6 ms·

> It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment. This is entirely a problem of our

by ohazi 6y ago

> It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment. This is entirely a problem of our own making. We give cellular providers hundreds of MHz of exclusive spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz block at 2.4 GHz. It's not that this standard is doing anything particularly nasty to the environment, it's just that it happens to be messing with the one tiny head-of-a-pin that we've decided everything needs to live on. It's a computer controlled radio for crying out loud, give us 400 MHz and let the computer figure out how to hop around.

hctaw 6y ago
The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. 2.4GHz may be crowded, but it's nowhere near as bad as mobile where the demand for bandwidth has been doubling yearly for two decades.
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi standard.
- ohazi 6y ago
  The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons. There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office. We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd. On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation. Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum. A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis. Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    I'd rather the telephone industry spend $1 on hardware than see them spend $1 on license fees. The story now is "$80 billion in license fees" and "$20 billion in hardware" and that seems the wrong way around -- when most folks play poker the stakes are supposed go up, not down.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      The money is made up! The FCC could sell spectrum for pennies, or give it away, or restrict access to The Right People, or wash their hands of it, or do another auction. They've done all of these things at various points. The license fees are made up.
      - bartvk 6y ago
        The way it's now done, will put the spectrum there, where there's the most value. However the result is that it's actually a tax which the consumer will indirectly pay.
        krageon 6y ago
        > where there's the most value It's where there is the most money, not value.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    >Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa. That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical area, and provides the base station and backhaul infrastructure to support their network. It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room"; it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of that room than T-Mobile does. The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage and network performance. Sharing spectrum would effectively require mutualization of base station infrastructure. You would effectively have a single monopoly with the networks operating as virtual operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good outcome, to me, at least.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. If market rate were justified for everything then we wouldn't even have space reserved for HAMs. > There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. There's plenty of industries with enough demand. There's just no way they can compete with the money that mobile offers. That's a damn shame given that money shouldn't be the only, nor even the main, driver.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    I think OP was using a rather consequentialist and capitalist economic model, where the value of a thing is by definition equal to the money that you can get for it on the open market.
    - scarby2 6y ago
      Or maybe just that governments rarely pass up on that kind of revenue unless it's a huge PR win, in this case it wouldn't be very noticeable.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  It very much depends on which band that spectrum is in. If 400MHz was worth the same everywhere, it's doubtful that amateur radio would have >4.7GHz of it allocated on a primary basis in the EHF band, for example.
  - fapjacks 6y ago
    Give it time. Once these bands become more utilized, and more hardware gets pumped into the system, this bandwidth allocation for hams will shrink just like it has in every other band. They'll find any reason to reduce these allocations in favor of some industrial monopoly that may or may not even use what it takes (cf. UPS).
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  It's our spectrum to sell or not sell. No industry needs to "buy" public bands, we can just decide to allocate them for the public.
- scotty79 6y ago
  What about 5GHz wifi? How does it work?
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    At that frequency, it becomes really hard to penetrate walls or travel without direct line of sight.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    It "works" but it is a mess. Large chunks of the spectrum require some combination of radar detection and power reduction, and if you live near a radar station you basically cannot use 160mhz wifi. I will also add that 60ghz works great, but it will not penetrate walls. I have found it penetrates my doors and thus makes a great replacement for 2.4ghz/5ghz mesh networking in my apartment, but not much else.
    - krageon 6y ago
      > if you live near a radar station This is actually incredibly annoying, especially in a residential setting where the 2.4GHz band is incredibly noisy (5GHz doesn't penetrate as well so it ends up being less noisy).
- RIMR 6y ago
  Kinda wild that there's such a steep market rate for being allowed adequately communicate over the open air.
- wilde 6y ago
  This would be more believable if Dish Network wasn’t squatting on a ton of spectrum.
Dylan16807 6y ago
> give us 400 MHz We have that, it's called 5GHz. And also 6GHz now, that allocation is 1200Mhz wide!
- harha 6y ago
  5GHz works well as long as your access point is in the same room. In real life one of the drivers behind having so many wireless devices in the first place is avoiding the effort and cost of laying cables everywhere, 5GHz often doesn't solve that problem well. For now I'm using powerline devices to connect rooms with their own set of problems, nothing beats having a well thought through wiring in the house though.
  - derefr 6y ago
    In apartment buildings, there’s no advantage in a wireless protocol that penetrates walls—quite the opposite. I don’t want my neighbour’s router and mine constantly shouting over each-other. I want the signal to end at the wall.
    - harha 6y ago
      I see more than 20 networks in the building I'm in, so that is already happening. Most people I know don't have cables going to different rooms, there's a router where the signal comes in and wifi from there. Often there's not even the choice which room or part of the room that is. Unless your building is relatively new and someone thought about setting up the cables, it can be very expensive to do so later.
      - krageon 6y ago
        > very expensive To lay a cat6 cable and have it snake over the ceiling in a cable gutter? The cable I grant you isn't dirt cheap but it's by far the most expensive part of that arrangement.
    - xraystyle 6y ago
      Agreed, this would be ideal. Most people don't understand that literally every access point on a given channel is part of the same broadcast domain even if they're totally separate networks. Every AP that yours can see on the same channel slows down the network for all of them, because wifi is half-duplex. Everyone needs to shut up for a second while one host on the channel transmits.
PaulHoule 6y ago
There is a big block of spectrum around 5GHz for unlicensed use, and another huge one in the 6GHz about to be opened up. The trouble is that protocols like ZigBee and ZWave and Bluetooth and ANT+ are stuck in the 2.4 GHz band and practically you cannot turn off your 2.4 WiFi access points and be happy. Thus I have to go to the woods to pair my fitness band with the heart rate sensor because at my house who knows what is going on with the hue light that is on the wrong side of my monitor from the hue hub or the smoke detector that posts the battery status to SmartThings, etc.
- jlv2 6y ago
  Zigbee is in 2.4GHz; Z-Wave is 900MHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave#Radio_frequencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave#Radio_frequencies
  - galangalalgol 6y ago
    Its not just 2.4 that usb3 kills. I've had it jam gps from a couple feet away and thats down at 1.3. Did some emi tests, it was really broadband interference. I really have no idea how these chipsets got approved.
    - cozzyd 6y ago
      GPS is sub-thermal noise and the receivers don't have a ton of dynamic range. Your GPS may not have a good filter on it and might be saturating, rather than necessarily broad-band RFI.
      - galangalalgol 6y ago
        We put the device with usb on it in an emi chamber and watched it on a spectrum analyzer. Unless it was in a taped box there was a mountain of noise.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  The big chunk around 5ghz is more restricted e.g. DFS/TPC requirements. Using 160mhz channels is impossible in my NYC area apartment because of those restrictions.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
"give"??
Roark66 6y ago
>This is entirely a problem of our own making. >We give cellular providers hundreds of MHz of exclusive spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz block at 2.4 GHz. I don't think this is a bandwidth issue. USB is a wired standard. Using shielding is not that hard, but doing it inexpensively, while maintaining cable flexibility and low attenuation at high frequencies is very hard. I wonder how do manufacturers of those devices manage to not get caught by the fcc in us and equivalent agencies in EU. Perhaps they sell directly to customers overseas?

