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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The ideal spectrum allocation scheme would be a by-the-minute rental.

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.

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An "ideal" scheme is once again derailed by reality, where predictability is valued; where antennas and signal processing equipment are physical objects, that cost money to procure and install, and are subject to engineering limitations which limit their flexibility.

Remember, the free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low.

Could you be more specific? What about this proposed "ideal" scheme is infeasible (specifically the engineering limitations you mentioned)?

As a quick example, I’ve been doing a bit of work with land-mobile radios lately (LMR). We rent a very small slice of spectrum from the government (12.5kHz wide, IIRC), and all of the radios use that frequency. They work anywhere (within the range of our license anyway). They run independent of a repeater or any kind of fixed base station.

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?

That's a neat problem. You may hear N other stations, but they may not hear each other at all. Its very difficult to know whom to tell about coordination information, or even how to calculate it. Solve that, even heuristically, and make a $B

I agree! It’s a very interesting distributed system problem and honestly, I might end up doing some sketching tonight.

Right now it’s easy to know whom to tell about the coordination though: the Canadian government :).

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