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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

You don't buy exclusivity for emergency services? What if a local congestion event degrades signal to the extent things stop working? This also demands all of the volunteer fire and emergency and rural fire and emergency recapitalise their radio investment. I would worry the exact thing that causes this is mass widespread "get online and check on aunty jennie" flash mob effects when emergency comms is most needful.

I am probably putting up some FUD argument here. But, I think this should be a contestable line of reasoning. I'd like to hear from some hams, or other spectrum users before I got with this. (I am neither, cell and wifi aside)

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I think that reserving bands for meteorology, Radio navigation, radio location, critical services (maritime mobile, time signal), science (space research), amateur radio, and microwaves is a very good idea. But if you were to redesign the allocations from scratch with modern technology, you could probably clear up a whole lot of spectrum.

On the other hand, how bad is congestion in practice anyways? Sure it's congested, but rarely to the point where it's unusable.

I don't think we need to clear out all of the spectrum from 100khz to 100ghz. If we doubled unlicensed spectrum around 2.4ghz, 5ghz, and 6ghz, we'd solve 90% of our congestion issues at the cost of barely any spectrum. Overhauling the entire electromagnetic spectrum allocations would cost millions of dollars of replacing devices; just throwing a bit more at wifi bands would cheaply solve most issues.

Define ‘unusable’?

If you assume it’s a smooth degradation where it goes from 50MB/s to 100kb/s, yeah, that’s rare. It is often ‘nothing at all’ for a second or two.

And that is unusable for a lot of things. Or at least infuriating.

Why does amateur radio make the list?

It seems like a fun hobby, but they could probably have just as much fun without an exclusive band for them.

We just got a whole bunch of new radios for fire brigade in our state. Every radio has a SIM and fails over to the public cell network if the primary (licensed) network is unavailable.

Which ironically is one of the first networks to fail when we have widespread storms etc.

Could the idea be to use satellite cellular as that becomes more commonplace?

The cell network is much more reliable than typical emergency comms, especially when you factor in ‘radio shadows’, etc.

Or at least will be out at different times/ways.

Oh, unless there is a major disaster, but those are rare.

A lot of money goes into building the cell network.

I don't know. Seems like where I live the cell network is about as reliable as power. Its why I switched to starlink as at least that stays up/comes back quickly during storms.

> Seems like where I live the cell network is about as reliable as power.

Power is extremely reliable in most places I've lived. But I guess you are in the middle of nowhere?

Not really. I live in the suburbs. We get a lot of thunderstorms, tornados and hurricanes here (southeast).

> get online and check on aunty jennie

I wonder if it's still an issue: checking aunt Jennie with text or audio is nowhere comparable in terms of data to checking 2K video news or scrolling tiktok for FOMO. Yes there was cutoffs during mass events in 2010', our 2g/3g infra couldn't keep up with people calling each others, and sure the network is faster now. However the next WTC will be another level if we all live-video check aunty Jenny. It seems way too few people understand (as other said) the bandwidth is not an infinite ressource.

And don't start me with ads bloating most website rendering them unusable on a low speed network. I have the chance to live in Europe and the cookie banner is a neat warning of a cumbersome website.

We used to do check news with channels' cable TV and radio (grandpa' grumble) and there was no "network problem".

I have some doubts about the efficacy of spectrum allocated per device class/manufacturer. This in itself is not a congestion management mechanism, although some vendors probably treat it as such. The majority of applications probably benefits from more available spectrum and cheaper devices based on COTS components.

Spectrum dedicated to individual users in specific areas is a different matter. I expect that there will always be use cases for this, for backhaul, backup links etc.

Was waiting for this response...

It's a long game. Yeah, we can't just say "fuck it, everyone go nuts" tomorrow. There are satellite downlinks that cant be readily changed, equipment capex that needs to depreciate etc. What we should be doing is adding and expanding ISM space as aggressively as we reasonably can and refusing to issue new exclusive licenses without an extremely good reason (and probably exclusively for public/civil purposes).

Do we really need to allow Industrial use of RF across the whole spectrum though?

Maybe we need a new definition of public use at “reasonable EIRP” without the industrial heating and whatever other weird uses of RF are out there.

The caveat should be (as it's always been) only radiate as much as you actually need to, and not having/buying sufficient shielding is not an acceptable "need to" argument. Microwaves share spectrum with WiFi but unless something is horribly wrong turning on a microwave doesn't jam every wifi access point within a mile.

I agree though, reasonable EIRP is something we need to talk about. For instance, there should probably be more of a logarithmic equation for calculating an EIRP alternative that allows more effective power in beam forming systems but to a sane limit. In other words, don't handicap people trying to be responsible with where they send signals but that doesn't mean you can build an absolute laser of an antenna array and start screaming at satellites coming over the hill behind your receiver.

This I can get behind.

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