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This article wasn't about unlicensed/ISM radio, though there have certainly been advances there as well. I'm genuinely curious about which parts of the ISM ran

by ac29 6y ago

This article wasn't about unlicensed/ISM radio, though there have certainly been advances there as well. I'm genuinely curious about which parts of the ISM range you see with "superior" utilization compared to cellular networks - I work with those type of radios for a living.

jessaustin 6y ago
For most of the spectrum, the devices and services that consumers may purchase are limited to those available from giant hierarchical oligopolies. In the ISM bands, we have a bunch of different technologies, but most importantly Wifi. There are much less stringent barriers to anyone using or selling devices and services that use Wifi. And it all works! Those who live in dense urban areas sometimes scoff at Wifi, but what they're seeing is the tiny segments of spectrum allocated to unlicensed use, not inherent problems with open spectrum. The excuse offered in the past for spectrum oligopolies was "oh it's physics" because the very simplest radio technology we could imagine in the 1930s does suffer from interference at lower frequencies. Of course we've had more advanced radio tech for a long time, but ignore that... at the frequencies under discussion for 5G, interference over any but the shortest range is no longer a threat. That means that most of the claimed justification for telecom monopolies (and perhaps the agency created to enforce those monopolies) goes away. It's sad that TFA is still focused on "carriers".
- ac29 6y ago
  Sure, I dont want to understate the impact that WiFi has - its a good technology, and its great that it can be used without a license. I wish more spectrum was available unlicensed - a portion of my income depends on it! My unlicensed radio experience is largely with 900MHz ISM systems, and I wish "its just physics" was a lame excuse. Fact is, the #1 thing limiting performance on these systems in most urban and suburban places is noise - I've installed plenty of radios capable of high order QAM that were limited to QPSK or even GMSK strictly due to noise. I'd say the noise floor in 900MHz ISM is something like 3-5 orders of magnitude higher than in similar sub-GHz licensed systems. Uncoordinated frequency hopping systems are noise-resistant, but still leave a lot of theoretical performance on the table. Cellular systems have their purpose too - WiFi is not a good technology for covering a city with internet access, as many attempts to do so should prove. Nor would it be wise to allow unlicensed use at high power - ask anyone who's ever lived in an apartment how their WiFi is, then imagine if power levels could be increased by an order of magnitude to or two.

by ac29 6y ago

jessaustin 6y ago

For most of the spectrum, the devices and services that consumers may purchase are limited to those available from giant hierarchical oligopolies. In the ISM bands, we have a bunch of different technologies, but most importantly Wifi. There are much less stringent barriers to anyone using or selling devices and services that use Wifi. And it all works! Those who live in dense urban areas sometimes scoff at Wifi, but what they're seeing is the tiny segments of spectrum allocated to unlicensed use, not inherent problems with open spectrum. The excuse offered in the past for spectrum oligopolies was "oh it's physics" because the very simplest radio technology we could imagine in the 1930s does suffer from interference at lower frequencies. Of course we've had more advanced radio tech for a long time, but ignore that... at the frequencies under discussion for 5G, interference over any but the shortest range is no longer a threat. That means that most of the claimed justification for telecom monopolies (and perhaps the agency created to enforce those monopolies) goes away. It's sad that TFA is still focused on "carriers".

ac29 6y ago
Sure, I dont want to understate the impact that WiFi has - its a good technology, and its great that it can be used without a license. I wish more spectrum was available unlicensed - a portion of my income depends on it! My unlicensed radio experience is largely with 900MHz ISM systems, and I wish "its just physics" was a lame excuse. Fact is, the #1 thing limiting performance on these systems in most urban and suburban places is noise - I've installed plenty of radios capable of high order QAM that were limited to QPSK or even GMSK strictly due to noise. I'd say the noise floor in 900MHz ISM is something like 3-5 orders of magnitude higher than in similar sub-GHz licensed systems. Uncoordinated frequency hopping systems are noise-resistant, but still leave a lot of theoretical performance on the table. Cellular systems have their purpose too - WiFi is not a good technology for covering a city with internet access, as many attempts to do so should prove. Nor would it be wise to allow unlicensed use at high power - ask anyone who's ever lived in an apartment how their WiFi is, then imagine if power levels could be increased by an order of magnitude to or two.