Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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And societies have the ability to add more capacity by realizing by having privately owned radio spectrum the advancement and adoption of wireless data transfer has been stunted for decades.

Everyone likes to argue that you can't have an all wireless society because there is limited bandwidth available, but as it is we are only using about 10% of the usable spectrum (from about 200MHZ to 8GHZ) for network data connectivity, and even then most of it is still privately controlled - if an area has too many AT&T subscribers and not enough Verizon customers, the Verizon spectrums go to waste while the AT&T ones are oversaturated.

There are a few things I could name off the top of my head that would overnight dramatically improve technology, but nationalizing back light for the people to use and then having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings would go a long way to improving most of our lives dramatically.

Private companies don't own spectrum, they lease it. They pay the government substantial sums of money for the temporary, revocable right to use a chunk of spectrum. Light is already nationalised, the government just chooses to rent it out, partly on the basis of need and partly on a market basis. That allocation system isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than declaring everything from DC to daylight an ISM band and letting the users have at it.

Good point about owning vs leasing. But there's also a lot of room between private spectrum rights and the ISM band free-for-all.

Of those middle-ground options, I can't think of any that don't involve revoking a lot of licenses and rendering a lot of expensive equipment useless. It's theoretically possible to manage spectrum dynamically, but you need a clear channel and smart devices.

Consider the digital television transition - it freed up a substantial amount of spectrum for other users, but it took many years and cost billions of dollars. Broadcast TV and radio is less significant today than it was in 2009, but there are thousands of spectrum user groups who would find it difficult to switch to dynamically managed spectrum, not to mention the potential safety issues.

The RF spectrum is a busy old place. We can carve out little bits here and there, but there just aren't many useful blocks left that aren't already being used by something quite important. Most of those allocations involve co-ordination with the ITU and couldn't be significantly altered without international agreement.

https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_201...

> There are a few things I could name off the top of my head that would overnight dramatically improve technology

Could you name a few? This is HN after all, we like to get technical.

You need to have someone coordinate frequency use or else you'll get tons of interference. At least by making people pay for it you incentize them to actually use the part of the spectrum they've purchased.

> ...having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings...

Kinda like how 2.4 GHz is damn near useless for many people?

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