Government auction of wireless airwaves will shape the future of the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Government auction of wireless airwaves will shape the future of the Internet

washingtonpost.com

101 pointsjgrahamc60 comments

It's so upsetting to me that they don't make bands like this available for general public use. If we had clearly defined rules about interoperability we could reserve a band for essentially free low bandwidth cell phone usage, at least for text and basic data.

I've imagined that the towers could be open hardware that sell minutes on the fly for bitcoin transferred by the user.

But no, instead these corporations pay billions with the expectation that they'll recover that and much more from us who have no free option for mobile wireless.

It's really frustrating to me.

Actually a few years back there was this idea called "White Spaces" that was exactly that... If the TV airwaves were not in use in your area, you could use them for other purposes.

Here's what happened.

Out on the west coast, particularly in Los Angeles, there are no white spaces. In LA you can often get nearly 100 channels with just an indoor antenna. It is unlike any other TV market in the U.S.

Well because there were not white spaces there, they managed to delay the introduction of "White Space" hardware and also the spectrum database needed to support this service.

Then, of course, the cell phone companies came in to buy up a lot of spectrum. Because things are changing, the white space market got stunted. Now that the cell phone companies own the spectrum, there are no white spaces, or at least, much less of them than they used to be.

It's a generally forgotten story that the spectrum situation on the west coast is entirely different from the rest of the country because of the "ring of fire" topography that focuses settlement along the coast.

Out in the Northeast we find that the population is dispersed enough that there are not many transmitters near most sites, but that cities are close enough that there are not many transmitters near most cities. For instance, in Boston you have to worry about interference with Hartford and Portland, ME.

Don't get me started about 900 MHz, which is a non-starter because of the concentration of the electronics industry in Palo Alto, where 900 MHz is crammed with half-baked gadgets made by Stanford kids.

That's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that commercial deployment of white spaces and similar technology has been held to a pretty much impossible standard: https://www.techworld.com.au/article/261483/google_page_whit....

The idea is to take advantage of unused spectrum without ever bothering incumbent users. In many cases that's simply impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem.

The problem becomes much more tractable when you ditch the requirement to protect legacy transmitters and receivers in the same band. Dynamic spectrum access technology existing today could work pretty well if you gave it a big chunk of its own spectrum, and used those technologies to mediate contention among themselves.

When the FCC can get tens of billions of dollars auctioning spectrum, making the case for that becomes difficult.

That is really the purpose of the amateur service. It is available to the general public with an inexpensive / free license. Business use is prohibited. There are a lot of other rules that you may or may not like but that is the purpose of amateur radio.

There are allocations across the spectrum including some bands that are very valuable today (440MHz, 900MHz, 1.2GHz). There are also allocations in bands with interesting properties such as high microwave, MF and short wave. The ITU even recently approved use in long wave bands which hasn't been available for amateur use for over 80 years.

While that's great for some purposes, I think the GP is suggesting that there is a need for more accessible spectrum for businesses which do not have the financial capabilities or political capabilities as the large telecoms and broadcasters.

How much spectrum? Businesses and individuals can get non-exclusive FCC licences (you don't have exclusive usage rights, but in practice, you can operate 24/7 without interference) for small slices of spectrum (12.5 or 25kHz) for under $1000 for a 10 year licence. If you want 1MHz+ in a desirable band, with exclusive usage rights, well, there's a reason those auctions end up going for millions or billions of dollars.

The most notable restriction being a prohibition on encryption of any kind.

On what bands is this applicable?

All amateur bands. There is one exception for radio controlled vehicle telemetry.

Some things can be crowdsourced, but not cell towers. These are just gateways to an underlying infrastructure. Someone needs to manage the fiber to the towers. Someone needs to get the permits, hire the diggers and occasionally lobby various governments. That takes years and won't ever be done by a F/OSS volunteer backed by donations. There are things that corporations do well, or at least better than the general public.

For a low data capacity network, I don't see why home data connections shouldn't work. I have a 130Mb connection at home, which would support plenty of voice calls simultaneously.

