5 ms·

The amount afforded to corporations vs unlicensed or amateur use gives you a good picture of how the power dynamics work in our “democracy” https://scholar.prin

The amount afforded to corporations vs unlicensed or amateur use gives you a good picture of how the power dynamics work in our “democracy” https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

dan-robertson 4y ago
Most of the allocations seem quite reasonable, eg lots of navigation, radio astronomy, etc, which don’t seem particularly corporate to me. I guess TV is corporate but there are a lot more people who watch rev than listen to amateur radio. Similarly people get pressure good use out of mobile phones. Plausibly it would be good if more of the spectrum was available for Wi-Fi. I guess one question is: are there amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?
- Reason077 4y ago
  > "are the amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?" WiFi 6e / WiFi 7 are getting a huge swath of bandwidth between 5.9 and 7.1Ghz in the US and Canada (but somewhat less in Europe/Japan/Australia/etc) Even with current 5 Ghz WiFi, a lot of routers seem to not let you select the DFS/TPC channels above 48 even though they're perfectly legal to use in most places. As a result, those channels are far less congested.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    I thought there was some tricky channel switching logic because of some other non-Wi-Fi uses of part of the 5GHz band, so maybe service degradation when switching away or just disabling the channels for a long time when the conflict-detection fires causes those channels to not be used much?
    - Reason077 4y ago
      I've certainly never noticed it switch channels on me in all the years I've been using it in the UK.
  - varenc 4y ago
    The DFS channels have big downsides though. I don’t know much about TPC but for DFS, if your access point is on a DFS channel and it detects weather radar usage there it has to immediately get off it. It also has a slow start up period where it must first listen for radar traffic before transmitting. Though if you’re in an area without any radar on those bands it could be well worth it.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      Yeah, it does increase boot time a bit while the initial scan happens. But hopefully you aren't rebooting your router too often anyway. Small price to pay for avoiding WiFi congestion if you're in a busy building/area. It's a huge performance penalty if some other nearby network is sharing your channel, so DFS is one small downside for a very big upside, IMO!
    - wtallis 4y ago
      In the US, it's only one specific type of weather radar (TDWR), which is only used at 45 major airports. If you don't live near one of those, you only have to worry about a false positive in the radar detection feature accidentally knocking you off a DFS channel. And I know from experience that local topography sometimes means you can be operating an AP on a DFS channel only a few miles from one of those airports without ever having a problem.
      - sidewndr46 4y ago
        It isn't really that simple. There are other users like satellite equipment & military radar. The military radar in particular runs anywhere they want at anytime without disclosing their actual location. The equipment itself also has false positives, which lead to much of it being unusable.
        Reason077 4y ago
        > "The equipment itself also has false positives" This has never noticeably happened in my experience (UK). I've used DFS bands on my routers for years. It's far worse to use non-DFS bands because if you live in a built-up area they are almost always congested, causing poor performance (latency spikes, packet loss, etc).
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I discovered that not all devices (stations not APs) support those channels. Many smart TVs in particular do not support them. https://www.reddit.com/r/Roku/comments/als768/why_do_roku_devices_not_support_dfs_channels/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Roku/comments/als768/why_do_roku_de...
    - Reason077 4y ago
      Personally I've never encountered a device (as opposed to an AP) that didn't work with DFS channels. There's certainly some devices (cheap WiFi light bulbs, or anything really old) that don't support 5 Ghz at all, but any 5 Ghz device I've ever used found my DFS AP just fine. 5 Ghz WiFi bandwidth is really severely limited without DFS. If you're using an 80 Mhz channel then you're using almost the entire available non-DFS bandwidth, overlapping/conflicting with nearly all other nearby non-DFS networks. But with DFS there's room for 7 non-overlapping 80 Mhz channels!
      - sidewndr46 4y ago
        You must just not be looking. It was standardized in 2003. Anything before that isn't going to have it. Even "new" products aren't going to have it mandatorily. I have laptop from 2013 that is 2.4 Ghz only for example.
        Reason077 4y ago
        Yes, of course there's plenty of old 2.4 GHz-only devices around. But in my experiences, devices (but not all APs) which support 5 GHz WiFi tend to support all 5 GHz bands, including DFS bands (channel > 48) just fine.
        kccqzy 4y ago
        Tell them to millions of disappointed customers of Roku TV.
tptacek 4y ago
https://www.chapman.edu/esi/wp/porter-smith-hazlett-radiospectrum.pdf https://www.chapman.edu/esi/wp/porter-smith-hazlett-radiospe...
