FCC planning to open up 1200 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed / Wi-Fi usage [pdf]
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz.
Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2.
I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems.
[0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work.
[1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-blue...
At this juncture, interference and noise are more of the problem with WiFi today. It’s not larger bands capable of faster speeds. We need more spectrum to mitigate interference and provide more landscape for multiple AP’s in tight geographical spaces to CO-exist without competing too much for airspace.
Bonding 80Mhz channels for 500+ Mbps is overkill and hogs airspace. 40Mhz channels are more than adequate for 90% of devices out there if that channel is stable and free from congestion.
I’m super against the FCC granting more spectrum only for routers/APs manufacturers to default to hogging more chunks of the airspace. It’s a race to the same shitty experience we see today. We should parcel out chunks that are allowed for high channel bonding, leaving the rest of the space to max out at single 40 MHz bands.
The problem is the box in the aisle of BestBuy that say “FAST 2.5 Gig WiFi” sells better than “Dynamic Signaling” so the incentive to just make really crappy radios that have more throughout outweighs the incentive to actually make decent and smart software defined radios.
That’s why I think the FCC needs to just set some band rules. They do this already in the commercial WISP space.
Yes I thought it was clear with the WiFi 6E mention, but turns out not everyone is up to date with things as shown in other replies, so I apologies for the confusion.
I agree with everything you said, but my opinion is it should be down to Wifi to enforce Dynamic Signalling as mandatory in WiFi 6 ( too late now may be WiFi 7 ) spec rather than having regulation. And I thought OFDMA is part of the solution?
If I remember correctly that is what the WiFi 7 / 802.11be committees were looking into. But then again judging from their Opera happening in WiFi 6 I am not too sure if they are capable of doing it.
I live in a high density urban living area and my MacBook currently reads at least 20 AP excluding their 5GHz naming counterparts. So I do feel the pain with crappy WiFi.
With 20 idle SSIDs on 2.4Ghz with default settings, roughly 50% of airtime is spent on SSID broadcast.
It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.
Think of it like 6.1 instead of 6E. Minor revision to the existing standard.
IEEE 802.11b --> Wi-Fi 2
IEEE 802.11a --> Wi-Fi 3
IEEE 802.11n --> Wi-Fi 4
IEEE 802.11ac --> Wi-Fi 5
IEEE 802.11ax --> Wi-Fi 6
IEEE 802.11ax in 6 GHz --> Wi-Fi 6E
IEEE 802.11be --> Wi-Fi 7
Has nothing todo with GHz frequency.
As interpreted by many modern, mostly conservative, regulators and scholars, the idea is that by giving private property rights in spectrum you incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies.
There's plenty to critique, especially as it applies to spectrum. See, for example, the famous Salon.com article summarizing David Reed's arguments: "The myth of interference" (2003), https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ But if you want to understand your adversaries' thinking, Coase's paper is the place to start.
As with software patents, I think there's an argument to be made that this is no longer true. Digital modulation schemes are leagues more efficient than older analog techniques, both in terms of power and bandwidth. Spread spectrum schemes in particular are even reasonably resistant to being plopped on top of each other.
The spectrum ownership scheme allows established players to sit around on their asses using loud, inefficient modulation schemes with huge dead zones in between channels because they don't need to do any better than that.
I think radio technology would be better across the board if spectrum were open, and if people had to compete by using better, more efficient, more interference-immune modulation schemes, or risk getting stepped on by someone else. If we had a system like this, the noise floor would just slowly increase in heavily used parts of the spectrum, rather than what we have now, which is a whole bunch of legally mandated quiet zones punctuated by huge narrow carrier spikes.
The technology to do this exists... you can go buy a broadband SDR and put together a system like this in GNU radio fairly quickly for experimental purposes, but it's not really legal to actually use this anywhere.
Thus the question isn't what regulatory regime is best for squeezing the most out of LTE, but rather what's the optimal pace of radio communications evolution and how to achieve it. That's a drastically different type of question that almost certainly has a drastically different answer, or at least a much more complex answer.
Instead of just giving it away or making it all free-reign.
Whenever anyone wants to use spectrum, their device automatically bids and gets allocated whatever size slice of spectrum and transmit power they ask for. Then the device maker or the user pays the bill at the end of the year, perhaps with some minimum free amount each year per person, which could cover all except the biggest spectrum users.