The real issue here is the control ISPs have over the networks. In my imagined future where we have crowd sourced cell towers, the tower operators have their own fiber connection at home that is essentially unregulated. Because that's a future I want for other reasons.

Unless you're paying for dedicated internet access, you likely don't "have a 130Mb connection at home". Or, at least you don't actually have full access to all 130Mbps all the time. Try using 100% of the capacity of your connection for an entire month and see if you don't get a call from your ISP.

Your basic home internet package of anywhere from 10-200Mbps is priced at a level which is consistent with a usage profile typical of most home users. A fiber drop to a cell tower has a much different usage profile over the course of a month.

Please, check your service contract before running for a month at capacity. A call from your ISP may be preferable over a bill from a tiered residential plan.

One of the first thing you learn in telecommunication is that frequencies are one of the most precious resources on the planet.

There are only very few of those, you can't make more of it, you can't share one, if two things try to use the same they are both broken.

By the way, there are free bands available to the general public for free use.

And it's probably going to get worse with LTE-U. It will likely hurt 5GHz Wi-Fi performance for the benefit of carriers, which will overcrowd that band.

Isn't 5GHz blocked by pretty much everything? So if you're in your house, the carriers won't be able to interfere with your WiFi?

Pretty high attenuation but it does go through walls.

I've imagined mesh networks across weaker frequencies, it'd probably require some new protocols but I haven't done that much research so I'm just not aware of any.

If devices or modems/routers were accessible and marketed correctly, I think the niche would grow with passionate users. Just knowing you could hop off of your terrible ISP (or at least avoid them some) would be enough for many people.

They do. It's amateur radio.

Not "the internet". This is about mobile and then only in the US. That is nowhere near the internet as an entity. And these lower frequencies have limits. There is only so much bandwidth they can now or ever carry. They cannot ever be the backbone for providing serious bandwidth to a large population (without lots of low-power towers but then you would use higher frequencies anyway.) Some people now without internet might in a decade be connected but this auction has no serious impact on the vast magority of users.

This is exactly how most people in rural areas connect to the internet /now/. The alternatives are dialup and satilite which are both worse.

"Epstein went on to add that the auction did what it was supposed to do: Find a meeting point between supply and demand for an increasingly sought-after physical resource."

All it did was assign a monopoly to a company that must increase the screwing the customers get, to make back the money they just gave the government. Thus in effect, customers money in the future is being handed to the government today. Whoever can screw the customers the hardest can pay the government the most for the privilege of doing so.

Just like for profit prisons, this could work great, IF you included some metrics for the prisoners, or in this case, the customers. If the customers had some interest or say in this at all. Since the public/customers are the parties who matter in the sale of public properties, they should get more say than "well, just don't buy it."

Not buying it is getting to cast a vote after the polls have closed, and it doesn't really get counted when it needs to.

  The first channels to relocate will not do so for another
  18 months, according to the FCC. And TV stations that are
  changing channels or will go off the air will be expected
  to notify their viewers ahead of time with on-screen
  banners and other guides.

I thought digital over the air TV had some sort of channel-mapping that decoupled broadcast frequency from the programming channels the viewer sees, and the relationship between the two post-transition was just a historical artifact. (hence the decimal fraction broadcast channels and occasional need to convince your DTV/adapter to re-scan for metadata) Can't these moving stations just change their frequency and keep their numbers?

They'll keep their virtual channel, but viewers will need to do a new channel scan, so if you want to keep your viewers, you probably want to ask them to do it enough times that when the current frequency stops working they'll remember to do the scan.

>... an unprecedented opportunity to acquire enormous amounts of high-value, “beachfront” airwaves.

I don't think this is really considered true anymore. This auction only generated something like 80 MHz due to the low interest. T-mobile got the biggest chunk, but that is only enough to provide a total of a gigabit of downlink per cell site. Unfortunately 600 MHz frequencies tend to propagate over longer distances so it is harder to have a lot of closely spaces access points. The real value is in densely wooded rural areas where there are not a lot of subscribers. Few subscribers means little revenue.

