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Comment by jake_morrison | Hacker News Reader

It is funny to see these technologies being shut down right when they are useful for IoT.

I was building LED displays for bus stops to show information about the next bus. I found pagers to be a great match: cheap chips with integrated support for communications and displays, low costs for small text messages, great network coverage. But then the telecoms started shutting down the networks.

Now we are seeing the same thing with the push to 5G. I don't want 5G, I want 2G. Before there was TCP/IP over cellular networks, we had cellular packet data. Very power and network efficient, it was the basis for things like BlackBerry's push email. Now the 2G patents are expiring, so it could be cheap and ubiquitous, built into everything. But instead the 2G networks are getting shut down...

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4G LTE has dramatically higher system spectral efficiency (in bits/Hz) compared to 2G - over 100x [0]. That's why 2G is getting decommissioned in favor of LTE (and 5G).

NB-IoT is probably where your application would go these days. Bi directional communication, cheap chips, and data plans around $10/device/year for 12MB [1], which is a lot of short messages (though things like OTA firmware updates might be painful).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_efficiency

[1] https://www.twilio.com/wireless/narrowband

Spectral efficiency is super important. Especially with IoT, because there are going to be so many devices. Trying to do that with old pager network bandwidth would quickly overload the network.

IoT is really several different kinds of devices. Many of which are extremely low bandwidth. When you’re talking a few per hour, spectrum bandwidth is simply a non issue.

A single device may be low bandwidth, but what about when you have thousands of such devices in a single apartment building?

100 bits per hour * 10,000 devices = 278 bits per second. That’s significantly less than the equivalent of a single cellphone per apartment building.

You're assuming they all spread out their communications evenly. What if they all want to send out a status update message on the hour?

That one of the reasons for the random delays are for in most network protocols. However, 10,000 devices sending 100 bits over say 10 seconds is still only 100kbps.

I am not talking about using the pager network for that, I am talking about the 2G network.

I am not opposed to using more efficient network protocols, more that we are endlessly replacing old technologies with completely new systems. The selling point of 3G/4G/5G has been that they will have more bandwidth, so people can watch videos or use self driving cars.

What is more interesting to me is embedding cheap low-bandwidth smarts in more devices. The costs of the new and immature hardware gets in the way of that.

Handling a large number of IoT devices has definitively been one of the major selling points of 5G.

One of the goals of 4G/5G is to allow for the coexistence of high bandwidth devices with IoT.

I agree that at this point the cost of cellular IoT is higher than it should and the technology is immature. In the long term though, it would be a better choice than keeping a 2G network.

> The selling point of 3G/4G/5G has been that they will have more bandwidth, so people can watch videos or use self driving cars.

In the cellphone commercial sure but in technical reality it's about device density. There is only one set of airspace and only certain chunks are useful for where we want to communicate; getting the most devices able to communicate has been the leading driver of RF planning and design for quite some time now. Bandwidth usually materializes out of a combination of more "slots" to talk and simply not using restrictions needed for 20 year old consumer hardware.

If I am sending 100 bytes, then spectral efficiency is not my biggest problem.

NB-IoT is fine, I will have to use it. The cost of 4G/5G chips is a lot higher than older generations, to say nothing of what would happen if anyone can make chips.

Everyone just wants to sell me something new, because that's how they make money. When 3G came out all the telecoms were excited to sell video, as it would give higher average revenue per user. Turns out people don't want to pay more.

We get faster networks but keep the same price per GB, so with 5G I will be able to blow through my monthly bandwidth in 60 seconds. And that assumes that the carriers have the backbone capacity.

You don't need a full fledged 4G chip for NB-IoT - something like Quectel BC66 would work. Its ~€10/each for QTY250 [0], or €29 for QTY1 on a Arduino compatible dev board [1]. Ublox has a similar product for a similar price [2].

[0] https://www.avnet.com/shop/emea/products/quectel-wireless-so...

[1] https://www.tekmodul.de/produkt/bc66-dvk/

[2] https://www.u-blox.com/en/product/sara-r4-series

Spectral efficiency may not be an issue for you but it sure as hell is an issue for your carrier.

What people are telling you is that 5G is more than just a plot to sell you YouTube streaming. It is the only way carriers can scale the mobile network to meet its growing needs.

There are only so many ways you can cram more people into a shared medium like the RF spectrum....

LTE-M / LTE cat.0 would be the ideal replacement for a pager. NB-IoT is not meant for mobility. NB-IoT has cell reselection mechanisms, so you can connect to a different base station, but the process is very energy demanding. It is meant to be used rarely, for example when a closer base station activates.