- user3939382 4y ago
  It's well-written but I totally disagree. Coase's prescription of auctions is precisely the means by which the People have had huge portions of the spectrum hijacked by megacorporations that they, in turn, use to extract rents from the public, while we get some overcrowded crumbs for our own use. This market-based analysis, which is typical, omits the factor of nearly complete regulatory capture, i.e. our reality. > Coase anticipated that full, fair, well-informed evaluations would find that decentralized resource owners generally outperformed state diktat. That omission is pervasive, as if "state diktat" is some force independent of these same resource owners.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Is it regulatory capture or an auction? Those things aren’t related and they are kinda opposing. Regulatory capture would prevent entrants from even having the option to bid for spectrum.
    - user3939382 4y ago
      The auctions pit average citizens individually against the resources of megacorporations. Obviously it’s no match, the outcome of that contest will inevitably be what we have now. The point I’m making is pretty simple which is merely that the public deserves way more unlicensed and amateur spectrum. The government serves the types of corporations participating in these auctions, to the exclusion of the People, so that’s probably not ever changing.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        The point of any auction is to determine who 'deserves' what. Your reversing cause and effect. And it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money, there are cases where they overbid and ended up losing money, to the benefit of the regulator, which is indirectly benefiting the taxpayer.
pphysch 4y ago
See also IP address allocation and DNS (TLD) allocation. Hierarchy is something like: 1. US military/intelligence 2. Transnational corporations 3. Other large orgs/governments (distant) 4. People
Panzer04 4y ago
In practice do we need more reserved/unallocated bands? The problem with unlicensed bands is interference and the like - they can't be used together without stomping eachother (eg. in FPV RC, analog and digital transmitters have difficulties because digital stomps the analog signals). Arguably given the above it would be useful to have a larger range of frequencies available to amateur/unregulated users, but it's also probably true that the general public gets more utility from more 4G LTE spectrum, if we're honest.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
You can operate in any frequency so long as you are in a faraday cage :)
- user3939382 4y ago
  True. They have RF blocking paint and window films. I’ve always been curious to see how far I could get creating one in a normal looking room. I was thinking of combining this with a 4G repeater so in theory you’d have phone data you can flip on and off with a switch.
darksaints 4y ago
If you have some sort of example of amateur or unlicensed spectrum that is more starved for bandwidth than the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using, I’d love to hear your ideas.
- Retric 4y ago
  Mobile phone aren’t bandwidth staved, they are generally using much larger cells than needed. It’s just a tradeoff where handing them more spectrum reduces infrastructure costs not really performance for most users.
- user3939382 4y ago
  > the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using Current adoption and technology has been shaped by precisely the corporate dominance of the spectrum I'm referring to. In light of that, there's a circular implication to this point you're making. Let's imagine a future where mobile data is fueled by citizen-run mesh/P2P networks. Who truly knows what's possible (not just in tech terms, but adoption/behavior) until it happens, but we can be sure what won't be possible if we (the People) don't even have the legal access to experiment. Intersecting with that issue -- it's not just about "starved for bandwidth". Different bands have distinct propagation characteristics that make them suitable for different purposes, so the variation is important too.
  - darksaints 4y ago
    Amateur and unlicensed spectrum allocations have also grown over time as technology has allowed for tighter bandpass filtering and more efficient digital transmission…but we haven’t seen an amateur resurgence, and mesh networks are actually dying off. Nobody cares. And legal access to experiment is already free and available to everybody. It’s called a Special Temporary Authorization. Corporations use them all of the time for various purposes, including experimental applications. Citizens are allowed to apply for them too, but nobody ever does. I don’t really care about hypothetical future scenarios that will never exist. Unlicensed and amateur spectrum has its place, but it’s not exactly deserving of any more bandwidth than it already has.

dan-robertson 4y ago

Most of the allocations seem quite reasonable, eg lots of navigation, radio astronomy, etc, which don’t seem particularly corporate to me. I guess TV is corporate but there are a lot more people who watch rev than listen to amateur radio. Similarly people get pressure good use out of mobile phones. Plausibly it would be good if more of the spectrum was available for Wi-Fi. I guess one question is: are there amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?