The current hotness seems to be millimetre waves. That is where the interesting 5G development is happening. In the end there is simply not very much spectrum available below 1 GHz and they are not making any more of it.

Spectrum auctioning is really bad policy.

Spectrum is like the road network. Why would we sell it to the highest bidder for them to sell it back to us?

Instead, spectrum should be public and free, like roads, for those that follow the usage rules.

I understand what you're saying. And it even does play out with US transportation. But absolutely not with roads! One of the main problems with US roads is our failure to price them correctly, causing everyone to demand usage at peak times.

In US transportation, this is seen in how we lost the rail right of ways. We sold them off, and we may never get them back. And it'll be a huge problem if we ever come to our senses and pivot back to trains.

Spectrum isn't free because it isn't free.

That isn't a tautology, it's a statement of fact: spectrum has a dollar value. In nature. In nature it's got a price. Because men will trade, or pay, or war for it.

Therefore, to allocate it efficiently, we should allow it to trade at that value. This is how that spectrum makes the most number of people happy.

That may sound like right-wing pablum, but it's a subject that has been well trod by great thinkers for a very, very long time. [1]

[1] Coase, to mention just one

Roads aren't free because they aren't free. That isn't a tautology, it's a statement of fact: Roads have a dollar value. In nature. In nature it's got a price. Because men will trade, or pay, or war for it. Therefore, to allocate it efficiently, we should allow it to trade at that value. This is how roads make the most number of people happy. That may sound like right-wing pablum, but it's a subject that has been well trod by great thinkers for a very, very long time. [1] [1] Coase, to mention just one

This is increasingly being done with congestion charges and time-dependent road or bridge tolls, but it still remains difficult, from a practical perspective, to maintain a continuous auction of road capacity.

Notably, wireless deployments differ from road use in that using a wireless spectrum assignment requires significant deployment time and capital investment, meaning when a frequency range is assigned it's reasonable to expect and allow a single entity to control that range for an extended period. With roads, on the other hand, a single use can be as short as a few minutes, meaning a similar auction would need to re-occur hundreds or thousands of times a day.

Further, if wireless spectrum ranges are not pre-assigned, it becomes quite difficult for multiple entities trying to use the same range to coordinate to avoid interference that would render the range useless to both. Roads, on the other hand, can be reasonably shared by multiple users without any coordination ahead of time.

Because of these practical difficulties, and the lack of an inherent need for usage assignments, most roads are not tolled or auctioned, and the result is heavy congestion in highly-sought-after routes at peak times.

While I agree with the substance of your comment, let us be clear about the difference between deployment and usage.

Entities investing in roadway leases and toll roads align closer to wireless deployments, IMHO.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-15-u.s.-h...

Wouldn't driving on a road for a few minutes correlate closer to making a phone call or sending a text?

(I can't believe I am perpetuating this analogy :P)

Would you be willing to 'sit in traffic' for your slot of bandwith, so to speak?

The existing road network is actually a bad analogy. We spend billions in taxes on cars, gas, etc to pay for road works.

Perhaps we could institute a transaction or device tax that would pay for government maintenance of spectrum transmission?

Note that this is in the 600MHz band, in the US only, and will require new frontends and related changes in order for phones to take advantage of this spectrum.

I kinda doubt it will "shape the future of the Internet" though.

It's making way for 5G service on mobile devices... 4G dragged the internet from our desktops to our phones, forcing business models around the world to change. 5G is sure to have a major impact.

> Note that this is in the 600MHz band, in the US only

What's weird is that the article mentions WWTO in Chicago. WWTO is on VHF channel 10 which is around 200 MHz. WWTO was previously on UHF channel 35 which is around the 600MHz band. However, it hasn't used that channel since 2009.

