4 ms·

There's a pretty simple solution to this problem. So lets say that a hotel wants to offer clean reliable wireless to its customers, possibly for a price. This

by derekp7 12y ago

There's a pretty simple solution to this problem. So lets say that a hotel wants to offer clean reliable wireless to its customers, possibly for a price. This can't be done with unlicensed spectrum, since you can't get exclusive access to it. The answer is to use licensed spectrum for this purpose. The way this could be implemented, is for a wireless equipment manufacture (or consortium) to purchase a chunk of spectrum, that they can control. Make it an industry standard, so that it gets included in generic client-side wifi chip sets. Then the manufactures can control the usage of the base stations for this private spectrum, so that it is only available in a commercial setting (i.e., places like Marriott would pay a license fee to the consortium to stand up a base station with the private spectrum). The only trick here would be getting industry agreement so that the client side would get widely implemented, so that Marriott's (and other venue's) customers would be likely to have this spectrum available in their client side devices.

waps 12y ago
Have you looked at the price of radio spectrum recently ? This would never fly. Even a small sliver of spectrum for one country costs more than Marriott is worth. Which is of course why they're trying to get it for free.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  This depends entirely on how much spectrum, how much power, and how geographically diverse you want to deploy. Without going into too many details, I can say that purchasing 500 milliwatts of EIRP transmit power in a small urban area (<10 sq km) of 5 MHz of spectrum in one country of population < 10mm people can be had for ~ $2mm/year.
  - ansgri 12y ago
    5MHz's unlikely to bring you any high-quality internet connection for many tens of guests, we should be looking at 100MHz at least.
- derekp7 12y ago
  Maybe it would be too expensive for Marriott to buy outright, but not for some equipment manufacture that can make up the money in licensing fees. That's what I was referring to -- someone like Cisco could acquire a chunk of spectrum, license it out for free for client side chipsets (call it 802.11x or something), and charge venues like Marriott for the base stations (and of course geographically control them so there is no overlap / interferience). Kind of like how Motorola owns the frequencies for some of their 2-way radios.

by derekp7 12y ago

waps 12y ago

Have you looked at the price of radio spectrum recently ? This would never fly. Even a small sliver of spectrum for one country costs more than Marriott is worth. Which is of course why they're trying to get it for free.

ghshephard 12y ago
This depends entirely on how much spectrum, how much power, and how geographically diverse you want to deploy. Without going into too many details, I can say that purchasing 500 milliwatts of EIRP transmit power in a small urban area (<10 sq km) of 5 MHz of spectrum in one country of population < 10mm people can be had for ~ $2mm/year.
- ansgri 12y ago
  5MHz's unlikely to bring you any high-quality internet connection for many tens of guests, we should be looking at 100MHz at least.
derekp7 12y ago
Maybe it would be too expensive for Marriott to buy outright, but not for some equipment manufacture that can make up the money in licensing fees. That's what I was referring to -- someone like Cisco could acquire a chunk of spectrum, license it out for free for client side chipsets (call it 802.11x or something), and charge venues like Marriott for the base stations (and of course geographically control them so there is no overlap / interferience). Kind of like how Motorola owns the frequencies for some of their 2-way radios.