Reason077 4y ago
> "are the amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?" WiFi 6e / WiFi 7 are getting a huge swath of bandwidth between 5.9 and 7.1Ghz in the US and Canada (but somewhat less in Europe/Japan/Australia/etc) Even with current 5 Ghz WiFi, a lot of routers seem to not let you select the DFS/TPC channels above 48 even though they're perfectly legal to use in most places. As a result, those channels are far less congested.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I thought there was some tricky channel switching logic because of some other non-Wi-Fi uses of part of the 5GHz band, so maybe service degradation when switching away or just disabling the channels for a long time when the conflict-detection fires causes those channels to not be used much?
  - Reason077 4y ago
    I've certainly never noticed it switch channels on me in all the years I've been using it in the UK.
- varenc 4y ago
  The DFS channels have big downsides though. I don’t know much about TPC but for DFS, if your access point is on a DFS channel and it detects weather radar usage there it has to immediately get off it. It also has a slow start up period where it must first listen for radar traffic before transmitting. Though if you’re in an area without any radar on those bands it could be well worth it.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Yeah, it does increase boot time a bit while the initial scan happens. But hopefully you aren't rebooting your router too often anyway. Small price to pay for avoiding WiFi congestion if you're in a busy building/area. It's a huge performance penalty if some other nearby network is sharing your channel, so DFS is one small downside for a very big upside, IMO!
  - wtallis 4y ago
    In the US, it's only one specific type of weather radar (TDWR), which is only used at 45 major airports. If you don't live near one of those, you only have to worry about a false positive in the radar detection feature accidentally knocking you off a DFS channel. And I know from experience that local topography sometimes means you can be operating an AP on a DFS channel only a few miles from one of those airports without ever having a problem.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      It isn't really that simple. There are other users like satellite equipment & military radar. The military radar in particular runs anywhere they want at anytime without disclosing their actual location. The equipment itself also has false positives, which lead to much of it being unusable.
      - Reason077 4y ago
        > "The equipment itself also has false positives" This has never noticeably happened in my experience (UK). I've used DFS bands on my routers for years. It's far worse to use non-DFS bands because if you live in a built-up area they are almost always congested, causing poor performance (latency spikes, packet loss, etc).
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I discovered that not all devices (stations not APs) support those channels. Many smart TVs in particular do not support them. https://www.reddit.com/r/Roku/comments/als768/why_do_roku_devices_not_support_dfs_channels/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Roku/comments/als768/why_do_roku_de...
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Personally I've never encountered a device (as opposed to an AP) that didn't work with DFS channels. There's certainly some devices (cheap WiFi light bulbs, or anything really old) that don't support 5 Ghz at all, but any 5 Ghz device I've ever used found my DFS AP just fine. 5 Ghz WiFi bandwidth is really severely limited without DFS. If you're using an 80 Mhz channel then you're using almost the entire available non-DFS bandwidth, overlapping/conflicting with nearly all other nearby non-DFS networks. But with DFS there's room for 7 non-overlapping 80 Mhz channels!
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      You must just not be looking. It was standardized in 2003. Anything before that isn't going to have it. Even "new" products aren't going to have it mandatorily. I have laptop from 2013 that is 2.4 Ghz only for example.
      - Reason077 4y ago
        Yes, of course there's plenty of old 2.4 GHz-only devices around. But in my experiences, devices (but not all APs) which support 5 GHz WiFi tend to support all 5 GHz bands, including DFS bands (channel > 48) just fine.
        kccqzy 4y ago
        Tell them to millions of disappointed customers of Roku TV.

