FCC seek comments on NextNav petition for rulemaking on lower 900MHz ISM band
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
They should instead hold an auction every decade for every bit of commercial spectrum. Winner can use it for 10 yrs. Stagger the auctions so a new chunk in each band is coming up for auction every month.
Nothing should be given away forever. Not even the 2.4 Ghz wifi band. One day there will be a better use for that band, and one bloke running his 50 year old wifi camera shouldn't be able to shut down the new use for a whole city block.
Perhaps combine with restrictions on use - if you don’t use the spectrum, or use more than you need, it gets taken away
Licensed spectrum is nearly always used by subscription services - eg. your cell phone service.
Given this line, how exactly is this response a defense of your original comment?
For unlicensed, it wouldn't be about registration, it would be about making effective use. It's hard to imagine a situation where nobody is making good use of 2.4GHz, so it should stay unlicensed, but the aspect of effectiveness is still there. Occasionally old tech that is acting like a noise blaster might need to be culled.
Strong agree, which is why they've traditionally licensed transmitters at specific sites. The coordination of use of a limited resource is the proper role of the FCC.
>They should instead hold an auction...
Strong disagree. Any auction is a tax, that gets increased and passed along to users. The whole idea of making a "profit" from the airwaves is a premature (and evil) optimization.
Part of a broadcast license should be expanded to include operating a timing and navigation beacon, supplied and maintained by the government, which transmits precision timing (via local atomic clock(s)) and thus can be coordinated with others to measure position. This should also apply to all cell sites.
Also, the shutdown of ground based navaids by the FAA should be reversed as much as possible. Full ground coverage in the event of a GPS loss should be maintained.
The FCC is a cost center. Enforcement costs needs money which comes from taxes (auction or income). So to me it's a wash regardless of where the money comes from.
The market is the most efficient form of pricing a scarce resource (bandwidth in this case) so it makes sense that an auction is the appropriate way to sell it.
The market may be "efficient", but I don't want my radio regulator to optimize for cost alone, rather for balancing a variety of different needs, ranges, and durations like they are now.
E.g. Why can't I use FM frequencies that aren't being used in the area for my personal use of a few hundred feet? Why can't I use the frequencies the local car dealership is using after 6pm when they've closed for the night?
Super weak voice channel where you can barely make out any words? That same channel, with the same transmit power, will get a decent telephone quality digital voice down, as long as you use modern low bitrate audio encoding. And it would send pages of text per second if you can handle typing not speaking.
It's not huge amounts of data or traffic, but it seems to be fairly reliable.
Then the outcome becomes effectively the same as the current "just ask nicely" system, whilst there aren't many people wanting to use the bandwidth.
They even have the audacity to make up things like "WiFi calling" that push you to the public spectrum while still charging you. The market really figured that one trick out.
I think the problem for something like this is that devices have chips hardcoded for this spectrum and have been shipped. And it is not like cellular, where the provider goes away and then all the phones/devices stop working. People can have 2.4ghz routers talking to 2.4ghz devices in their house, and they will work basically forever. Is this tragedy of the commons?
even so, I do agree with you. I think there should be a "for limited time" clause for spectrum, but like patents, not like copyright.
Basically, if your device is offline for 10 years, and isn't in range of any other online device for 10 years, then it will stop working.
The license would list frequency bands and power levels. That allows the FCC to decide to limit power later, or reduce/widen frequency ranges, and devices already in the field will start to comply within 10 years.
A few bands intended for less smart devices (ie. doesn't have both transmit and receive, isn't digital, doesn't have a clock or storage, etc) wouldn't require such licenses.
Government should auction all property (land plots) every 10 years too?
If I have a 999 year leasehold, that's the same as ownership in practical terms as my ownership goes away when the government fails and is replaced/taken over/overthrown.
In tech specifically, a 99 year lease is practically permanent as well. (1925 was before the first RF transmission of a television picture.)
* Maybe Japan is an exception here.
They're claiming none of their governements is over 999 years old.
Denmark's constitution is from 1849 [1].
Hungary's constitution is from 1949 / 1989 [2].
China's government is form 1949 (when the previous government got overthrown and went to Taiwan) [3].
I'm not going through the whole list.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Government_and_politic...
The 2 meter band for instance is back to back busy with people speaking English, Spanish and other languages in L.A. but if I scan for a while in NYC I’ll eventually hear two people talking on a repeater.
So far as I can tell startups in the Bay Area try to develop 900 MHz devices and come to the conclusion that the band is too crowded because every Stanford student and his uncle is testing some gadget they made. If somebody tried that in the Research Triangle Park area, however, they’d probably wonder if their receiver was dead.
So more products dogpile in the 2.4G band which is crowded everywhere.
The situation is at the most blatant where it seems the utilization of TV channels is much less than 10% on the East coat because our cities are too spread out for it to be easy to cover people but are too close together to be able to reuse frequencies. Thus you can get more channels than some cable plans with just a pair of rabbit ears in LA but it is not like that in NYC where reflections are so bad in the canyons I wouldn’t count in tuning into anything in Manhattan.
