“If You’re Not Pissed Off, You’re Not Paying Attention”

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10 points·cnst··3 comments

I am pissed off that the powers that be are still allocating separate spectrum for separate companies. That worked once for analog cell phone service. It doesn't work any more and is wildly inefficient. The present approach is pretty much the same as those stupid proposals to have each possible company run a separate fiber to each building.

Only one company can use a given piece of spectrum in a given territory.

What they should be ensuring, however, is that each piece of spectrum from a given auction is equivalent to the other piece, so that we don't have another situation like the one with 700MHz where LTE Band 12 had to be abandoned due to high-power transmission TV channels, and AT&T got itself a new Band 17 as a subset of Band 12, whereas T-Mobile and the regional carriers ended up having to wait many years until they can finally start using Band 12 fully, and even today many new phones still don't support Band 12, all whilst having full support for the subset in the face of Band 17.

Of course, the problematic part comes in the face of the fact that T-Mobile and other smaller carriers need spectrum NOW or at the very least ASAP, whereas broadcasters are still using most of it, and must be compensated for having to surrender it, or pay extra to continue using it etc, thus the whole thing is a big mess, basically.

>Only one company can use a given piece of spectrum in a given territory.

That's the part I disagree with. In general, last mile infrastructure needs to be shared. The smaller carriers don't need spectrum, they need access to their customers. As it is now they need to either try to strike a deal with a company with a government granted monopoly or they have to get their own monopoly in exchange for a large kickback.

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