There was also 12Mhz of unlicensed spectrum on the old uhf channel 37 guard bands being opened up as well [1]. It's less than the 24-30 MHz advocated for users of 802.11af though. So that's a plus for IoT I guess.

Overall this is a good thing. Reshaping the future of the Internet might be hyperbole though.

EDIT: I overlooked the byline, and it appears this article is from 2014. I'm not sure if this is the same bands discussed as those from the FCC Public Notice here [2].

[1] http://www.telecompetitor.com/wheeler-sees-limited-unlicense...

[2] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

Germany has terrible internet access because the carriers there overpaid for the rights. The winner should be who can provide a good end service the cheapest, not who will provide the end service at the highest price.

The current system is a reverse-disincentive to screw the customer.

In the case of the current headline "Government" obviously means "US Government".

If it's obvious, then what purpose does your comment serve?

Anyone know what the terms of the deal are WRT length of lease, or are these perpetual?

Could we crowdsource the purchasing of some of this spectrum for collective use?

I wonder at what point it will be cheaper to build more cell towers than to buy more spectrum.

I, for one, don't believe that the state has the moral authority to "auction" the airwaves.

What makes 600mhz constitutionally distinct from 400hz? If the answer is "nothing," then it seems that the state can auction the air surrounding my vocal chords, deciding which vibrations are ad are not permissible.

If free speech is to mean anything in the information age, it must apply across a broad, useful, reasonable spectrum just as much as the tiny slivers which happen to be visible or audible to human eyes and ears.

You'll find that HN has bipolar disorder when it comes to libertarian positions:

Upvotes for:

+ Privacy, opposing mass-surveillance

+ Opposing cronyism

Downvotes for:

+ Free markets in education, healthcare, housing

+ Opposing "common sense safety" regulations

You would think that such an intellectual crowd would have more tolerance and curiosity for new ideas. But you would be wrong.

That's not bipolar disorder; if it was an individual, it would just be having an ideology that doesn't neatly align for or against a particular common archetype.

In the case of HN, it's both not particularly accurate and, to the extent it is at all accurate, is a mixture of some people not aligning with popular archetypes and people that do align with both libertarian and anti-libertarian archetypes being present in significant numbers in the HN community.

These positions don't seem incompatible to me.

The answer is not nothing.

They have different characteristics: Propagation, attenuation, power consumption, penetration through walls/building, crosstalk, bandwidth...

Short version: do you want to have a 10 inches antenna on your phone, or your TV?

> They have different characteristics: Propagation, attenuation, power consumption, penetration through walls/building, crosstalk, bandwidth...

I mean... I'm not stupid. I realize that.

But do these differences rise to the level of constitutional distinction for the purposes of protections under the 1st amendment (and its philosophical underpinnings)? I assert that the answer is unequivocally "no."

It may be that these sorts of regulations made sense for the past 100 years, but I don't think that they do for the next.

I don't know what regulations you have in mind but the frequency spectrum absolutely needs to be managed.

Do you believe in private property?

Within reason, sure.

But declaring the overwhelming majority of electromagnetic waves to be the purview of the state and its friends is, to my way of thinking, far from reasonable.

What does this even mean?

I'm not sure how to make it more clear: that the state does a dis-service by claiming dominion over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

If one needs to pay to transmit at convenient and reasonable frequencies, at reasonable levels of signal strength, then speech on the spectra in question is simply not free.

I am very much concerned that, outside the visible and audible spectra, along with slivers of 800Mhz, 2.4Ghz, and 5Ghz, that basic free speech is no longer the default.

> the state does a dis-service by claiming dominion over the entire electromagnetic spectrum

The alternative is the guy with the loudest transmitter wins.

I don't think that's true, any more than thinking that everybody will be zombifed heroin addicts in the absence of drug prohibition.

My CB radio would like to have a word with you.

Haha... Yeah you're not wrong there.

nIs Downtown James Brown still around? I haven't used CB in a few years.

There are branches of libertarianism that believe resources should not be sold by governments, but rather as commons.

Some of them also believe in private property which is always annoying.

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