So it's garbage band that works pretty much everywhere.
In LA I think part of that is the repeaters on every mountaintop in the area. Most of LA county and the Inland Empire have clear line of sight to the San Gabriel mountains and most of Orange County has a clear LoS to the Santa Ana mountains. Both ranges have peaks in excess of a mile above sea level.
Even before digital TV broadcast the VHF dial was full and there were a lot of UHF channels. I'd guess the Bay Area was similar as most of the population has a pretty clear view of some high peaks with repeaters on them.
I haven't lived in Southern California for about twenty years now so I can't speak to the current stations but in the 90s and early 00s I recall a lot of the UHF stations were foreign language. The English-language stations mostly aired reruns. So overall the plethora of stations wasn't all that attractive to me personally but the number was impressive.
I'd contrast that to the Syracuse and Binghamton markets which I can both get most of the stations reliably where there are no foreign language channels but quite a few that show reruns of shows like Columbo, Farscape, That 70's show and such as well as news from the BBC and Japan.
This station is crazy powerful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSYT
and I can receive it indoors with rabbit ears in an old house which is full of little nails that interfere with radio. (Usually I use a small outdoor antenna, though it is hard to watch broadcast TV now that there is FAST.) People on the other side of Lake Erie in Canada watch for it DX when tropospheric conditions are favorable, on some of those days our repeater opens up an I can talk to them.
> In 1985, the Federal Communications Commission allocated the frequency band between 902 and 928 MHz to Part 18 ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) devices. In that proceeding, the band was also allocated to the Amateur Radio Service on a secondary basis meaning amateurs could use the band as long as they accepted interference from, and did not cause interference to, primary users.
This is so they can offer nationwide machine to machine long distance communication. Commercial meshtastic. They spectrum would be entirely theirs across the whole country, and could be used for any purpose. The extra anticompetitive move is that it would kick out and constraint free users of this bandwidth at the same time offering paid services in the same band. Corporate enshitification of the commons.
On March 11, 2024, NextNav announced it signed an agreement to acquire spectrum licenses covering an additional 4 MHz in the lower 900 MHz band (902-928) from Telesaurus Holdings GB LLC, and Skybridge Spectrum Foundation. NextNav acquired the additional spectrum licenses for a total purchase price of up to $50 million, paid for through a combination of cash and NextNav common stock. The acquired licenses are in the same lower 900 MHz band as NextNav's current licensed spectrum. On April 16, 2024, NextNav filed a rulemaking petition with the Federal Communications Commission to deliver a spectrum solution in the Lower 900 MHz band to facilitate a terrestrial positioning, navigation, and timing network (as a complement and backup to GPS) and broadband.
Hmmm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.25-meter_band#U.S._reallocat...
I have a better idea. Take the old UHF TV channels 70-83 that were re-allocated to AMPS cellular and re-allocate them again.
TV above channel 37 has been reallocated for even more cellular phone use in two more chunks since then.
Cellular phones get a lot of bandwidth, but it's highly utilized.
If companies could reasonably expect to get away with it, they'd offer murder-for-hire as-a-service so long as it was profitable, and if they didn't, there'd probably be at least one activist shareholder who would push for it.
WWV isn't a precision timing source, and is only sporadically available depending on a number of factors.
The best option would be something like a sub carrier on DTV and FM broadcasting, along with a beacon at all cell sites.
Auctions of the airwaves are a hidden tax, and should end.
Navigation system like that is useful for more accuracy or when GPS has problem. But not at the expense of 900 MHz band for other useful things. I'm surprised that they can't find an awkward slice of low-band that mobile provider would get rid of or lease.
Can anyone comment on nextnav's intended duty cycle or just how much they'll occupy? They're asking for a lot of bandwidth, so perhaps it's in a short enough burst and infrequent enough to not cause real problems?
Is this about propagation over obstructed Fresnel zone paths?
I ask because generally 2.4GHz has much longer range than 900MHz due to the much higher gain antennas achievable at higher frequencies.
But if there's something in the way (trees, buildings, a bit of terrain), then 900MHz can work on a path when 2.4GHz doesn't. I suppose that's one definition of "has sufficient range".
According to the FCC doc nextnav plans on "making excess spectrum available for commercial broadband service" (LTE/5G or similar I assume). So, it could be pretty impactful to current users of the band.
In this day and age, the protocols do not require exclusive control over a band to function in spread spectrum modes.
Pretty douche move, and pissing off 68000 amateur radio folks in an election year may be unwise. =3
Meshtastic devices are really starting to see uptake among techies in general, and in the US, the primary band they operate on is 915Mhz. It's to the point now that DefCon will put extra strain on the mesh and the project has to release patches ahead of time. If news got there this year, you can count on some jimmies having been rustled.
People need the lower frequency to punch though the water vapor, and can't get away with <14cm without cutting range.
Using it for 5G bandwidths is stupidly inefficient, as it will cap out at a few hundred users a cell. Maybe they are getting the bands for cheap... lol =)
So at least all LoRa based applications seem unaffected by this. Though I don’t know how much traffic in the proposed NetNav bands will migrate to 915 MHz bands, crowding the spectrum.