by ohazi 6y ago

hctaw 6y ago

The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. 2.4GHz may be crowded, but it's nowhere near as bad as mobile where the demand for bandwidth has been doubling yearly for two decades.

lukeschlather 6y ago
This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi standard.
ohazi 6y ago
The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons. There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office. We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd. On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation. Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum. A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis. Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  I'd rather the telephone industry spend $1 on hardware than see them spend $1 on license fees. The story now is "$80 billion in license fees" and "$20 billion in hardware" and that seems the wrong way around -- when most folks play poker the stakes are supposed go up, not down.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    The money is made up! The FCC could sell spectrum for pennies, or give it away, or restrict access to The Right People, or wash their hands of it, or do another auction. They've done all of these things at various points. The license fees are made up.
    - bartvk 6y ago
      The way it's now done, will put the spectrum there, where there's the most value. However the result is that it's actually a tax which the consumer will indirectly pay.
      - krageon 6y ago
        > where there's the most value It's where there is the most money, not value.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  >Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa. That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical area, and provides the base station and backhaul infrastructure to support their network. It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room"; it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of that room than T-Mobile does. The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage and network performance. Sharing spectrum would effectively require mutualization of base station infrastructure. You would effectively have a single monopoly with the networks operating as virtual operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good outcome, to me, at least.
inetknght 6y ago
> The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. If market rate were justified for everything then we wouldn't even have space reserved for HAMs. > There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. There's plenty of industries with enough demand. There's just no way they can compete with the money that mobile offers. That's a damn shame given that money shouldn't be the only, nor even the main, driver.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  I think OP was using a rather consequentialist and capitalist economic model, where the value of a thing is by definition equal to the money that you can get for it on the open market.
  - scarby2 6y ago
    Or maybe just that governments rarely pass up on that kind of revenue unless it's a huge PR win, in this case it wouldn't be very noticeable.
NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
It very much depends on which band that spectrum is in. If 400MHz was worth the same everywhere, it's doubtful that amateur radio would have >4.7GHz of it allocated on a primary basis in the EHF band, for example.
- fapjacks 6y ago
  Give it time. Once these bands become more utilized, and more hardware gets pumped into the system, this bandwidth allocation for hams will shrink just like it has in every other band. They'll find any reason to reduce these allocations in favor of some industrial monopoly that may or may not even use what it takes (cf. UPS).
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
It's our spectrum to sell or not sell. No industry needs to "buy" public bands, we can just decide to allocate them for the public.
scotty79 6y ago
What about 5GHz wifi? How does it work?
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  At that frequency, it becomes really hard to penetrate walls or travel without direct line of sight.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  It "works" but it is a mess. Large chunks of the spectrum require some combination of radar detection and power reduction, and if you live near a radar station you basically cannot use 160mhz wifi. I will also add that 60ghz works great, but it will not penetrate walls. I have found it penetrates my doors and thus makes a great replacement for 2.4ghz/5ghz mesh networking in my apartment, but not much else.
  - krageon 6y ago
    > if you live near a radar station This is actually incredibly annoying, especially in a residential setting where the 2.4GHz band is incredibly noisy (5GHz doesn't penetrate as well so it ends up being less noisy).
RIMR 6y ago
Kinda wild that there's such a steep market rate for being allowed adequately communicate over the open air.
wilde 6y ago
This would be more believable if Dish Network wasn’t squatting on a ton of spectrum.