Also, firmware updates for these devices are a few KB typically and occur maybe once every 6 months. 12 MB per year should be enough.

> Now the 2G patents are expiring, so it could be cheap and ubiquitous, built into everything. But instead the 2G networks are getting shut down...

The frequency bands these older technologies run on are very, very valuable. The prices paid at the last FCC frequency auction are a tiny fraction of the revenue those frequency bands will earn over the next decades.

Also factor in that in many cases, no new equipment is available for replacement parts, service contracts get increasing expensive as vendors milk the older tech, expertise is lost, features like remote management and interoperability with recent technology is poor....

The list goes on and on.

It never ceases to amaze me that we allow our FCC to sell leases for so little. Instead of demanding companies share revenue or provide basic services for all for free, we allow this type of theft under colour of "fair governmental auction".

Remember, in the US, the FCC is only the current custodian of this shared property called the EM spectrum.

US citizens can and should take it back as their property, and demand all citizens profit equally from these auctions.

Other countries have declared internet access a basic human right... At a minimum that should be included in all future leases.

The FCC is US citizens. Running an auction is the best way to get the most value at the present time for the spectrum.

You're more than welcome to get an Amateur Radio license and get the same access to spectrum, in some cases spectrum that's even better than what cellphones run on now.

Amateur Radio license holders can't use encryption in the USA. This kills a large portion of the use case for an amateur cellular network.

Would steganography count as encryption?

Yes although you might not get caught if you were careful and quiet.

You’re aloud to sign things, so if you’re doing ip/packet you can use client side certs for authentication and then I think with OpenSSL there’s a way to only enable the “null” cypher.

The other issue is you’re not supposed to use it for profit (except selling radio equipment and I think there are other rules on that too) so you really couldn’t usefully replace your internet connection with it.

When European regulators auctioned off spectrum for UMTS use they got bids so high that the operators became capital constrained with respect to actually building the network.

I was working at British Telecom when they bought their 3G licenses for the UK. The stock dropped by 50%, making my options worthless. Not that I am salty.

I wonder if it is optimum for society to price the spectrum so high that it is barely possible to build on it, then transfer the costs to the consumer. Basically it's a tax on technology. Or if it's not so high, then it's a windfall to the carriers.

Some say that the high prices paid at frequency auctions are partially responsible for the high prices, shitty coverage, and mediocre bandwidth of mobile networks in Germany. Most of Europe is much better.

Yep and it's gonna be the same thing all over again with 5G.

At least you can rejoice that Austria was selected as the testing grounds for 5G before Germany. I was at the event where T-Mobile renamed themselves to Magenta and the CEO of Magenta "interviewed" the right-wing chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz as they laughed and announced Austria will roll 5G out before poor Germany. The audience didn't seem all that enthusiastic with the announcement, then again in Austria getting crowds really excited at business events is quite the challenge...

A friend of mine also has a map of 5G hotspots in Switzerland, and there are already quite a lot, e.g. in Geneva, for such a small city and they have at least multiple tens already installed.

>Some say that the high prices paid at frequency auctions are partially responsible for the high prices, shitty coverage, and mediocre bandwidth of mobile networks in Germany.

I was just visiting Germany less than a year ago, and got a SIM card and a month of service there for EUR15. My coverage was just fine in cities and some smaller towns, and the data rate seemed just fine; I even used it for a VoIP conversation.

Your prices are much, much cheaper than here in the US. They're also significantly cheaper than Japan. From what I've read, your prices seem to be cheaper than, or on par with, most westernized countries. The only places that seem to be cheaper are eastern European places like Romania.

Seriously, I wish I could get good service as cheap as I found it in Germany; I'd be paying less than half of my current phone bill (and I already pay much less than most people I know, because they all insist on expensive full-service plans).

You should check out Sweden or Austria regarding prices and what you get for them!

Coverage on Autobahns and train lines is pretty bad. In some villages it's also bad.

Are you saying Sweden and Austria are even cheaper?

If so, that's great and all, but honestly, from an American perspective, EUR15 per month for 3GB of data is a very, very good deal. That's so cheap that I'm not sure I'd care much if another place was even cheaper.

I didn't notice any coverage problems while I was there, but admittedly I was only there 2 weeks, but I did take the trains a lot (but only in Bavaria). I never noticed any problems. I was using O2. I don't think the coverage was perfect all the time, but it's not perfect here in the US either, and I use Verizon which is generally accepted to have the best overall coverage nationwide.

In short, I think Germany has things pretty good from a global perspective, as far as cellphones go. Some other European places may be even better, but I just don't see much to complain about over there, when compared to any place outside of Europe.