If you didn't like the government allocation scheme, you could rent your own block and do your own sub-allocations, for example some kind of packetized system with microsecond long packets wouldn't want to have to contact a government server for every 1 microsecond allocation.
That gives a strong incentive to use efficient allocation schemes.
Remember, the free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low.
If I’m out in the middle of nowhere with my team and we’re using these radios because there’s no cell coverage, a) how would a given radio “bid” on a piece of spectrum, and b) how would the other units in the talk group know to listen to a particular frequency for my message?
Right now it’s easy to know whom to tell about the coordination though: the Canadian government :).
In Coase's view the government shouldn't be auctioning spectrum for limited times or with strings attached, as we commonly do now. (What the FCC does now is a quasi-Coasean spectrum regime.) In Coase's view spectrum usage would be most efficient by selling all spectrum (from 0-infinity) in a one-time auction to the single highest bidder. That bidder could (and, crucially, would in Coase's view) then subdivide and sell the spectrum according to market demand.
Coase's logic is solid; it's the premises that are problematic. First, it ignores transaction costs, or at least assumes they're de minimis. Even before the Law & Economics field took off (which is the field Coase most influenced), it was understood that one of the purposes of legal rules was to minimize transaction costs. Sometimes a market is made more efficient by specifying a fixed rule, and even more often by specifying a fixed default rule, then by permitting perfect contractual freedom. Of course, this begs the question of when you can know whether to intervene. But that's the only legitimate question, not whether you should ever intervene. In Coase's time his argument was more practical as widespread independent and even individual broadcast usage wasn't a commercially realistic scenario; transaction costs would always be born by economic behemonths and therefore would be de minimis relative to their price. But that's not Coase's actual argument; his actual argument is categorical and absolute, and that's how most modern proponents (IME) apply it as well.
Secondly, the notion of spectrum rivalrousness is contentious. If something isn't rivalrous, a property regime is unnecessary and usually strictly inefficient.[1] Without getting into the science (and I'm not an electrical engineer so I'd just make mince of things), as a practical matter spectrum usage is only partly rivalrous (rivalrous mostly deriving from the technical environment, not from the fundamental character of spectrum, as with physical goods and real estate). Your ability to enjoy maximal channel bandwidth between two physical points is limited by how sophisticated your transmitter and receiver, and ultimately by computational power, not by coincidental usage, per se. (Not unless someone is actively trying to screw you.) As WiFi has born out, we're all in an arms race for buying and using the latest, greatest gear. In one sense this is just a convoluted price signaling scheme--the people most in need of bandwidth just pay for fancier equipment--that might be less efficient than a simple property regime. But arguably in practice this process plays out slowly enough (especially with moderate power limits, carve outs for emergency use, etc) that these transaction costs are far less than the transaction costs we see in a market where we expect Verizon's or AT&T's spectrum usage rights to trickle down to ad hoc groups and individuals of spectrum users in the same way William the Conqueror's lands in England were slowly subdivided until every Englishman could build his own castle.
Nobody will ever sell me rights to spectrum for use within a 10-meter or even 100-meter radius, even though it's possible and would open up a tremendous wealth of opportunities. Cordless phones (POTS, not cell) and WiFi could only have happened with unlicensed (i.e. unowned) spectrum, in contradiction to Coase's argument.
[1] Exception--if food wasn't rivalrous because we all had free Star Trek-style replicators I imagine obesity would be an even worse problem than it is today, we'd be more sickly, and so we'd probably want to impose costs to maximize aggregate wealth. (See soda tax.) And if we did that we might want to make those costs transferable (e.g. carbon credits) rather than centrally figuring out the most efficient price for each individual.
Section 5 sophisticatedly exposits the specific case on how the free market solves frequency interference in admonishment of the special regulation. Excerpts of his discourse:
“All property rights interfere with the ability of people to use resources.What has to be insured is that the gain from interference more than offsets the harm it produces. There is no reason to suppose that the optimum situation is one in which there is no interference”
“The operator whose signals were interfered with, if he had the right to stop such interference,would be willing to forego this right if he were paid more than the amount by which the value of his service was decreased by this interference or the costs which he would have to incur to offset it.” He goes on to talk about the case of deliberate interference. This is about deliberate spectrum preference overlap not accidental interference.
