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FCC Behind On 3G Wireless Network 33

Posted by Hemos from the get-with-the-program dept.
dinosaur writes "This Week The US Federal Communications Commission failed to meet a deadline schedule proposed in October by President Clinton on the rules for identifying additional airwaves for the deployment of third-generation high-speed wireless services. Mark Rubin, FCC Wireless Bureau spokesman, said the proposed rules should be released this week. The FCC expects a final report and interim studies on the third-generation airwaves by March 1, 2001. The New York Times has a story on it (lamerator reg required) while NewsBytes hs another summary without the registration required."
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FCC Behind On 3G Wireless Network More

FCC Behind On 3G Wireless Network

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  • 3G is the ISDN of wireless data. Highly touted, sounds good on paper, sucks in comparison to the other options.

    Ricochet [ricochet.com] is faster, not dependent on FCC approval, and currently working. 3G is...well...coming soon...probably.

    Yours truly,
    Mr. X

    ...3G needs a bit more thought...
  • Umm why does a T1 cost 20-40 times more than DSL? DSL is also more than twice as fast?
  • Okay! :)

    I thought 2.4GHz was S-band, though? I remember they used to use 2.somethingGHz as radar for catching speeders in the 60's or 70's, and it was S-band. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, though; I can't remember the article exactly. (I think it was in Car & Driver a while back.)

    --
  • Simply said: To monopolise you. Most of the 'Bells' do that. AT&T was a monopoly at one time, untill the government stepped in on it. I don't bother with it because I havn't had any problems with cable.

  • The protocol for 3G wireless devices is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) [columbia.edu]. 3G Wireless promises 2Mbps transfer rates which is well enough for live 2-way video feeds.
  • Firstly don't forget the inverse square law. The power of a transmitter goes down as the square of the distance. For an omni it is the cube.

    The power of a basestation is not that much more than that of a mobile. In engineering a mobile system it is critical to tune the reception of the up-link signal. So transmitting at high powers is useless, just increases interference and reduces frequency reuse. There are much larger sources of non-ionising radiation around, eg power lines.

    The only area that has been raised that MAY be a concern is the pulsed nature of TDMA transmissions. This is not an issue with basestations as they transmit continuously. At the moment nothing has been proved, nor any mechanism shown for how this could work..

    Here are a few links for further reading:

    The World Health Organizations agenda for EMF research priorities [slashdot.org] The WHO International EMF Project list of research priorities needed in advance of the formal health risk assessments in 2003 and 2004. EMF research being supported by the GSM Association and the MMF [slashdot.org] The Association and the Mobile Manufacturers Forum are working to address EMF research priorities identified by the WHO. Report of the UK Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones In May 2000 [slashdot.org], an expert panel led by Professor Sir William Stewart released its report with extensive recommendations that need careful review. Study in Journal of American Medical Association - 20/12/2000 [slashdot.org] Dr Muscat et al conclude that "the use of handheld cellular telephones was unrelated to the risk of brain cancer in the current study." Study in New England Journal of Medicine - 19/12/2000 [slashdot.org] The authors conclude that "These data do not support the hypothesis that the recent use of hand-held cellular telephones causes brain tumors, but they are not sufficient to evaluate the risks among long-term, heavy users and for potentially long induction periods."

  • Real problem is past decisions haunting them (Score:3)

    by nosilA ( 8112 ) on Thursday January 04, 2001 @10:10AM (#531225)
    A few months ago I heard Reed Hundt (FCC chairman from 93-97) give a talk, and a lot of it focused on 3g wireless and ATV (HDTV) spectrum. The real problem here is he made a big mistake in granting the ATV spectrum, and for free no less, with very little incentive for the conventional TV stations to vacate their old spectrum until AT LEAST 2006. This is part of why the FCC refuses to create "open access" laws for cable, or why they refuse to regulate content on HDTV. They now realize it is better to not regulate until the technology develops.

    This spectrum is ideal for reaching indoors and as such is extremely valuable, however the push to get ATV was stronger than 3G wireless, and that's how it went.

    The problem with the FCC is that they have to make decisions long before they know if the technology is viable - long before the industry has done market surveys, long before the technology has been invented. True, the FCC makes a lot of decisions based on deep pockets and power, but they really are trying to fulfill the "public interest, convenience and necessity" in their spectrum allocation.

