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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand how the FCC can justify just giving away spectrum forever to the first person to ask.

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.

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So all the tech you bought fails when the company doesn’t renew? Although uk works on auctions and they work.

Perhaps combine with restrictions on use - if you don’t use the spectrum, or use more than you need, it gets taken away

nearly all wireless devices in your home use unlicensed spectrum (2.4 Ghz wifi, bluetooth, ISM for car remotes, etc).

Licensed spectrum is nearly always used by subscription services - eg. your cell phone service.

> Nothing should be given away forever. Not even the 2.4 Ghz wifi band

Given this line, how exactly is this response a defense of your original comment?

I get the impression from their wording that the licensed and unlicensed bands would have different thresholds and rules.

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.

Victory Coffee and Gin might taste interesting the first time...

>I just don't understand how the FCC can justify just giving away spectrum forever to the first person to ask.

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.

> Any auction is a tax, that gets increased and passed along to users.

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 has been such an efficient form of allocating spectrum that WiFi et al. in the few blocks for public use push the vast majority of bits out there, while the other 70% of precious spectrum we sold to companies for exclusive use nickel and dime you on the gigabyte. Great fucking success story that is.

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.

For some bands, the opportunity for abuse is low because it's only allowed to be used at low power or for voice or other limitations that don't scale up much. But cellphone data has more demand than the spectrum can provide. If they didn't charge users, some people would try to hog all of it and ruin it for everyone. Same goes for broadcast radio transmission. Access has to be restricted somehow. If not by payment, then probably something that makes less efficient use of it like non-transferrable first-in-first-served or lottery.

Wouldn't this lead to a spectrum monopoly and the death of family radios, home wifi, etc.?

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.

First, I would argue we haven't efficiently used the bandwidth at all. In many places you'll find large swaths of bandwidth not being used at the moment. This gets particularly more pronounced at night.

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?

I'd agree with that, and wish we could phase out many of the old analog frequencies and relicense them for use with more efficient digital encodings.

Digital encodings are analog down deep under everything, and often they are far, FAR less reliable when you don't have 20 dB+ s/(s+n). Analog at least degrades in a fairly transparent and predictable manner. Many public service departments across the country are giving up their old "vhf" channels... and then regretting it when the new UHF digital stuff just doesn't work half the time.

Almost any channel adaptive digital encoding (ie. where the sender gets feedback from the receiver about how much data is successfully arriving) will end up sending more useful data than any analogue scheme in any conditions.

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.

FT8 I think is a great example of low power digital working well.

It's not huge amounts of data or traffic, but it seems to be fairly reliable.

I see. Thanks for the input!

Also, there should be no reserve price. If just one person bids, then rent it to them for a dollar.

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.

> Not even the 2.4 Ghz wifi band.

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.

If I were the FCC, I would issue "transmission licenses" valid for 10 years, to anyone who wants one for the unlicensed bands. The license would be a signed digital file shipped on hardware. They would work like let's encrypt - when nearing expiry, your device could auto-renew its license via the internet. It could transmit its license via a wifi beacon packet, allowing other devices to use the license too (with the same expiry time).

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.

From a security angle, I'm not sure that I want to connect every transmitter to the internet if it doesn't have a natural reason to be. It may make sense for a WiFi access point, but if something doesn't need internet connection to function, adding that attack surface comes with a cost.

> Nothing should be given away forever.

Government should auction all property (land plots) every 10 years too?

Some countries kinda do this. Either by the government owning large chunks of the land and renting it to the citizens, or the government having large land taxes, which if unpaid the land reverts to the government.

99 years or 999 years. AKA a leasehold

Those are quite different lengths in practice. 99 is less than some individual humans have lived. 999 is longer than any* country has continuously lived.

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.

Contenders: Denmark, Hungary, China, Czechia, France, England and a bunch of others depending on how you count, like Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Sweden etc.

Nobodys claiming no group of people lived in Denmark, Hungary, China, etc for 999+ years.

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...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Hungary

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China

Yes, we should have a Land Value Tax to replace income tax.

As a government entity they should be optimizing for 'public benefit' not auction revenue. Licenses should be for who can make the best use of the spectrum.

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