And Coase disambiguates his advocation if it still isn’t clear: “What this analysis demonstrates,so far as the radio industry is concerned, is that there is no analytical difference between the problem of interference between operators on a single frequency and that of interference between operators on adjacent frequencies.”
“It has been the burden of this article to show that the problems posed by the broadcasting industry do not call for any fundamental changes in the legal and economic arrangements which serve other industries.”
You’re mistaking market efficiency, transactional costs and externality. It’s argued that legal rules are necessary to instead reduce externalities by market failures, which existed long before Coase. Coase instead contributed to the limits of cost savings about transaction costs provided by the formation of business and maintenance of markets in The Nature of the Firm (aside from his free market advocation of the spectrum), which became Coase’s theorem.
I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true. Even amongst a single broadcaster within his own spectrum he runs into constant constraint and trade off by his own bandwidth.
I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist. Especially since Coase didn’t think externalities were unfortunate, instead he thought that was a “dirty word”, and seldom found a case for a government all to eager to specially regulate.
But it's rivalrous in a distinctive way--it's a function of contemporaneous and evolving limitations of the existing state of technology and usage patterns. To quote a famous IEEE Spectrum article, "Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization." https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr... What that's referring to are techniques like MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, etc.
As David Reed is quoted and paraphrased as saying in that Salon article: '[We have stupid radios not because we haven't figured out how to make them smart but because there's been little reason to make them smart. They're designed to expect signal to be whatever comes in on a particular frequency, and noise to be everything on other frequencies.] 'The problem is more complex than just making smart radios, because some of the techniques for un-confusing the receiver are best implemented at the transmitter, or in a network of cooperating transmitters and receivers. It's not simply the radios. It's the systems architecture, stupid!' https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/
We're only beginning to scratch the service of the channel discernment improvements that can had with MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, and other techniques, but we're limited by the larger ecosystem of devices and regulations, which is largely an artifact of a system which assumes a fixed interference burden across vast geographical areas. The channel capacity of a band of spectrum is, in the absence of coherent interference, point-to-point as a theoretical matter because non-coherent electromagnetic radiation does not interfere. To reiterate, interference as typically experienced is a function of the inability to differentiate a signal which is present or which could be present if the transmitting and receiving systems were more sophisticated, and (according to the theoretical work) this is ultimately a computational problem.[1] Thus "spectrum scarcity", at least in the context of P2P wireless networks, is a function of technology, not an intrinsic, fixed property.
Taking that context into account--that interference and thus the degree of rivalrousness for any band of spectrum is a complex, dynamic function that dissipates as technology progresses--we can end up drawing different conclusions than from the technological presumptions behind Coase's argument. For example, as someone else mentioned, maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi. Similarly, a lot of theoretical radio techniques are first explored and applied by the military precisely because of the adversarial context, and they're consistently fruitful because the physical limits of what's possible are still quite distant.
> I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist.
I never had the sense that Coase was characterized as interventionist, at least not in the context of FCC reforms. If refuting that is your goal, fair enough. IME, however, in popular discourse anything "free market" is generally considered non-interventionist, and as compared to FCC regulations contemporaneous with his paper that's a fair characterization. But from my perspective (and AFAIU of many others, especially in the SDR community), establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist, no less than it is with copyrights and patents, relative to the baseline of nothing. Nobody claims taxi medallion systems are non-interventionist, even when medallions are a freely transferable property right (e.g. NYC, sub-class of medallions in SF, etc). Uber would certainly disagree.
[1] This is why 5G achieves aggregate bandwidth multiples in the same bands even though 4G channel efficiency is near the Shannon limit. See https://cmte.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/05/17/taking-a-f...
> Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved.
With this definition then there is no other type of rivalry. This is true for any resource with tragedy of the commons, where an externality is encountered. This goes for land, agriculture, pollution, oil, etc. The limit here is always the efficient production from some resource using technology. This is part of the ceteris paribus of rivalry.
For what you're discussing, for non-interfering waves with the same spectrum, you would need a QAM or some other modulation scheme, with more granular phase detection, which requires exponential more energy, thus capital, per degree resolution of phase detection at the same distance. Thus, the rivalry always exists because enterprises prefer the method leading to the cheapest production with the same product.
> maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi.
As I'll continue discussing in your other comment this is exactly what Coase advocated for.
> establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist
It is in the sense you're discussing with the FCC but not in the Coase's sense where private property is in the strict abstract sense by enforcement of contracts between consenting individuals. Coase's point is that it shouldn't be specially regulated differently than the enforcement of any other private contract. Unless for specific cases which can only be known through experience
In the Chicago School monopolies are impossible; or rather, monopoly pricing is a fiction.
I can't find a direct top-down subdivision quote (my copy isn't searchable; he might not literally say it at all[1]), but efficiency of the single initial auction winner scenario can be logically inferred from what he explicitly says. For example, on pp 20-21 he says that in a property regime broadcasters would be able to assemble larger bands through free market purchases, subject only to their ability and desire to pay. Efficient aggregation and subdivision of spectrum is a built-in presumption.
AFAIU, applying Chicago School principles, the price at which a single owner of all spectrum would subdivide and sell a portion would have no (or at least de minimis) monopoly profit component. Another way to look at it is that ownership of any contiguous range of spectrum, just as with a contiguous piece of land, is by definition monopoly ownership. Breaking contiguousness might require a premium, but only proportional to the economic value from contiguous usage. Breaking contiguousness of all spectrum would require a premium proportional to the marginal additional usage value, which for all spectrum is pretty much nil. What usage of all spectrum has a value greater than the aggregated value of using two, smaller portions? More likely there's greater value in the latter than the former. At some point subdividing becomes inefficient, but certainly at that point we're no longer dealing with a single, contiguous band of spectrum. The initial, profit-maximizing owner has already subdivided most it, and probably no longer owns any of it--our hypothetical bid winner was probably a specialized broker banking on extracting value by subdividing it.
Of course, judging by your comment, we both believe that monopoly profits are real. Minimally they're approximately equal to the transaction costs required to buyout or break the monopoly, which is approximately equal to the cooperation costs for victimized buyers, which in practice would be born by a prospecting broker. (What we intuitively think of as "monopoly profit" are the opportunity costs to buyers having to pay a premium over the price paid in a competitive market. But we don't include those costs in the buyout/breakout scenario because they're recovered after the fact in the hypothetical and cancel out.) AFAIU, according to the Chicago School these transaction costs are de minimis, especially with large, liquid financial markets. This is why they're such fans of financial market deregulation, derivatives markets, short sellers, private equity, etc. But many people, including some Chicago School luminaries after 2008 (e.g. Greenspan), aren't so sanguine about those costs.
And this explains why AT&T and Verizon don't behave like the efficient economic actors in Coase's world--they won't subdivide or sublease their spectrum down to the levels required for WiFi-like usages because the costs of all of us cooperating to collectively bid is too high. Actually, that's not strictly true--the costs of cooperating can be trivial if we move beyond simple market theory. All we need to do is democratically choose, directly or indirectly, for the FCC to expand unlicensed spectrum, marginally rolling back a regime we previously democratically created.
Yes, I get that Coase in particular was appreciative of transaction costs in other contexts, such as in the theory of the firm. But Coase, and people in general, often make implicit assumptions about relative quantitive costs that become assumptions about qualitative costs that in turn become judgments about whether transaction costs are substantive. The transactional costs of subdividing and transferring spectrum among TV, radio, military, and other large, traditional broadcasters undoubtedly looked de minims in 1959. Certainly they were lower than the costs of FCC central planning, and that much I can't disagree with. But 40 years later the environment had completely changed.
[1] I distinctly remember seeing illustrations of this arguing-to-the-extreme concept, but the illustration itself was probably from another author as a gloss on Coase's work.
Coase: “Or, alternatively, if this operator had the right to cause interference, he would be willing to desist if he were paid more than the costs of suppressing the interference or the decrease in the value of the service he could provide if interference were barred. And the operator whose signals were interfered with would be willing to pay to stop this interference an amount up to the decrease in the value of his service which it causes or the costs he has to incur to offset the interference.”
Why would the operator have to pay to stop this interference if he owns that spectrum? If I go onto your land do you have to pay me to get me off of it? No, you have legal protection protecting that property right against non-consensual trespass.
Similarly, we can then conclude the operator must not have a property right of that spectrum if he must pay to prevent trespass, otherwise the operator would be able to file a criminal injunction to prevent the interfering individual from continuing to disrupt his signal at little cost--as you would do for a land trespass.
