The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons.
There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office.
We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd.
On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation.
Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum.
A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis.
Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
>Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical area, and provides the base station and backhaul infrastructure to support their network.
It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room"; it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of that room than T-Mobile does.
The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage and network performance. Sharing spectrum would effectively require mutualization of base station infrastructure. You would effectively have a single monopoly with the networks operating as virtual operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good outcome, to me, at least.
They could share spectrum with different equipment in the same way multiple WiFi routers can share spectrum. The underlying reality is cell networks don’t actually need a lot of spectrum, instead their trading owning a lot of spectrum to reduce the number of cell towers because they aren’t charged the full price of that spectrum. Add some significant property taxes for that spectrum and you bet they would be selling or handing a lot of it back to the public domain.
> That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it?
I think it can be done at the legal layer - just require roaming agreements between providers. They can already roam across borders so there's no technical barrier.
I'd rather the telephone industry spend $1 on hardware than see them spend $1 on license fees.
The story now is "$80 billion in license fees" and "$20 billion in hardware" and that seems the wrong way around -- when most folks play poker the stakes are supposed go up, not down.
The money is made up! The FCC could sell spectrum for pennies, or give it away, or restrict access to The Right People, or wash their hands of it, or do another auction. They've done all of these things at various points. The license fees are made up.
The way it's now done, will put the spectrum there, where there's the most value. However the result is that it's actually a tax which the consumer will indirectly pay.
> The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons.
That’s the spin.
Yes, the FCC is the steward. But it’s also a bureaucratic, underfunded, somewhat backwards agency.
SIGINT is pretty cool, and FCC has some cool things and people that interact with them, I’m sure. But the outward face of FCC and how they appear to operate seems to have hardly changed in past years. I respect that typically, but it’s like an old bowling alley kind of respect; it’s fun, but it’s old and dirty, and the nachos aren’t bad but they aren’t good. The Lysol sprayed in those shoes is for psychological comfort. You don’t need to know the real reason.
All licenseholders should add up their transmitted joules of energy at the end of the year and pay the FCC. It will be in everyone's best interests to make most efficient use of the spectrum because then they can get their information to its destination with fewer joules.
Devices like home wifi routers should be able to buy upfront a license for X number of joules/year, and the cost of that is included in the purchase price of your router/laptop.
There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office.
We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd.
On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation.
Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum.
A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis.
Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.