    Think back to the 70's. Computers were only in a few research institutions. You wanted to develop a numbering system and hierarchy that would be simultaneously sufficient and not wasteful. So Here is the birth of 32 bit addressing. 30 years later we realize it isn't so easy to switch over to 128bit while maintaining the 32 bit infrastrucure (I know I'm simplifying the problem a bit, but the idea is the same). These geniuses 30 years ago came up with a great system, but they had no idea what would happen in the next 30 years.

    The FCC dug a hole for themselves in the past 5-15 years with spectrum allocation. Add to that the fact that FCC chairmen and commissioners last usually 4 years, and then a whole new breed come in and mess things up again. And add that the commissioners are lawyers, not engineers. And they need to be both.

    It sucks that the FCC messed up with the whole ATV thing, and I'm sure whoever Bush appoints will take care of the problem for better or for worse, but they are trying their hardest not to make the same mistakes they have in the past.

    -Alison

  • Not the only FCC delay. (Score:3)

    by AFCArchvile ( 221494 ) on Thursday January 04, 2001 @08:18AM (#531226)
    The FCC still hasn't increased the output limit so that 56K modems can actually operate at 56K. And they've had almost three years to do that! Furthermore, they've turned a blind eye to the DSL industry, essentially giving Pacific Hell, Southwestern Hell, and Derision free reign over the DSL market, allowing them to stand in the way of paying customers and bog down competing ISPs who do a much more responsible job as an ISP than the baby bells themselves.

    What's that? You don't care about the DSL woes because your T1/T3 is doing just fine? Then maybe you should think about how the baby bells are keeping their prices high while other ISPs are offering $900 to $2500 per month for a T1. However, you still have to go through a baby bell to get the T1/T3 line.

    I'll put it this way: if the baby bells can't give a soccer mom a decent Internet connection without fouling up somewhere, then why trust them with a high-speed, high-cost connection to your servers?

  • I still get a login request going to that link
    --
  • It is a shame the the FCC is unable to allocate the 1800 and 900 MHZ bands to GSM like the rest of the world. I guess it would be too costly to move the existing stuff out of those bands. It would be nice to have a single phone that worked everywhere in the world that wasn't like a sextet band phone.

    FoonDog
  • The biggest reason is a T1 guaranteed to run at T1 speeds. DSL isn't. In fact, the max speed the phone company has to guarantee over DSL is 0Kbps.
  • Without the pesky registration can be found here [nytimes.com]
  • here [cnet.com] they even have a update that is not on the nytimes page yet.
  • A big problem for 3G in the US is the difficulty in getting rid of bandwidth-wasteful analog TV, especially in the UHF band. For instance, see this article [coxnews.com].

    It is my opinion that the FCC should auction ALL bandwidth in a "dark fiber" mode with no restrictions on modulation or protocol, as long as you stay within your band. For the more progressive minded, perhaps the FCC should only auction rental bandwidth, with a new auction every 1-5 years.
  • I'll put it this way: if the baby bells can't give a soccer mom a decent Internet connection without fouling up somewhere, then why trust them with a high-speed, high-cost connection to your servers?

    Err, there are other options including (but not limited to) MCI, Sprint, GlobalOne, GlobalCrossing, 360 degree Networks, etc.

    What's that? You don't care about the DSL woes because your T1/T3 is doing just fine? Then maybe you should think about how the baby bells are keeping their prices high while other ISPs are offering $900 to $2500 per month for a T1. However, you still have to go through a baby bell to get the T1/T3 line.

    To be honest this is the dumbest post I've ever read about telco pricing, let me tell you that if you take a medium to large city, deploy fiber (Let's say 6 30 Km rings) plus the necessary SONET equipment, ATM switches, IMA concentrators plus the outside copper plant and you've got yourself an investment around $60 million, now depreciate the equipment over 5 years and add the oretain and maintenance costs and you'll see why a T1 costs as much as it does, at least with Cable and DSL you can oversubscribe and recoup the investment faster which means a lower price.

    Oh, BTW the 53K limit is in place so you can actually use the other wires (The ones next to yours in the neighborhood FXB) for other forms of communication without cross-interference.