Seems like you might want to send in your comments.
- Z-wave network
- Weather Stations
In the past - cordless phones
- baby monitors
Do we have any guarantees that these devices will continue to work?
>NextNav does, however, seek the removal of the current requirement that it not cause unacceptable levels of interference to part 15 devices. See Petition at A-6 (proposing to amend § 90.361), A-11 (proposing to add § 90.1410(c)).
Here is the much more readable PDF.
> The Petition recognizes that there currently are unlicensed part 15 devices operating in the Lower 900 MHz Band, but it is unclear regarding the extent to which the proposed reconfiguration would impact potentially millions of such devices. With respect to part 15 devices, NextNav states that it is completing technical analyses and “will work with unlicensed users to understand their spectrum requirements.” Id.
> NextNav does, however, seek the removal of the current requirement that it not cause unacceptable levels of interference to part 15 devices. See Petition at A-6 (proposing to amend § 90.361), A-11 (proposing to add § 90.1410(c)).
Requesting public comment is perhaps better than nothing (and likely better than just allowing lobbyists to influence policy behind closed doors), but it's a hard problem to quantify whether the collected comments are representative when one side is more heavily resourced and organized than the other?
Is it even possible to "work with unlicensed users to understand their spectrum requirements" in a way that doesn't ignore a potentially substantial long-tail of varied usage?
That is also amateur radio band and their organization, ARRL, will probably be involved.
There are products, like ZWave, that are in band and might protest. The short-range in-house probably won't interfere with the outside users.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK60cMsBaFo
Make sure to switch to 1080p.
> NextNav does, however, seek the removal of the current requirement that it not cause unacceptable levels of interference to part 15 devices. See Petition at A-6 (proposing to amend § 90.361), A-11 (proposing to add § 90.1410(c)). NextNav also states that updating the band to increase flexibility will not impact amateur users.
If you were really going to do the first part then surely you don't need to remove the no interference requirement, right? If the rule is "$new_thing can occupy this spectrum but it must not interfere with existing usages of the spectrum" then what's to discuss, it's a win-win? It seems like the FCC is doing what they need to and making them actually specify what is required to not interfere with existing users so it can be made part of the rule. So I guess I'll hold my breath and see what they come up with.
>will Metropolitan Beacon System charge a royalty for devices to use its network?
>Yes, the Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS) developed by NextNav is a proprietary technology, and it is likely that there will be charges associated with using its network. These charges could include royalties or licensing fees for devices that utilize the MBS network for precise location and timing services
EDIT: typos
To quote another HNer:
> If you are opposed to the proposal then make your feelings heard by submitting them at https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings using proceeding/docket # 24-240
RE: WT Docket No. 24-240, RM-11989
To the Federal Communications Commission:
I strongly oppose NextNav's petition to reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band. As an amateur radio operator and user of various devices operating in this spectrum, I believe this proposal would have significant negative impacts on both hobbyists and consumers.
1. Impact on Amateur Radio: This band is crucial for amateur radio experimentation and innovation. I personally use it for Meshtastic devices, which provide valuable experience in mesh networking and could be vital for emergency communications. Displacing these activities would hinder technological advancement and public service capabilities.
2. Consumer Device Disruption: Many common household devices operate in this band. For example, I use Z-Wave devices for home automation. The proposal could render these devices inoperable, forcing consumers to replace expensive equipment and potentially reducing the availability of affordable smart home technologies.
3. Unlicensed Innovation: The 902-928 MHz band has fostered significant innovation in unlicensed devices. Restricting this spectrum could stifle future developments in IoT, smart cities, and other emerging technologies that rely on license-free operation.
4. Inadequate Protection for Incumbents: NextNav's vague assurances about working with incumbents are insufficient. The proposal lacks specific, enforceable protections for existing users, including amateurs and Part 15 devices.
5. Potential Windfall Concerns: The proposed "spectrum swap" appears to grant NextNav significantly more valuable spectrum rights without clear public interest benefits. This raises concerns about equitable spectrum management.
6. Alternative Solutions: The Commission should explore alternative methods to support PNT systems that don't involve disrupting a heavily used and innovative spectrum band.
I urge the Commission to reject this proposal and maintain the current diverse ecosystem in the 902-928 MHz band, which supports amateur radio, consumer devices, and technological innovation.
Respectfully submitted,
[Your Name]
Amateur Radio Operator, [Your Call Sign]
I think transparency actually gives the benefits that neutrality claims. Everything I think and do has bias, I will (as best I can) tell you what my biases are and let you evaluate that how you will.
> in Europe it operates at the 868-869 MHz band while in North America the band varies from 908-916 MHz when Z-Wave is operating as a mesh network and 912-920 MHz when Z-Wave is operating with a star topology in Z-Wave LR mode.
So there definitely would be overlap in North America.
This suggests they'd leave 915 alone?
They're requesting more than half of that space.
I have a basement full of Ricochet hardware that operates across the whole band, and it occasionally proves useful for data links that're tricky in other ways. It'd all be junk if this goes through.