Tossing unrelated legislation into bills (Wireless Spectrum Auctions)

[drebo]

The American Jobs Act, which President Obama announced before a joint session of Congress Thursday, includes a proposal to auction spectrum and to set aside spectrum for a nationwide public safety network.
The provisions are part of an effort to expand wireless broadband to 98 percent of Americans and spur innovation, according to a White House fact sheet about the bill.
An interoperable public-safety network has been a top goal for first-responders since communication problems hampered their response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has sought to pass the public-safety network into law by the 10th anniversary of the attacks next week.
According to the fact sheet, the broadband proposal will cost $10 billion, but the price will be offset by incentive auctions of spectrum.
The White House estimates it will raise $28 billion through the auctions.
The auctions are likely aimed at encouraging television broadcasters to give up their spectrum to make more room for wireless broadband. Broadcasters have resisted incentive auction proposals unless they include protections to ensure the auctions are entirely voluntary.

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-v...ley&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

So Obama's new "Jobs Bill" also includes another wireless spectrum sale. Not sure why they're related, but they're claiming it's for "public safety." Almost everywhere in the US already has 4.9ghz dedicated for public safety networks, so I'm not sure why we need more.

To further complicate things, Obama's stated goal with this is to ensure that 98% of Americans are covered by wireless broadband. Well, I'm not sure how he's going to accomodate that by selling all this unused bandwidth to private parties and restricting it to public safety networks only. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It hinders competition and innovation, and isn't likely to lead to anyone more having access to wireless broadband. Just look at the results of the last whitespace auction.

If Obama really wanted to encourage competition in the wireless broadband market, he would expand upon the program that's started with the 3.65ghz spectrum. The 3.65ghz spectrum is incredibly limited in both available frequency and bandwidth, and is also plagued with "grandfathered" satellite stations, making it completely unusable in most of the east and west coastal regions. It's also a recordkeeping nightmare, as every single base station AND fixed CPE unit needs to be registered and approved.

We could, of course, expand upward as some European countries have done and start using 10ghz frequencies in unlicensed fashion, and 24ghz is already available in unlicensed. The problem with this is that higher frequencies are extremely sensitive to line of sight issues. The higher the frequency, the bigger the issues. 900mhz is nice, but extremely crowded and there's not really much bandwidth available. Most places are so crowded that 5mhz channel widths are all that's usable over any distance. However, it's not nearly as suseptable to line of sight issues.

What we need is for the old analog TV white space to be repackaged by the FCC and provided in a similar manner as 3.65ghz spectrum (non-exclusive nation-wide licenses) with registered base stations, but unregistered CPE. If we had 100mhz in the sub-900mhz frequency range, it would foster a wireless broadband market that was absolutely huge. That would give plenty of bandwidth for higher speed links with plenty of room for competing WISPs. It also would simplify installation, as currently with fixed WIFI, you really need to have line of sight, which means externally mounted antennas. If we could use a lower frequency, we could use desktop CPE.

The FCC's job is not to make money by auctioning off spectrum to private parties. The FCC's job is to make sure that consumers are protected from spectrum monopolization by big business and to protect businesses from each other in terms of spectrum. These auctions need to stop.

If the administration's goal is increased wireless broadband coverage, they need to stop selling spectrum to private companies and work on making more available to small businesses.

 

[amddude]

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-v...ley&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

So Obama's new "Jobs Bill" also includes another wireless spectrum sale. Not sure why they're related, but they're claiming it's for "public safety." Almost everywhere in the US already has 4.9ghz dedicated for public safety networks, so I'm not sure why we need more.

To further complicate things, Obama's stated goal with this is to ensure that 98% of Americans are covered by wireless broadband. Well, I'm not sure how he's going to accomodate that by selling all this unused bandwidth to private parties and restricting it to public safety networks only. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It hinders competition and innovation, and isn't likely to lead to anyone more having access to wireless broadband. Just look at the results of the last whitespace auction.

If Obama really wanted to encourage competition in the wireless broadband market, he would expand upon the program that's started with the 3.65ghz spectrum. The 3.65ghz spectrum is incredibly limited in both available frequency and bandwidth, and is also plagued with "grandfathered" satellite stations, making it completely unusable in most of the east and west coastal regions. It's also a recordkeeping nightmare, as every single base station AND fixed CPE unit needs to be registered and approved.

We could, of course, expand upward as some European countries have done and start using 10ghz frequencies in unlicensed fashion, and 24ghz is already available in unlicensed. The problem with this is that higher frequencies are extremely sensitive to line of sight issues. The higher the frequency, the bigger the issues. 900mhz is nice, but extremely crowded and there's not really much bandwidth available. Most places are so crowded that 5mhz channel widths are all that's usable over any distance. However, it's not nearly as suseptable to line of sight issues.

What we need is for the old analog TV white space to be repackaged by the FCC and provided in a similar manner as 3.65ghz spectrum (non-exclusive nation-wide licenses) with registered base stations, but unregistered CPE. If we had 100mhz in the sub-900mhz frequency range, it would foster a wireless broadband market that was absolutely huge. That would give plenty of bandwidth for higher speed links with plenty of room for competing WISPs. It also would simplify installation, as currently with fixed WIFI, you really need to have line of sight, which means externally mounted antennas. If we could use a lower frequency, we could use desktop CPE.

The FCC's job is not to make money by auctioning off spectrum to private parties. The FCC's job is to make sure that consumers are protected from spectrum monopolization by big business and to protect businesses from each other in terms of spectrum. These auctions need to stop.

If the administration's goal is increased wireless broadband coverage, they need to stop selling spectrum to private companies and work on making more available to small businesses.

They already have nationwide mutual aid frequencies, plus the DOJ has a bunch of top tier city joint systems as well. I don't get it?

 

[drebo]

That's pretty much my point. I don't get it, either.

 

[EagleKeeper]

If the admin is going to waste money, it is demonstrating how it can recover some. And a job or two will be created in the government to oversee this.

JOB CREATION!!

 

[Thump553]

Just a guess but I imagine it's included as a revenue raiser, as Obama is selling this bill (in toto) as revenue neutral-raising as much money as it spends.

As to the merits of this portion, I have no idea. I'm still PO'd about the billions of dollars wasted to force us all to go to digital TV. All I got out of that was ThisTV (old MGM movies and endless attorney and pawnshop ads), CreateTV (recycled public TV, but without the filler and fund raising) and a music video channel. Worst waste of money ever-especially when you think of all the perfectly good TVs that went to the landfill.

 

[drebo]

Would it improve your opinion at all to know that the whitespace that was auctioned off as a result of the digital TV switch and bought by Verizon has been put to absolutely no use since?

I know I could use some 700mhz bandwidth to provide good residential wireless broadband Internet service. But nooooo.