  • The spectrum allocation in the US is a knotty problem as the 1900MHz band that most of the rest of the world has adopted has been allocated for PCS networks. Perhaps an advantage to Voicestreem and Bell South GSM operators to integrate 3G into their existing spectrum

    Perhaps this is behind another interesting development, AT&T seem to be going down the GSM route to 3G according to this [totaltele.com] article in Communications Week (Registration required) Here is a summary for those who can't get there:

    AT&T's decision to build out quickly a GSM overlay network on top of its existing network of time division multiple access (TDMA) basestations has swung the balance of competing wireless technologies in North America.

    The decision by the third biggest cellular service provider in the United States - with 15 million subscribers - to adopt GSM systems after all as the platform for developing third generation high-speed mobile data, has fired industry analysts with expectation that the European-backed standard could now become a leader in the U.S. market.

  • Who cares about Clinton! I finished setting up my own wireless networking in my house 5 minutes ago! Now I can place a computer in any room and have a cable net connection without laying down CAT-5 cable! Woohoo!

    Blow me away with Offtopic mod points, I don't care! I'm so happy I pulled this shit off (with a router and everything-- schweet!)

  • You forgot to mention their coverage.
    http://www.ricochet.com/about_us/coverage_maps/i nd ex.html

    Puke! Their speeds are only 128kbps, which is the lowest of the 3G protocols.

    Plus, the biggest advantage of 3G is that most carriers actually seem eager to embrace it, which means that we could actually have a unified wireless system.
  • What if someone created a website, say, www.nytimesneedstogrowup.com and when someone wanted to go to:

    www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_0_4_4347578_00.html

    They would type in:

    www.nytimesneedstogrowup.com/cnet/CNET_0_4_43475 78 _00.html

    and software would create a fake persona (the software is already there, check freshmeat), auto-register, and log the user into the page. This would be seamless for the user.

    Not only would this skip the annoyance, it would fill up the Times database with imaginary people.

    -Jeff

  • They will avoid 2.4 GHz, not because of the resonant frequency of water (Which it is NOT, check this link). When the frequency was chosen for microwave ovens, they chose 2.45 GHz because they knew that it would interfere with other forms of communication, and they wanted to keep the interferers all in one (relatively unused at the time) place. Enough RF at virtually any frequency will heat things.

    Man, I'm a moderator right now, and I was sooo tempted to mod you down for being so far off base. However, I figured replying instead, to straighten things out, would be the more mature thing to do. So here goes:

    When 2450MHz was selected in the 70's for microwave ovens, it was because it was a frequency that made water molecules vibrate really well. It's this vibration that causes them to heat up, which heats up the whole product. This is precisely why microwave ovens take a LONG time to heat items with very little water (puff pastry by itself, for example). It had nothing to do with interfering with things. True, early microwave ovens leaked quite a bit of RF, but nothing else transmitted at or immediately around 2450MHz, so it didn't matter whether or not they spewed RF because there was nothing else being broadcast at that frequency for them to interfere with.

    For example, here's a choice snippet from the very link you quote:

    Waves of that frequency penetrate well into foods of reasonable size so that the heating is relatively uniform throughout the foods. Since leakage from these ovens makes the radio spectrum near 2.45 GHz unusable for communications, the frequency was chosen in part because it would not interfere with existing communication systems.

    2450MHz wasn't in use, and it worked well, so they chose it. Period.

    End of lecture, class.

    --
  • Whoops, looks like they 'fixed' the 'partners' link. Worked when I checked it...
  • True you absorb more surface energy by the sun than that of a cell, however what of the small and minute damage that is done over time internaly. Remember your eyes are made up of a lot of water, and the brain is very sensitive to RF damage. I know I work in the Cell industry and around microwave radio sites. Also what of the cell sites? AMPS (Analog) sites regularly put out 40-60 wats out of the transmitter and have about 30-40 watts at the the antenna. PCS CDMA systems put out like 15-20 watts at the antenna. Now with Cell sites being stealthed a lot to where it's almost impossible to know where they are, it get's scarry. I know Sprint PCS has taken houses, gutted them and built a cell site in them, in the middle of a residential neighborhood! They have also made sites out of a corner appartment, then they take the remainder and turn it into living spaces. I used to work 8 feet below a three sector site, and I always felt sick and tired, everyone in that room is sick all the time, since I left that room I feel better. Coincidence, probably not.
  • The point I was trying to make was that there is nothing magic about 2.4 GHz. RF works pretty well at heating things at many different frequencies. The article I did point to mentioned that 2.4 GHz is far below any resonance for water- the first resonance of water (vapor) is at about 22 GHz. There are industrial RF heating ovens that use 900 MHz. If you want to avoid RF heating of your head, you have to keep virtually any device that generates RF away from it. On the other hand, these devices are very limited in power, so the actual heating that they do is minimal.

