By effectively being limited to within structures, 6Ghz spectrum isn't rivalrous even from a person in Pai's perspective. Note: I went to George Mason Law school which has a faculty that's extremely active in the FCC spectrum debate, and I know Pai is intellectually (and in some cases personally) friendly with some of that faculty. The faculty are vehement advocates for private spectrum auctions. I've had more than one intense debate advocating for more unlicensed spectrum usage and none of them were the least bit kind to that approach. But that was 10 years ago; perhaps opinions have softened since then.

ohazi 7y ago

At 6 GHz. This is super exciting. I have a huge backlog of fun wideband radio projects (radar, spread spectrum, etc.) that I've never been motivated enough to start because it would technically be illegal.

wbl 7y ago
Get a ham license and they become legal.
- m463 7y ago
  can you do encrypted communications with a ham license? (does spread spectrum qualify?)
  - freeqaz 7y ago
    Unfortunately, you can't. It's silly[0]. [0]: https://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its-the-intention-thats-not/ https://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its...
    - tlrobinson 7y ago
      Your link isn't arguing that encryption being prohibited is silly, it's arguing that proprietary protocols like D-STAR are effectively "intended to obscure the meaning of the communication" (for profit rather than secrecy) and shouldn't be allowed.
      - paulgerhardt 7y ago
        My understanding was under one interpretation encryption was always permitted by the FCC on ham bands over 50mhz but by a 2:1 majority common wisdom within the community (and the ARRL itself) hadn't come around to this line or reasoning[1]. Specifically encryption is not allowed if it's "for obscuring meaning except for the following circumstances" of which authentication and securing network operations are two. I would want some legal precedent or an amendment to the code before weighing on this too heavily to see which of the two interpretations takes priority. That article isn't the final word but it's interesting following the work of the broadband-hamnet folks - particularly in Texas[2]. They mostly say one can't use encrypted traffic. They are however relaying IP traffic but imply one shouldn't use https. During National Emergencies (like now?) a lot of the rules around call signs, power, and presumably encryption fall by the wayside. In practice it looks like the FCC grants per disaster waivers[3]. [1] https://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Legal.pdf https://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encrypti... - the lede is buried on page 3 [2] https://hotarc.org/mesh/ https://hotarc.org/mesh/ [3] http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-grants-temporary-waiver-permitting-use-of-pactor-4-for-hurricane-response-and-relief http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-grants-temporary-waiver-permitt...

jeppesen-io 7y ago

This is fantastic. For urban living, in appartments, 5Ghz is great in part because of the shorter range. Roughly speaking, how many WIFI chanels does 1200 Mhz give? How does this compare to 5Ghz?

zaroth 7y ago
Historically the channels were 20MHz. More recently 40MHz and I don’t know if ac goes wider? 1200MHz of bandwidth is a lot.
- dboreham 7y ago
  80MHz is common, 160MHz exists.
tradertef 7y ago
Roughly 2-3x more channels compared to 5 GHz.

kingbirdy 7y ago

> the full 1,200-megahertz available in the 6 GHz band Can someone explain this to me? Doesn't 1 GHz = 1,000 MHz?

ChuckMcM 7y ago
One is frequency, the other is bandwidth. So 1.2 GHz of band width in the 6GHz band. The actual frequency band is 5.925 GHz to 7.125GHz[1] which is 1.2GHz from bottom to top (that is how "wide" the band is) That spectrum is broken up into channels that can be up to 160 MHz wide which allows for a lot of data all at once, but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does do don't think of it easily covering your house. [1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf
- wyldfire 7y ago
  How wide is/are the existing 2.4/5 GHz ISM band(s)?
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    40Mhz and 20Mhz
    - herpderperator 7y ago
      and 80 MHz and 160 MHz
    - dboreham 7y ago
      Wrong. 20MHz is the channel width (bonded together to make 40, 80 and 160MHz aggregate channels). There are three non-overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz band (so 60) and "many" in the existing 5GHz allocation. In some countries there's an extra usable channel in 2.4GHz. Once you bloat up to 160MHz (which is needed to achieve the highest marketing speeds) it is hard to find clear gaps in today's 5GHz because it isn't contiguous.
  - 7y ago

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago

The practical impact to my knowledge is very high bit rate communications (many gigabits?) at short distances and indoors.

