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Animats

This is up at 17 GHz. It's not the attempt to take over the 900MHz ISM band.

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Same.

There's plenty of spectrum available. For purchase. Contact T-Mobile or Verizon.

The biggest mistake the FCC made was using spectrum to maximize revenue and not value for taxpayer.

Yep. Spectrum should be allocated based on Harberger taxation (sometimes called self-assesed tax)

Maybe there is a way to force them to release unused spectrum for free?

There is a way, which is through buildout enforcement. Basically, if you don't meet buildout deadlines and cover x% of pops within a specific time period, you forfeit the license. It should probably be a lot more stringent and with tighter deadlines, but the mechanism already exists.

It hasn't ever really been an issue with any spectrum that they've bought in the past, and it has only ever been a concern with mmWave spectrum, because the costs of coverage are much higher than were ever anticipated with their tiny effective ranges. Anything below 3GHz seems to get built out and used extremely quickly.

> There is a way, which is through buildout enforcement.

LOL, DISH squatted nationwode spectrum for years and it wasn't until the tmo/sprint merger that they did more than build a single tower in Colorado. I don't think I've ever seen the FCC seriously enforce the buildout requirements since any license holder can say 'but its hard we need more time/money'

I think of the 20B+ the shambling humonculus AT&T has pocketed for fiber deployment and think the process is captured.

> if you don't meet buildout deadlines and cover x% of pops within a specific time period, you forfeit the license

The issue you have to surmount is this reduces the value of the licenses in the short run. Which means less cash for the seller (the public) now versus a recurring productive asset.

The useless response is to decry hyperbolic discounting. A productive response would think through how to design the auction such that the public would prefer to have the productive, recurring stream of revenue versus some shiny thing today.

> The issue you have to surmount is this reduces the value of the licenses in the short run. Which means less cash for the seller (the public) now versus a recurring productive asset.

Well, that assumes the public isn't really benefiting from the products and services that can actually take advantage of that spectrum. Making less in license fees is probably a good trade-off if your phone is faster or you get interesting and affordable satellite services.

Dish I think is sitting on a bunch with endless extensions

Or force regular auctions on them.

(Maybe this is already the case, idk)

Sure. Tax it like any other property.

What other properties get taxed? Real estate is the only one I can think of. Precious metals, musical instruments, patents / copyrights / trademarks, vehicles, electronics, lumber. . . none of these properties are taxed.

Slight correction cars are typically taxed. Usually in 3 different ways. Fuel, property and tag. Now not all states call it a tax. Not all states have all 3.

I’ve never seen property tax on a car. What states have that? And EV’s don’t typically pay a fuel tax, which wouldn’t be a property tax anyway. Registration/tag is certainly not a property tax.

There’s a difference between taxing ownership of a property and taxing activities you use the property for. The latter includes things like fishing licenses, but nobody would say there’s a property tax on fishing rods.

NC has property tax on cars. It is different from state to state what is in or out or what they call it.

I about had a heart attack before I clicked on it and realized that.

Wait until Apple puts 17ghz receivers in their iPhones

Is that feasible in an iPhone? Could an iPhone with just one more radio become a sat phone?

They can already send texts over satellite so probably pretty feasible. Idk though

It's much harder at higher frequencies because you need to point your antenna more accurately. That's pretty hard to do by hand on a phone.

Alternatively, the aperture of the antenna on the satellite can be increased. So high-gain from space, but low gain on Earth, which is the approach of AST SpaceMobile.

How is that not one way communication?

https://www.starlink.com/gb/business/direct-to-cell

They already have 30 GHz hardware (for 5G mmwave)!

I don’t think either spectrum will be feasible for direct to cell satellite communication in the short term, though.

IIRC SpaceMobile showed direct-to-cell satellite communication recently with 5g. Still to be seen if they or someone else (SpaceX?) can make it work large scale.

SpaceX has been launching direct-to-cell satellites for a bit now (a couple per Starlink batch), IIRC they said they need to get to ~300 such satellites to provide consistent service in at least some places. Although, again, worth emphasizing that 'large scale' in this case is still just to provide emergency coverage in places with no other coverage.

So far they have 233 DTC satellites in space, but some are still raising their orbit and not operational yet.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/09/24/live-coverage-spacex-t...

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