    I did a bit of research on the damage that RF can do to living tissue, and the only verifiable damaging effect is localized heating, and that is a factor of average power that hits the tissue. (I was working with a high peak power radar at the time, and very concerned.)

    There are other reasons for 2.45 GHz beyond communications- the magnetron for it is a comfortable size, not too big to fit in a household device, not too small as to be hard to manufacture.

    That frequency *was* in use, just not by many commercial devices- it is at the high end of L-Band, which was used in the 70's for radar (for sure) and satellite communication (I think).
  • The U.S. Goverment setting deadlines on itself....Now THAT is something that is bound to fail from the beginning...

    Blake
  • is here [nytimes.com] use and abuse it.
  • Who expected this on time? It's funny, whenever the govt gets involved in the "next generation" of technologies, it usually ends up completing the paperwork shorlty after the technology has been made obsolete.

    Your tax dollars at work

  • Okay, where's the link to the times article that doesn't require registration?
    They always seem to pop up, how do you guys get that anyway?
    --
  • Unfortunately, yes. I'm STILL waiting for my DSL to be prepared (58 days and counting), so I'm on a 56K right now. When you first buy a computer, unless you scheduled the DSL/Cable modem a month in advance, you'll have to use the modem. And with some DSL providers (Verizon, Telocity, and Pacific Bell, to name a few), the DSL connection is so bogged down due to improper routing, that people would rather use their analog modem than trudge through the 23Kbps/1Kbps connection of their pathetic DSL ISP.

  • How can be best screw the average Americans? (Score:3)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Thursday January 04, 2001 @08:28AM (#531247)
    FCC Bigwig A: Hmmm... we haven't yet worked enough rules in to make sure that only large business and corporations can get access to the 3G specturm.

    FCC Bigwig B: That's a problem! I know, we can do what they did with the internet and create a 'Non-profit Coporation to do our dirty work for us!

    Bigwig A: We'll call it 'Gigahurts Solutions'. What's better about having it privatized is that in disputes between corporations and individuals, the corporations will come out on top because they have more money to grease palms with!

    Bigwig B: Speaking of which, how's new your 'complimentary' summer home in the keys?

    Bigwig A: Almost completed! How about your kids' 'scholarships' to Yale and Harvard.

    Bigwig B: Billy's grades aren't that great, but I can just make another 'donation' to take care of that!


  • I haven't kept up on what spectrum is going to be used, but I very much hope they avoid 2.4gig as it is the resonant frequency of water... ya I really want a microwave oven next to my head that is unsheielded.... ;-)

    Then at the same time I really hope they use something like CDMA as the air interface when they have spectrum...
  • They will avoid 2.4 GHz, not because of the resonant frequency of water (Which it is NOT, check this link [virginia.edu]). When the frequency was chosen for microwave ovens, they chose 2.45 GHz because they knew that it would interfere with other forms of communication, and they wanted to keep the interferers all in one (relatively unused at the time) place. Enough RF at virtually any frequency will heat things.

    There are other frequencies used for heating things, they are in what is called ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) bands. These bands are a bit more "anything goes" than other frequencies. The FCC rules are in this hefty tome [fcc.gov]. I'll leave it up to you to find the applicable parts. That's why Bluetooth and 802.11 work in the 2.4 GHz region. They have more free reign for what you can do, but you also have to accept interference without complaint.
  • This Week The US Federal Communications Commission failed to meet a deadline schedule proposed in October by President Clinton
    He's a lameduck now so it doesn't matter what he says anymore. That is why they didn't meet the deadline.
  • As you approach the 2.4GHz water absorption frequency the range of mobiles goes down considerably because of absorption by water in the atmosphere. Hence the range of a 900Mhz phone is considerably larger than an 1800MHz one at the same power. But at the moment in most countries this is an advantage as capacity is more of an issue that range. The lower range of 1800MHz means smaller cells so more channels in a given area and also more channel reuse (the nearest cell that can use the same channel without interference).

    The warming effect is NOT a problem standing in the sun you will absorb many times the thermal energy given off by a mobile even transmitting at maximum power of 0.25 Watts

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