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There are short range ultrawideband technologies thar have different laws because the power is so low. One of those may be able to do it. But... range will be

There are short range ultrawideband technologies thar have different laws because the power is so low. One of those may be able to do it. But... range will be short. We can't claim more bandwidth because the spectrum is utterly plastered with legacy stuff, some good, some just legacy. If it were up to me, we'd probably start phasing out things like FRS and business radios, maybe even part of the FM spectrum, and all of the world's mobile radio would be digital and probably fit in 5MHz plus 1MHZ for emergency services or so, and we'd have lots of free space for IoT. But that wouldn't give us 4K, for that we'd need a lot more, and you'd get in the way of important stuff like radar or something if you wanted long range. You would have really big competition issues too. We have ChromeCast and various things that use compression that are good enough. People want to stream to TVs to consume media, and using the phone as a remote to control youtube does fine. For very very short ranges, perhaps we will have some 2ft range optical networking for laptop to monitor connections someday?

zvorygin 4y ago
Say you had a blank slate to rejigger how bandwidth is allocated. What would it look like? Could we move things around and end up with more bandwidth than anyone knows what to do with? What's the ratio of "bad legacy we should cut" to "useful legacy band but it's only around because of legacy, we definitely wouldn't carve a band out for it today if it didn't have one" to "we have to keep this around". Is it like "well, if you want airplanes not to crash, you need to give up this band to RADAR, and that means there's a fundamental limit on how good wireless communication can possibly be for today's humans?".
- eternityforest 4y ago
  In reality it would cost billions, because the only way to do it without disrupting the world would probably be the way they did digital TV, just giving people free digital replacement radios, and it would likely be unpopular with those who don't trust computers. All in all, looking at this chart, we could probably save about 30MHz to 100MHz, if I had to guess and there were no political or financial issues. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/United_States_Frequency_Allocations_Chart_2016_-_The_Radio_Spectrum.pdf/page1-6300px-United_States_Frequency_Allocations_Chart_2016_-_The_Radio_Spectrum.pdf.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Un... Some of FM radio and most of the 2-way stuff could go without disrupting anything, as long as we were willing to pay for high quality digital replacements. but everything that's already digital is generally pretty good. The only change I'd really want to make is we would replace land mobile radio and similar services with a national standard digital system, that would have cell phone level quality, provisions for tiny amounts of digital data, and a standard repeater and internet tunneling system. All but the top public safety systems wouldn't have private frequencies anymore, you'd get assigned to a shared digital channel, and you'd have have a secondary redundant shorter range higher frequency link for things like construction sites, so that you'd always have at least local coverage even if the long range channel was clogged in a disaster. Just really go all in and make sure there was no room for anyone to complain that analog was better, make it totally bulletproof and mass produce one high quality module by the millions. Another possible savings is to ban any new commercially sold point to point devices that don't use transmit power control. If you know who you are sending to and have a 2-way link, it's easy to adjust to the minimum power, it just gets hard when you are broadcasting or meshing. For some reason wifi has it as an extension, but it didn't come till later. At the moment it seems like they do a pretty amazing job

zvorygin 4y ago

Say you had a blank slate to rejigger how bandwidth is allocated. What would it look like? Could we move things around and end up with more bandwidth than anyone knows what to do with? What's the ratio of "bad legacy we should cut" to "useful legacy band but it's only around because of legacy, we definitely wouldn't carve a band out for it today if it didn't have one" to "we have to keep this around". Is it like "well, if you want airplanes not to crash, you need to give up this band to RADAR, and that means there's a fundamental limit on how good wireless communication can possibly be for today's humans?".

eternityforest 4y ago
In reality it would cost billions, because the only way to do it without disrupting the world would probably be the way they did digital TV, just giving people free digital replacement radios, and it would likely be unpopular with those who don't trust computers. All in all, looking at this chart, we could probably save about 30MHz to 100MHz, if I had to guess and there were no political or financial issues. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/United_States_Frequency_Allocations_Chart_2016_-_The_Radio_Spectrum.pdf/page1-6300px-United_States_Frequency_Allocations_Chart_2016_-_The_Radio_Spectrum.pdf.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Un... Some of FM radio and most of the 2-way stuff could go without disrupting anything, as long as we were willing to pay for high quality digital replacements. but everything that's already digital is generally pretty good. The only change I'd really want to make is we would replace land mobile radio and similar services with a national standard digital system, that would have cell phone level quality, provisions for tiny amounts of digital data, and a standard repeater and internet tunneling system. All but the top public safety systems wouldn't have private frequencies anymore, you'd get assigned to a shared digital channel, and you'd have have a secondary redundant shorter range higher frequency link for things like construction sites, so that you'd always have at least local coverage even if the long range channel was clogged in a disaster. Just really go all in and make sure there was no room for anyone to complain that analog was better, make it totally bulletproof and mass produce one high quality module by the millions. Another possible savings is to ban any new commercially sold point to point devices that don't use transmit power control. If you know who you are sending to and have a 2-way link, it's easy to adjust to the minimum power, it just gets hard when you are broadcasting or meshing. For some reason wifi has it as an extension, but it didn't come till later. At the moment it seems like they do a pretty amazing job