deleted 7y ago
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ksec 7y ago
On a 2x2 160Mhz capable devices you are looking at 2.4Gbps, that in real world should be closer to 1.6Gbps. So not really many gigabits, but good enough for most of us.
tradertef 7y ago
Also helps with congestion in dense places like apartment complexes, stadiums etc.

cnxsoft 7y ago

That's for whwat is called "WiFi 6E" https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-brings-wi-fi-6-into-6-ghz https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-br...

fulafel 7y ago

Is this going to become a widely adopted Wifi/etc band or is it US-only?

eqvinox 7y ago
Your guess is as good as anyone's; it's US-only but I would expect some other countries / regions to follow for at least part of the band if not all of it.

rmac 7y ago

the real question is "when" i've lost faith over the years after buying into whitespace and cbrs; when neither happened in meaningful ways. The FCC is a shitshow

tradertef 7y ago
Formally be approved on April 23. New devices should be available late summer. CBRS and TVWS requires database which takes many years to craft.

ksec 7y ago

Other than the 1200Mhz [0] from the 6Ghz Band, the requirement of 6Ghz Certification ( New WiFi Chip, Antenna, and FCC Certs ) means that WiFi 6E brings opportunity to fix everything that went wrong with WiFi 6. The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz. Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2. I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems. [0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work. [1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-bluetooth/bcm4389 https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-blue...

stefan_ 7y ago
It just hit me that all of what is now sold as WiFi 6 does not in fact have a 6 GHz radio. The incompetence is breathtaking, it's been a year since they revamped all of their naming and it's already fucked again.
- AlphaSite 7y ago
  I’m not sure that ghz and version number were ever intended to be interchangeable, were they? I think if it happened it would be a happy coincidence.
  - tradertef 7y ago
    True, it is coincidence IEEE 802.11 --> Wi-Fi 1 IEEE 802.11b --> Wi-Fi 2 IEEE 802.11a --> Wi-Fi 3 IEEE 802.11n --> Wi-Fi 4 IEEE 802.11ac --> Wi-Fi 5 IEEE 802.11ax --> Wi-Fi 6 IEEE 802.11ax in 6 GHz --> Wi-Fi 6E IEEE 802.11be --> Wi-Fi 7 Has nothing todo with GHz frequency.
- willidiots 7y ago
  The intent of "Wi-Fi 6" is to start versioning Wi-Fi numerically (i.e. the next major rev will be Wi-Fi 7) instead of the IEEE's ever-lengthening 802.11 alphabet soup. It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.

jokoon 7y ago

Would that allow SDR? If yes, that would be a game changer...

nisa 7y ago

Good. Let's see if this actually happens and if Europe follows (I doubt the whole 1200MHz are free here, at least not on paper) The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band. At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities. But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...

vageli 7y ago
> But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps... But isn't the spectrum owned by the government? There is no compelling profit motive for government-provided services. The sale vs granting to the public likely had to do with the revolving door between interest groups and government.
upofadown 7y ago
Nit... "White space" spectrum is where you use the unused TV channels in a particular area. The 600-900 MHz spectrum has no TV in it anymore and and is just regular spectrum that various wireless phone providers have government granted monopolies on. They got exclusive access to that spectrum in return for large financial kickbacks.
tradertef 7y ago
802.11 is inefficient? What are you talking about. It is more efficient than cellular systems in terms of bits/second/Hertz. Unlicensed does not mean inefficient. Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.
- nisa 7y ago
  > 802.11 is inefficient? CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹ https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-magical-feature-in-the-802-11ax-standard.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-...

oliv__ 7y ago

Great, some more wifi to add to the electrosmog soup we already live in. When are we going to start taking into account the health effects?

lawnchair_larry 7y ago
We already do. There aren’t any.
- cesarb 7y ago
  To be pedantic, there are the thermal effects, which is why the EIRP is limited to a number low enough that the normal blood circulation can take away the extra heat, even in more sensitive parts like the eyes.

zeckalpha 7y ago

Title is a bit misleading, this is not about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band

tradertef 7y ago
Title does say "of", 1200 MHz of spectrum. It does not say in 1200 MHz band.

wyldfire 7y ago

Do most routers and other wifi devices need a new frontend to leverage the new band? Or could they conceivably receive a firmware update to unlock this?

tradertef 7y ago
New front-end hardware is required. Bunch of companies already announced equipment availability.