tptacek 4y ago

https://www.chapman.edu/esi/wp/porter-smith-hazlett-radiospectrum.pdf https://www.chapman.edu/esi/wp/porter-smith-hazlett-radiospe...

user3939382 4y ago
It's well-written but I totally disagree. Coase's prescription of auctions is precisely the means by which the People have had huge portions of the spectrum hijacked by megacorporations that they, in turn, use to extract rents from the public, while we get some overcrowded crumbs for our own use. This market-based analysis, which is typical, omits the factor of nearly complete regulatory capture, i.e. our reality. > Coase anticipated that full, fair, well-informed evaluations would find that decentralized resource owners generally outperformed state diktat. That omission is pervasive, as if "state diktat" is some force independent of these same resource owners.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Is it regulatory capture or an auction? Those things aren’t related and they are kinda opposing. Regulatory capture would prevent entrants from even having the option to bid for spectrum.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    The auctions pit average citizens individually against the resources of megacorporations. Obviously it’s no match, the outcome of that contest will inevitably be what we have now. The point I’m making is pretty simple which is merely that the public deserves way more unlicensed and amateur spectrum. The government serves the types of corporations participating in these auctions, to the exclusion of the People, so that’s probably not ever changing.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      The point of any auction is to determine who 'deserves' what. Your reversing cause and effect. And it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money, there are cases where they overbid and ended up losing money, to the benefit of the regulator, which is indirectly benefiting the taxpayer.

pphysch 4y ago

See also IP address allocation and DNS (TLD) allocation. Hierarchy is something like: 1. US military/intelligence 2. Transnational corporations 3. Other large orgs/governments (distant) 4. People

Panzer04 4y ago

In practice do we need more reserved/unallocated bands? The problem with unlicensed bands is interference and the like - they can't be used together without stomping eachother (eg. in FPV RC, analog and digital transmitters have difficulties because digital stomps the analog signals). Arguably given the above it would be useful to have a larger range of frequencies available to amateur/unregulated users, but it's also probably true that the general public gets more utility from more 4G LTE spectrum, if we're honest.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

You can operate in any frequency so long as you are in a faraday cage :)

user3939382 4y ago
True. They have RF blocking paint and window films. I’ve always been curious to see how far I could get creating one in a normal looking room. I was thinking of combining this with a 4G repeater so in theory you’d have phone data you can flip on and off with a switch.

darksaints 4y ago

If you have some sort of example of amateur or unlicensed spectrum that is more starved for bandwidth than the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using, I’d love to hear your ideas.

Retric 4y ago
Mobile phone aren’t bandwidth staved, they are generally using much larger cells than needed. It’s just a tradeoff where handing them more spectrum reduces infrastructure costs not really performance for most users.
user3939382 4y ago
> the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using Current adoption and technology has been shaped by precisely the corporate dominance of the spectrum I'm referring to. In light of that, there's a circular implication to this point you're making. Let's imagine a future where mobile data is fueled by citizen-run mesh/P2P networks. Who truly knows what's possible (not just in tech terms, but adoption/behavior) until it happens, but we can be sure what won't be possible if we (the People) don't even have the legal access to experiment. Intersecting with that issue -- it's not just about "starved for bandwidth". Different bands have distinct propagation characteristics that make them suitable for different purposes, so the variation is important too.
- darksaints 4y ago
  Amateur and unlicensed spectrum allocations have also grown over time as technology has allowed for tighter bandpass filtering and more efficient digital transmission…but we haven’t seen an amateur resurgence, and mesh networks are actually dying off. Nobody cares. And legal access to experiment is already free and available to everybody. It’s called a Special Temporary Authorization. Corporations use them all of the time for various purposes, including experimental applications. Citizens are allowed to apply for them too, but nobody ever does. I don’t really care about hypothetical future scenarios that will never exist. Unlicensed and amateur spectrum has its place, but it’s not exactly deserving of any more bandwidth than it already has.