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>I just don't understand how the FCC can justify just giving away spectrum forever to the first person to ask.

Strong agree, which is why they've traditionally licensed transmitters at specific sites. The coordination of use of a limited resource is the proper role of the FCC.

>They should instead hold an auction...

Strong disagree. Any auction is a tax, that gets increased and passed along to users. The whole idea of making a "profit" from the airwaves is a premature (and evil) optimization.

Part of a broadcast license should be expanded to include operating a timing and navigation beacon, supplied and maintained by the government, which transmits precision timing (via local atomic clock(s)) and thus can be coordinated with others to measure position. This should also apply to all cell sites.

Also, the shutdown of ground based navaids by the FAA should be reversed as much as possible. Full ground coverage in the event of a GPS loss should be maintained.




> Any auction is a tax, that gets increased and passed along to users.

The FCC is a cost center. Enforcement costs needs money which comes from taxes (auction or income). So to me it's a wash regardless of where the money comes from.

The market is the most efficient form of pricing a scarce resource (bandwidth in this case) so it makes sense that an auction is the appropriate way to sell it.


The market has been such an efficient form of allocating spectrum that WiFi et al. in the few blocks for public use push the vast majority of bits out there, while the other 70% of precious spectrum we sold to companies for exclusive use nickel and dime you on the gigabyte. Great fucking success story that is.

They even have the audacity to make up things like "WiFi calling" that push you to the public spectrum while still charging you. The market really figured that one trick out.


For some bands, the opportunity for abuse is low because it's only allowed to be used at low power or for voice or other limitations that don't scale up much. But cellphone data has more demand than the spectrum can provide. If they didn't charge users, some people would try to hog all of it and ruin it for everyone. Same goes for broadcast radio transmission. Access has to be restricted somehow. If not by payment, then probably something that makes less efficient use of it like non-transferrable first-in-first-served or lottery.


Wouldn't this lead to a spectrum monopoly and the death of family radios, home wifi, etc.?

The market may be "efficient", but I don't want my radio regulator to optimize for cost alone, rather for balancing a variety of different needs, ranges, and durations like they are now.


First, I would argue we haven't efficiently used the bandwidth at all. In many places you'll find large swaths of bandwidth not being used at the moment. This gets particularly more pronounced at night.

E.g. Why can't I use FM frequencies that aren't being used in the area for my personal use of a few hundred feet? Why can't I use the frequencies the local car dealership is using after 6pm when they've closed for the night?


I'd agree with that, and wish we could phase out many of the old analog frequencies and relicense them for use with more efficient digital encodings.


Digital encodings are analog down deep under everything, and often they are far, FAR less reliable when you don't have 20 dB+ s/(s+n). Analog at least degrades in a fairly transparent and predictable manner. Many public service departments across the country are giving up their old "vhf" channels... and then regretting it when the new UHF digital stuff just doesn't work half the time.


Almost any channel adaptive digital encoding (ie. where the sender gets feedback from the receiver about how much data is successfully arriving) will end up sending more useful data than any analogue scheme in any conditions.

Super weak voice channel where you can barely make out any words? That same channel, with the same transmit power, will get a decent telephone quality digital voice down, as long as you use modern low bitrate audio encoding. And it would send pages of text per second if you can handle typing not speaking.


FT8 I think is a great example of low power digital working well.

It's not huge amounts of data or traffic, but it seems to be fairly reliable.


I see. Thanks for the input!


Also, there should be no reserve price. If just one person bids, then rent it to them for a dollar.

Then the outcome becomes effectively the same as the current "just ask nicely" system, whilst there aren't many people wanting to use the bandwidth.




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