You're confusing the specific bill he mentions in the preceding section about the legal etiology of the FCC, which had proposed to do exactly what you're mistaking as the argument of Coase; where Coase thinks only that that specific bill shouldn't have been dismissed so trivially and as a resolve to the current situation where the FCC has already sold partial licenses--but leaves it thoroughly short of an advocation as he develops the case of no special regulation for broadcasting rights.
Obviously the system couldn't be expanded to a market with more than two entities without causing a lot of inefficiency. The regulators did this expansion anyway and that led to the insanity we have today.
I think both types are quite important.
I wrote more here: https://wiki.cjpais.com/brain-dump/march-15th-22nd-2020/radi...
Edit: I’m very glad the FCC is doing this. This is a great step forward. Looking forward to experimenting with this spectrum
With other shared mediums, we police the spectrum (e.g. light, sound, etc...). If a user starts blasting out FM, or too much 2.4gz and so on, it can be detected, traced and prosecuted. It's 2020, we don't need FM, we need high speed IPv6 radios and improved routing tables/algorithms. Lift FM channels into the digital realm and let's get on with it.
This all sounds somewhat fair, but the problems really start when not all the stations can hear each other. Station A can hear Station B and Station C. Station C starts sending a message to station A. Station B can't hear Station C, so starts sending a message to station A. The result is that both messages are lost and the effective channel capacity goes to zero. This is obviously a big problem.
The fundamental problem is that radio is very much half-duplex. Only one station can use a certain amount of spectrum at a time; if someone is using it, you can't. It causes problems everywhere; with WiFi, with air traffic control, etc.
Centralized frequency allocations get around this with better protocols. All the stations know about each other, and can be told when they can transmit by a centralized coordinator (TDMA is an example of such a protocol). As a result, each station has a predictable amount of airtime, and therefore guaranteed bandwidth and latency; no time is wasted with two stations talking over each other. (There are other sharing schemes that are more interesting and popular than naive time-sharing; CDMA, spread-spectrum, and GPS's "Gold Codes" are all interesting reading.)
The easiest way to implement this is not to write a standard and then ensure that everyone buys a standards-compliant device, but rather to give chunks of spectrum to companies, and have companies distribute devices that work they way they want. It's easier for the regulatory agency ("pay us money and do whatever you want"), and doesn't cap innovation. Verizon can collect your phone tomorrow and give you a new one if they want to use whizbang new technology. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it is of course a compromise. (Faster innovation, less government interference with technology... but at the cost of making it impossible to start a cell phone provider on your own.)
I guess my TL;DR is: it's not that simple. You could let everyone do whatever they wanted. That's how it was in the early days. People used spark-gap transmitters that generated so much noise that there was effectively only one half-duplex channel for the entire planet to use. Regulators saw that that wasn't going to scale and invented spectrum allocations, and here we are today. It's not perfect, but technology is improving how we used the unlicensed bands. (I am not as up to date as I want to be on WiFi specifically, but if you look at the amateur radio community, it's routine these days to communicate around the world with 5-10W of power. 20 years ago, it would have taken two orders of magnitude more power and 20x the bandwidth to do with voice what we do with FT8 today. People are still idiots, though, and generate plenty of QRM. It only gets worse when people without licenses start operating the radio stations.)
Actually, the proposal already contains this: "An automated frequency coordination system would prevent standard power access points from operating where they could cause interference to incumbent services." We could absolutely have central authority assigning time slots in congested areas in a fair way, while staying decentralized everywhere else. A bit like the way air traffic control works.
DECT base stations are capable of detecting when two (or more) stations are on the same channel and sharing transmission slots between them.
With 10 channels and 12 full duplex slots/channel you can handle 120 people sitting on top of each other, spread them out a bit and then you can handle many more - probably a small number of hundreds if done right
The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band.
At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities.
But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...
Mesh networks aren't good for paid prioritization, bandwidth overage charges, arbitrary disconnection on copyright claims, paid peering, or location/origin-based censorship, all of which the current model supports very well.
Strongly crosslinked local communities are much harder to centrally govern. The entire US society is built around hub and spoke media.
But isn't the spectrum owned by the government? There is no compelling profit motive for government-provided services. The sale vs granting to the public likely had to do with the revolving door between interest groups and government.
Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.
CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a-...
To build your projects you need a ham license, and if you have that you have the ham allocations.