Dylan16807 6y ago

> give us 400 MHz We have that, it's called 5GHz. And also 6GHz now, that allocation is 1200Mhz wide!

harha 6y ago
5GHz works well as long as your access point is in the same room. In real life one of the drivers behind having so many wireless devices in the first place is avoiding the effort and cost of laying cables everywhere, 5GHz often doesn't solve that problem well. For now I'm using powerline devices to connect rooms with their own set of problems, nothing beats having a well thought through wiring in the house though.
- derefr 6y ago
  In apartment buildings, there’s no advantage in a wireless protocol that penetrates walls—quite the opposite. I don’t want my neighbour’s router and mine constantly shouting over each-other. I want the signal to end at the wall.
  - harha 6y ago
    I see more than 20 networks in the building I'm in, so that is already happening. Most people I know don't have cables going to different rooms, there's a router where the signal comes in and wifi from there. Often there's not even the choice which room or part of the room that is. Unless your building is relatively new and someone thought about setting up the cables, it can be very expensive to do so later.
    - krageon 6y ago
      > very expensive To lay a cat6 cable and have it snake over the ceiling in a cable gutter? The cable I grant you isn't dirt cheap but it's by far the most expensive part of that arrangement.
  - xraystyle 6y ago
    Agreed, this would be ideal. Most people don't understand that literally every access point on a given channel is part of the same broadcast domain even if they're totally separate networks. Every AP that yours can see on the same channel slows down the network for all of them, because wifi is half-duplex. Everyone needs to shut up for a second while one host on the channel transmits.

PaulHoule 6y ago

There is a big block of spectrum around 5GHz for unlicensed use, and another huge one in the 6GHz about to be opened up. The trouble is that protocols like ZigBee and ZWave and Bluetooth and ANT+ are stuck in the 2.4 GHz band and practically you cannot turn off your 2.4 WiFi access points and be happy. Thus I have to go to the woods to pair my fitness band with the heart rate sensor because at my house who knows what is going on with the hue light that is on the wrong side of my monitor from the hue hub or the smoke detector that posts the battery status to SmartThings, etc.

jlv2 6y ago
Zigbee is in 2.4GHz; Z-Wave is 900MHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave#Radio_frequencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave#Radio_frequencies
- galangalalgol 6y ago
  Its not just 2.4 that usb3 kills. I've had it jam gps from a couple feet away and thats down at 1.3. Did some emi tests, it was really broadband interference. I really have no idea how these chipsets got approved.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    GPS is sub-thermal noise and the receivers don't have a ton of dynamic range. Your GPS may not have a good filter on it and might be saturating, rather than necessarily broad-band RFI.
    - galangalalgol 6y ago
      We put the device with usb on it in an emi chamber and watched it on a spectrum analyzer. Unless it was in a taped box there was a mountain of noise.
betterunix2 6y ago
The big chunk around 5ghz is more restricted e.g. DFS/TPC requirements. Using 160mhz channels is impossible in my NYC area apartment because of those restrictions.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

"give"??

Roark66 6y ago

>This is entirely a problem of our own making. >We give cellular providers hundreds of MHz of exclusive spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz block at 2.4 GHz. I don't think this is a bandwidth issue. USB is a wired standard. Using shielding is not that hard, but doing it inexpensively, while maintaining cable flexibility and low attenuation at high frequencies is very hard. I wonder how do manufacturers of those devices manage to not get caught by the fcc in us and equivalent agencies in EU. Perhaps they sell directly to customers overseas?