Yes, I'm saying that you can get more and faster data for cheaper in most EU countries, and IIRC Sweden is an extreme case while Austria is also much better and right next to Germany, which is why I picked these two.

That's nothing though - in Seoul, people are watching YouTube videos on the subway. In Germany, it only became reasonably pleasant to read text websites on the phone in the subway a few years ago.

I feel the opposite -- why are the leases so expensive? Billions of dollars paid to the government for spectrum is a hidden tax since it's paid by consumers.

Much better would be to sell them for the cost of administration of the sale, but only upon approval of a business plan that weighs the value to consumers in awarding the bid. So instead of selling to huge telcos that can afford to pay billions of dollars, it could be sold to a much smaller company that may provide a better value to end users.

The tax on consumers is appropriate because cell users should pay for the opportunity cost of removing the spectrum from other possible uses.

As to government review of business plans—the market is better at deciding what business models bring “better value to end users” than the government. We used to have exactly the model you suggest—the FCC would grant spectrum licenses based on its view of “the public interest.” It was a disaster—resulting in our current situation where huge amounts of spectrum are locked up in low value uses like over-the-air TV.

Over the air broadcast TV provided great value to consumers (and still does -- lets me watch local TV without needing to buy cable). The problem with broadcast TV is that the technology at the time meant that the spectrum had to be dedicated to TV and can't easily be phased out for other uses -- the cutover to digital TV was a huge ordeal. That's no longer the case, different users can share the same spectrum today.

If the lease was cheap, what would force the owner to price their services any cheaper? No one can compete with them anyway as they own the spectrum

Their approved business plan - that's the entire point of having a business plan review, not just picking the highest bidder.

If they say they are going to sell wireless broadband at $xx/mbit to consumers, they need to follow through or lose their spectrum allocation, so there's no incentive to lie.

The leases are sold at auction, so they go for what they go for. Remember, on top of buying the spectrum rights, companies have to invest a ton of capital in actually building networks. (It’s like leasing land to build a hotel. The land lease is going to be a small fraction of the hotel revenue.)

As to attaching “basic services” and other riders—these are outmoded, disproven ideas. Unfunded mandates and conditions invariably (1) reduce competition; (2) cost the public more money; and (3) produce opaque markets and trade offs that are impossible to quantify.

Granting license based on “public interest” type analysis is what got us into our current mess, with broadcasters holding valuable spectrum for low value television and radio services. (Likewise with the idea of granting cable monopolies in return for the public benefit of serving areas that would otherwise be unserved, which was such a bad idea Congress had to make it illegal.)

Almost every developed country has copied the US model of spectrum auctions. It was one of the foundational advances in the regulation of public goods in the 20th century. See: https://www.chapman.edu/ESI/wp/Porter-Smith-Hazlett-RadioSpe....

> The prices paid at the last FCC frequency auction are a tiny fraction of the revenue those frequency bands will earn over the next decades.

The licenses that the FCC auctions off have a finite term. E.g. this [1] license is owned by AT&T and expires in 2021.

[1]: http://reboot.fcc.gov/spectrumdashboard/detailLicense.seam?c...

So over the next decades those carriers have to purchase it from the FCC again and again and again.

This is actually news to me and I’m pretty glad to hear it. I always assumed these companies could just sit on the frequencies after they bought them.

I was always pretty upset about the low unlicensed power levels living out in the country side as a kid. The cell companies weren’t using the frequencies out there so why couldn’t we?

I’ve heard tv white space actually works that way although some telcos “cheat” by reporting that they cover way more area than they do. I’m so glad to have moved far enough into the city that I no longer care.

I'm neither smart enough or well-connected enough to even hazard a guess but I wonder if there's an opportunity to acquire the older radio broadcasting assets and make them useful?

Sure, you could get the equipment for next to nothing. But without a spectrum license it's useless.

That's essentially what's going on with high TV channels right now. They're getting repacked into lower frequency bands so the high frequency channels can be used for cell phone service. You may have seen your local channel telling you to recant, that's why.

The FM/AM radio spectrum is too low frequency to be practical for cell phone use. The antennas would be outrageous.

Have you tried LoRa?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

LoRa probably works great, but I think the parent's point is that there are extremely mature, low-cost technologies that are a perfect fit already for their need and have existed for decades. It's frustrating to have those technologies disappearing and have to choose between either something mainstream that's more expensive or a handful of more novel things any of which might turn out to be a flash in the pan and a support nightmare down the road.

2G is horrible compared to 4G or 5G efficiency. Please do homework.

Why not RDS? Still ubiquitous and cheap to implement.

how did you do authentication?

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