Yes, most radio transmitters are certificated (including Part 15 transmitters like Wi-Fi routers), but homebrew devices should still be possible under Part 15 without certification. Part 15 allows the use of unlicensed radio transmitters built for personal use, not marketed, not constructed from a kit, and built in quantities of five or less, without going through the process of certification by regulators. See [0].
However, whether it can be implemented within the technical requirement and limitation of Part 15 is another question. Usually, Part 15 is very limited, it may or may not be usable for your project, unlike the amateur radio service (Part 97), which is a more powerful service.
> actually stick to their band and power limit, and don't interfere on some random harmonic. To build your projects you need a ham license.
Same for ham. The only difference is that certification by a regulator is not needed, and the technical standards that need to be satisfied is different, but regardless of what service you operate in, you must test your equipment by yourself to ensure the technical requirements are not violated.
[0] https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/what-are-the-us...
AFAIR what it boils down to is that if you have a ham license, there is a presumption that you know to some extent what you're doing (15.15.a?); so if you do break something it probably makes the distinction between "reckless" and "accidental".
Honestly if you do it well the question won't come up. So either you learn your shit well enough for it to not matter, or you get the ham license for insurance at the cost of at least proving you got the gist down. shrug :)
No. It's prohibited internationally and enforced by all ITU member states, the only exception which encryption is acceptable is the control uplink to aircraft and spacecraft. Although in some countries, using encryption domestically, purely for access control (not for confidentiality) is acceptable under some circumstances, if you publish your key.
> does spread spectrum qualify?
No. There are additional rules governing spread spectrum communications, but it doesn't automatically imply encryption. Many spread spectrum systems use weak PRNG and not meant for encryption.
Encryption would open the bands to general commercial usage. My uncle works in Canada's spectrum enforcement. You would be surprised at how many small business attempt to violate band licenses to save a few bucks. Think taxi or logging services with commms on protected bands.
First, it's important to understand that radio communication is a modern creation, not a post-modern creation like the Internet. From the beginning, telecommunication and radio communication was/is an area under heavy regulations by powerful governments. Since a hundred years ago, almost all aspects of communications (modulation, equipment, content, frequencies, price, recipients), even whether one is allowed to listen a broadcast station, were heavily regulated, often under the name of national security (and commercial interests). Today's regulations still follow the same framework. Amateur radio service was created to allow noncommercial technical experimentation - encryption is prohibited as parts of the compromise made by experimenters, in exchange, Big Brothers allowed experimenters to perform noncommercial communications under greatly reduced regulations, this even includes some authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union. Without such a compromise, amateur radio service wouldn't even exist at all. Unless the underlying political landscape and framework of radio and telecommunication is changed greatly, such as the vision advocated by the supporters of spectrum commons theory [0], this situation will remain.
Second, what has been prohibited is not encryption itself, but all forms of encoding that cannot be understood by others ("secret code"), this includes encryption, and also includes proprietary protocols. This regulation forces all communicators and commercial equipment vendors to document the technical information of the communication protocols being used to facilitate experimentation, thus it serves as a barrier against the use of proprietary protocols that is detrimental to the community. There is only one major flaw - there are no rules about patents, and there are already protocols designed by commercial vendors that cannot be legally decoded without obtaining a patent license. Nevertheless, the non-encryption rule works well to keep all protocols open, at least, its specification.
Third, amateur radio is, by definition, non-commercial, and it's not negotiable. There is the fact that the existence of amateur radio frequency allocation is constantly under the threat of reallocation to commercial services (the latest one is 5G). And there is also an opinion commonly held by many in the community, that there's always a trend that some commercial users may choose to abuse amateur frequencies to avoid the costs of using a commercial radio service, and that if proprietary protocols or encrypted communication is allowed, there's a danger of a de facto commercial exploitation of the amateur radio service when the nature of communication cannot be determined.
So, in conclusion, encryption was originally prohibited for "national security" to allow the existence of amateur radio, and many members in the community today believes the rule is still necessary to keep the proprietary protocols out of amateur radio, and/or to keep commercial abusers out of amateur radio. Although there are many situations which encryption can be beneficial for the community, but the consensus seems to be that, even if the state allows it (which is unlikely), its threats to the community is greater than its benefits. Any argument to allow encryption in amateur radio will be faced with suspect by many that it's only a disguised attempt to introduce proprietary protocols or commercial uses.
