Wi-Fi “as free as air” – totally false story
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1. The advertising-supported media model is broken.
2. People on the internet are distressingly credulous.
3. There is a huge pent-up demand in the US for a next-generation communications network at reasonable cost. Somehow we can do long distance phone service for a low monthly flat rate, and have done for ~20 years, but you can't get moderate speed consumer internet service in a major metro for less than about $65/month.
For the UK to call the US is 28.95 cents a min, plus a 20 cent connection charge.
For me to call from my local telco (CenturyLink) here to the UK is 7 cent a min to landlines, or 26 cents per min for mobiles.
I know LD resellers from which I could get even lower rates, this is just incombent to incombent.
That said, one thing Europe does beat us on is footprint, only a very small percentage here has real broadband access (sat access doesnt count). But that is the nature of the differences in population density.
Not to mention that bandwidth doesn't 'roll-over.'
One approach would be to unbundle internet from premium bandwidth services offered by the same company over the same channel. Suppose the US was organized with a tier of companies competing to offer you cheap, reliable bandwidth, and a tier of companies competing to offer you premium services riding atop that bandwidth. Other countries have a model similar to this, and they generally have much better bandwidth services. In the US, we're tied to legacy investments in carrier infrastructure that make moving to such a system very difficult.
Personally, I think we should just pay them off and start fresh. Unfortunately, that ends up basically looking like nationalization, which in the US is extremely difficult politically.
Actually if the Government broke up the monopolies that have a stranglehold on connection points and wires to the homes -- competition would sort everything out without a bunch of needless Government bureaucracy creating huge unintended consequences.
Cognitive radio offers the potential for large increases in data capacity since the radio spectrum is currently underutilised. I was at a conference a few years ago, where a presenter had done the measurements, and the utilisation of the radio spectrum (averaged across time and frequency) was about 5%. It turns out that most licensees hardly, if ever, transmit.
There's currently a regulatory push to allow others to use a chunk of spectrum, as long as they don't interfere with the licensee, meaning the licensee gets guaranteed access, rather than exclusive access. It should be interesting, since it will open the (cheaper?) alternative of buying smarter radios instead of buying spectrum.
The first problem can be mitigated by making the sensing receiver significantly more powerful than the transmitter, although you still have issues with specific terrain layouts (e.g. something big and RF-attenuating between you and the transmitter). The second problem makes it very difficult to interoperate with existing licensees (who assume exclusive use of the spectrum); it may be possible to make it work better with new licensees.
There is another interesting approach to cognitive radio, which is to use a centralised database of spectrum allocation, and then use RF propagation models & surveys to find gaps in space & frequency where you can let people transmit - for example, there are big gaps between terrestrial TV transmitter zones, to avoid the multi-kW transmitters interfering with each other, where you can easily fit "big WiFi"-style transmitters transmitting at a few watts.
Obviously, there are a number of issues here (need GPS or an accurate location on installation, need internet access for the DB, need to restrict movement, inefficient without really good RF models, weather affecting RF propagation) which make this less of a panacea than sensing-based cognitive radio, but it is relatively simple and robust to implement. In particular, a lot of the issues disappear if you use it for "big WiFi" applications - access points already have a fixed location, internet access, and mains power.
It also opens the possibility of a much more dynamic marketplace for spectrum - if all spectrum users are checking with a centralised DB (at least in a particular band), then it becomes much easier to handle short-term/local licenses - for example, providing massive short-term additional cell/wifi service to big events and festivals.
tl;dr Cognitive radio is a very interesting and promising development, but it's much harder than initial intuition suggests.
First, only primary sources should be cited. If an article is written by a news source, it stands to reason that is is not suitable for citation by another news source. They are both at the same level of empiricism, one cannot be an adequate citation for another.
And second, the exchange of data has not changed drastically in the says since the story was first reported, so this isn't an internet speed issue. It's an issue of people being less pliable to the truth once they've hit upon a wonderful fallacy.
What that translates to is that news articles need to be less sensationalized, more factual and have a much more rigorous set of criteria for what's true and what's not.
I'm not a journalist, but I wouldn't be surprised if journalists deliberately look for what can be sensationalized in a potential story, to the point of unintentionally fabricating material - it is not inconceivable that a reporter simply skimmed some material about the FCC and then this story hit him like a "Eureka!" moment. I doubt it was fully intentional, it was just being caught up in the prospect of a great story.
For this to be possible, we need much more dense modulation than we currently have, and a wide block of spectrum. I really believe for urban areas the future is mesh, ala Ricochet (even using some of the same methods), which means cells that extend over a 1-3 block radius and extremely fast/wide backhaul, the backhaul needs to be automatic and self healing, wireline backhaul from anything more then every other 3-5 sites breaks the cost quotient. High Sites wont work in any event, you could deploy something in rural areas looking more like the cell phone network - but again, to enable reuse, you need a really wide block of spectrum.
In either case, be it mesh, or cell site like things, these have to be engineered networks, you cant just throw it up and expect it to work. Also, the chance for great financial success as a commerical entity is low, see Ricochet and Clearwire.
I'm no RF expert, but couldn't you decrease power to increase cell density?
That said, for universal wireless anything, you need a considerable block of spectrum. Consider that between T-Mobile/Sprint/Clearwire/AT&T/Verizon in the Seattle market, they hold something like 400+ mhz of spectrum. To provide this kind of service, you would need a similar (though not as large) block of spectrum. If you just looked at LTE or WiMax, to roll out a nationwide footprint, you would need something like 250 mhz of spectrum, and that includes backhaul pairs, and this is to provide enough carriers per site that most people could get a 'similar to cable internet experience'.
There isnt 250 mhz of spectrum (other than the huge swaths the government has held for itself) in the bands that are useful for both rural and urban environments.
People apparently want this so badly that they'll believe anything.
Now that's journalism.
Even worse is that some sites tried to just copy and paste from other sites and change a bit to look original, and ended reporting wrong (invented) facts.
No surprise here.
Notice that the "old media" in the article are the ones that refuse to correct incorrect reporting. At this point, the only people continuing to subscribe to their publications can't be driven off with a stick. Their revenue will finally go dry when their subscribers succumb to old age.
It took me about three passes to understand this sentence. A comma would have helped.
Excluding lobbying from telcos, is there any reason that the FCC hasn't already done this?
Probably switch those two, and you'd be dead on.
At the municipal level, though, things seem to run more smoothly and the amount of tax waste seems to be less. Keep the Feds out other than to provide the bandwidth, IMO.