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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done. For it to be shuttered would harm only those who have invested billions in the fake "assets" that FCC invented and must constantly police.

It isn't the 1930s anymore. Modern radio technology could enable a much more complete utilization of spectrum. FCC's primary mission at this time is to delay that happy day as long as possible. "Happy" because with true competition, the consumer would forget that net neutrality was ever anything a government agency needed to enforce. Don't like how your WISP is handling your traffic? Just switch to one of the other 25 WISPs in your area.

It's true that if FCC were eliminated to the general benefit of the nation, curious citizens would wonder what else could be eliminated. Should we feel sorry for any organization unable to justify its own purpose and actions?

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I strongly disagree with the idea that specrim doesn't need assigned.

There are fudemental mathematical limits to how much data can be sent over a range of frequency. We aren't all that far from it. Even without that, what are you picturing everything coming with enough smarts and flexibility to decide what frequency to use and then use it.

What about people acting in bad faith, cell phone jamming ect.

> FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done.

I wanted net neutrality the first time it was implemented. I remember being excited about a few other regulations that the Wheeler FCC implemented.

> FCC does nothing that citizens need or want done.

Keeping emergency bands clear is something the general populace wants done and frankly, needs done.

They "implemented" it a year before that president left office, knowing the next administration would roll it back. It didn't even actually get out of the courts, so the implementation never affected anything. A fairly cheap signal of virtue...

That's a mischaracterization of what happened.

Traditional telephone telecoms were always common carriers under Title II, and that applied to internet over dialup during the 90s. When broadband meant that internet connectivity was now being delivered via other medium, the FCC enforced what we now call net neutrality via a lighter regulatory scheme. Verizon ironically sued to get the courts to say that the FCC couldn't enforce the rules in a lighter scheme and therefore had to declare the new internet connectivity infrastructure to be full Title II common carriers to apply any of those rules to them. That court case ended in 2014, and so the FCC followed the court recommendation to apply the rules the were already enforcing.

Long story short: there was never really a time with both consumer internet connectivity and no net neutrality, despite the right wing talking points that this is some new thing.

Thread parent specifically credited Wheeler. I assumed that was for what Wheeler did in 2015? In my opinion (of course everyone is welcome to her own!) that action was calculated for reversal. In fact the whole "our backs are to the wall since VZN sued us" kabuki performance was planned years in advance. Big telcos are plugged into the parts of USA government that don't face reelection. They can bring extraordinary pressure to bear on judges and bureaucrats. Nobody in that system wants thousands of wildcat WISPs dotting the countryside.

I agree that the AM talk goofballs are full of shit on most things they say about the internet.

Net neutrality is the origin and the genesis of the Internet.

It's baked into TCP/IP with packet agnosticism the central and guiding principle.

You've given into partisan ignorance and I can't fault you: it's typical of people all around the world to wrap themselves in comforting ignorance lest they be forced to exercise even a small portion of their brains.

*And thanks for finally coming clean in your own regard. I realized who I replied to after I posted my own reply to your 'content.'

Yes I'm partisan in that I'd like for us to be rid of both wings of the mainstream party. In the context of this thread "net neutrality" has been a regulation. Of course as a design consideration it is fundamental to how the internet is built, and of course it's an abomination that none of the ISPs available to me feel that way. I don't judge things by the marketing, FCC included. If FCC fixed any number of the many things they do wrong, I'd have to change my tune. I don't expect to have to do that...

I'm not sure what other reply you're referencing.

I think you're underestimating how constrained the radio spectrum actually is. There's not enough room for 25 WISPs.

I can see (and, with the right tools, connect to) more than 25 WiFi APs from my office. The reason "there isn't enough room" in other bands is because we haven't really tried. Developing the tech is expensive, so investors will be sure there is an application before investing. In Wifi, a tiny sliver of "whoops why the hell did we leave that open oh yeah microwave ovens damn that's inconvenient" spectrum that no one who could get a meeting with FCC wanted, lots of wonderful and unpredicted things have happened. It seems we get another 802.11 letter every couple of years now. Those engineers don't need supervision from the feds. They wouldn't need supervision on a larger chunk of spectrum either.

You actually do get very significant contention between 25 WiFi APs, or even 12. 2.4 GHz only supports 11 channels; any more simultaneous users than that and you get collisions, which requires packet retransmission and can severely increase latency. That's a large part of the reason why everyone has dual-band APs now - 2.4GHz got so congested that people needed more spectrum, so they got 5GHz routers to avoid the congestion (and then all their neighbors got 5GHz as well, nullifying some of the effect). If you have a dual-band router in an urban area and sometimes find that your YouTube videos keep buffering, try switching bands; oftentimes when 2.4GHz is unusable, 5GHz will be clear, and vice versa.

And those 11 channels overlap and aren't real full channels. You essentially only get 3 real channels.

> Those engineers don't need supervision from the feds

The FCC limits broadcast strength on the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band as well. Remove that limit and 2.4 GHz wifi will finally become pure noise as everyone tries to down each other out (it's already pretty much useless in a dense apartment building)

Intentional transmitters are very heavily regulated, even in the 2.4GHz band.

With 25 visible APs, chances are your wireless performance is shit, whatever you say about it subjectively.

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