Amateur radio has usually been sold to regulators as a way to encourage international goodwill. Setting up a private point to point link is inherently in opposition to public goodwill. Like the difference between zoning real estate for public park to increase public happiness, vs zoning private warehouse space; they can't coexist in the same location.
The FCC provides elaborate services ... to SOME services. If you interfere with aviation navigation signals, ambulance dispatching, or megacorporation broadcasting they have in some cases visited with swat teams. If you have no borders and no categorization there can be no differential services. If some idiot decides to use the middle of the 80 meter ham radio band for broadcasting and spectrum enforcement is a free for all then nothing will work for anyone anymore. This was the justification for a TV broadcast license costing roughly 1e5 times as much as a ham radio license, which also makes problems. The real estate analogy is no zoning at all of any kind usually doesn't sell very well to endusers once its explained what will happen. No one likes excessive zoning regulation, but none at all is usually worse.
We're exiting a local maxima of personal freedom and for most of the lifespan of the technology the idea of letting people say what they want on the radio is on the downswing along. The easiest way historically to deal with "this speech is not a hate crime if spoken in Morocco but is a hate crime to be heard in Germany" or similar was always to make encryption illegal thus abstract out the technology of radio. This also helps with espionage. If its illegal to send encrypted codes (internationally and locally), and you don't send any, its kinda hard to get prosecuted for sending CP or industrial secrets or hate speech or whatever.
[0]: https://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its...
That article isn't the final word but it's interesting following the work of the broadband-hamnet folks - particularly in Texas[2]. They mostly say one can't use encrypted traffic. They are however relaying IP traffic but imply one shouldn't use https.
During National Emergencies (like now?) a lot of the rules around call signs, power, and presumably encryption fall by the wayside. In practice it looks like the FCC grants per disaster waivers[3].
[1] https://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/Data%20Encrypti... - the lede is buried on page 3
[3] http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-grants-temporary-waiver-permitt...
So not really many gigabits, but good enough for most of us.
The cynic in me notes that unlicensed, Mhz-range spectrum would have been a game changer and created a serious challenge to incumbent cellphone and broadband companies. Unlike Mhz spectrum, the 5Ghz spectrum he mentions (as an alternative) in that old opinion and the 6Ghz spectrum in the recent notice is limited to private usage within a building. You can't do anything long range, not even from down the block--at least not in a commercially viable way. Using unlicensed Mhz spectrum you could provide competitive broadband directly from the street (if not further), removing all the expense of leasing or running wires to people's homes or paying extremely costly fees to incumbent cellphone companies.
I reconsider what I said about dissonance: there is none. His past and current positions are consonant with the view that rivalrous spectrum usage is best resolved by auctioning private property rights in spectrum--the classic Coase approach. By effectively being limited to within structures, 6Ghz spectrum isn't rivalrous even from a person in Pai's perspective.
Note: I went to George Mason Law school which has a faculty that's extremely active in the FCC spectrum debate, and I know Pai is intellectually (and in some cases personally) friendly with some of that faculty. The faculty are vehement advocates for private spectrum auctions. I've had more than one intense debate advocating for more unlicensed spectrum usage and none of them were the least bit kind to that approach. But that was 10 years ago; perhaps opinions have softened since then.
Roughly speaking, how many WIFI chanels does 1200 Mhz give? How does this compare to 5Ghz?
1200MHz of bandwidth is a lot.
Can someone explain this to me? Doesn't 1 GHz = 1,000 MHz?
The actual frequency band is 5.925 GHz to 7.125GHz[1] which is 1.2GHz from bottom to top (that is how "wide" the band is)
That spectrum is broken up into channels that can be up to 160 MHz wide which allows for a lot of data all at once, but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does do don't think of it easily covering your house.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf
2.4 GHz has 83 MHz spectrum 5 GHz has 580 MHz spectrum but part of it is shared with radars.
6 GHz is 1200 MHz, double of what we have today!!
I was under the impression that the higher the frequency, the more energy the wave has, and thus does a better job of passing through walls. Is that incorrect?
Shortwave is 100 to 10 meters wavelength compared to 5G which has wavelengths measured in millimeters.
i've lost faith over the years after buying into whitespace and cbrs; when neither happened in meaningful ways. The FCC is a shitshow
CBRS and TVWS requires database which takes many years to craft.
If yes, that would be a game changer...