US Pledges Work Toward More Airwaves for Wireless Providers Facing Surging 5G Demand (bloomberg.com) 57
The Biden administration on Monday told US agencies to work toward giving up use of some telecommunications airwaves in order to make room for commercial providers facing surging demand for fast 5G services. From a report: The plan, called the National Spectrum Strategy, called for "detailed studies" to be concluded within two years. The document provides for "more transparent, more coordinated" efforts at airwaves management, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said.
"We have to make better use of the airwaves we have," said Alan Davidson, an assistant secretary of commerce who will help lead further steps to fulfill the strategy. Commercial providers have long sought more access to airwaves occupied by US agencies, saying that government uses at times aren't efficient and they should share space with new commercial technologies. Spectrum refers to the array of airwaves that carry everything from voice calls to satellite transmissions to signals for industrial machinery.
"We have to make better use of the airwaves we have," said Alan Davidson, an assistant secretary of commerce who will help lead further steps to fulfill the strategy. Commercial providers have long sought more access to airwaves occupied by US agencies, saying that government uses at times aren't efficient and they should share space with new commercial technologies. Spectrum refers to the array of airwaves that carry everything from voice calls to satellite transmissions to signals for industrial machinery.
Haven't they taken enough bandwidth already? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Broadcast Television has been losing bandwidth for decades. They just went through a re-pack to free up frequencies for 5G, and now they want even more?
I guess since there isn't as much profit potential in providing free over the air TV, it has to give way to companies that will use it for obscene/significant profit by charging the public to use those same frequencies.
Profit uber alles.
Re:Haven't they taken enough bandwidth already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they have taken more than enough bandwidth at this point. Throwing more at the problem is foolish. There's a limit to how much capacity additional spectrum can buy you. I can give you a real world example. Lake Stevens WA [cellmapper.net], population ~30k, served by five cell sites on Verizon.
Assume Verizon has roughly 1/3 of the business, the population is spread equally amongst those cell sites, and the sites are standard three sector deployments. That's 2k people per cell site or roughly 666 people per sector. Even with 5G, C-Band, and all the latest capacity improvements, that's not enough available bandwidth to replace the local wireline provider. DOCSIS has a better contention ratio (generally only a few dozen customers per node with modern deployments), far more available bandwidth to work with (hundreds of MHz) and minimal worries about external interference, signal attenuation, etc.
The cellular network there holds up pretty well, all things considered, because it's being used in the mobile context. I happened to be there during an extended power outage, after an ice storm, which took the local wireline (Comcast) provider out. I watched all three carriers implode. Speeds on Verizon went from 80 to 90Mbps to 100 to 200Kbps. I could barely load my e-mail to cancel my appointments for the day. I could not load the local electric utility's webpage simply to try and get information on their power restoration efforts.
A handful of additional spectrum licenses is not going to solve that problem. The real way to solve that problem is network densification, i.e., additional cell sites, so you lower the number of users on each site. In a locale like Lake Stevens that's easier said than done. The city is population dense enough that a macro only deployment won't keep up with demand but not so dense that it's easy to justify the CapEx of an aggressive small cell [wikipedia.org] deployment. In a larger metro, you'd have small cells, which flips the contention ratio script; now you have a more favorable radio than DOCSIS.
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No offense, but who cares about your small silly town. You only get 5 cell sites because your city is only 30k during the winter months, after which your population falls back to ~7k or whatever the seasonal number is. Your solution does not scale, as they say. I highly doubt NYC is undersized in cells sites as an example. Not to mention what interference could you possibly have in Lake Stevens compared to an almost entirely steel city.
So yes, your complaint makes sense during the three months you experi
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It wasn't a lament about "my" (not from there and do not live there) "silly small town"
It was an illustration of why throwing more spectrum at the problem does not eliminate the problem. Even doubling the spectrum is not going to make that network scale to being a wireline replacement. The only way to resolve the problem is to reduce the contention ratio, which is what I said, next time try reading the whole post instead of running your mouth without context.
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and now they want even more?
They want it all. So that your TV set will need a monthly cellular plan to watch the stations you used to get for free*.
*Yeah, there's that advertising revenue. But do you really think the cellular companies are going to give that up?
Fifty Shades of 5G: A Wireless Romance (Score:2)
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Your metaphor cup runneth over.
Telco spectrum grab is decades old, and Lidar-equipped "autonomously-drven cars" will eat more.
Queue lots of telco lawyers with satchels full of campaign contributions trying to do "the right thing" in the halls of US Congress.
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They've gone past 40GHz like a breeze. Imagine the royalties on visible light!
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And don't worry about those exposure warnings.
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Ah, the National Spectrum Strategy, or as I like to call it, 'Finding Nemo in the Sea of Frequencies'. Two years for 'detailed studies'? Sounds like they're using Internet Explorer to load the PDF. It's like asking HAL 9000 for a spacewalk schedule, and he's still pondering the nature of the universe. The government giving up airwaves is like Gollum parting with the One Ring - "My precious bandwidth!" And let's not forget, this is the same crowd that probably thinks TCP/IP is a new brand of allergy medication. Meanwhile, commercial providers are like Luke Skywalker, staring longingly at the spectrum, dreaming of a day when they can use the Force... or at least, 5G without buffering.
And then they realized that Red Chinese scientists inside Purple Mountain Laboratories were manipulating their thoughts using 6G!
Don't. Post. Bloomberg. Articles (Score:1)
Paywall
How much bandwidth is being used for tracking? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Ads and tracking is literally hogging the airwaves. Flavor of the month javascript frameworks too.
Not to mention website coding that is SO BLOATED that it should be on a never-ending mega-dose of Wegovy for "weight loss".
I guess marketers cut back the funding for lighter weight "mobile" versions of their employer's websites - to the detriment of us mobile users.
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Ads and tracking is literally hogging the airwaves. Flavor of the month javascript frameworks too.
98% of email is unwanted spam. And yet corporations insist it still holds value in business. Even after spending a lot on anti-protections for email, for an audience bitching about emails longer than 240 characters that go unread.
No one said Greed did shit for Common Sense's sake.
Re:How much bandwidth is being used for tracking? (Score:4, Informative)
And yet corporations insist it still holds value in business.
Are you proposing otherwise? Or are you trolling? Even if 98% of email is unwanted spam, the 2% is pretty important, and it's actually pretty important to make sure that 2% doesn't get lost in the other 98% garbage. Even before internet email became popular in the early 90s, companies still had internal email systems. Going back to early 80s, even NetWare had an email system. It's a natural outcome of networked computers that you'd want to send messages, short or long, back and forth.
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The argument in question was about bandwidth abuse. Are you arguing that everyone should really be footing the bandwidth bill for spam, or should we wait until that's 4K 3D video spam at 100MB an email clogging up corporate bandwidth only to be shitcanned by the costly Spaminator service who might start licensing by the blocked GB soon, because they already know you can't live without that pretty important 2%?
Abuse is abuse. I was arguing more against that than in favor of getting rid of email, although t
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I agree with everything you say, but the way you wrote your post it came off as if you were advocating for getting rid of email because of spam. Nobody (in their right mind) likes spam and while being a sysadmin is not my main job, I've had to deal with spam for the past 25 years on a daily basis because I have my own mail server with my own domain. AmavisD+SpamAssassin work for the most part, but they're not perfect. I count my time spent deleting the ones that make it through as a casualty of my job.
What happens when you're managing even a group of half a dozen people and their inboxes, and one of them becomes victim of the wrong kind of zero day attack via that vector? Is the business data being stolen and customers suing you out of existence merely a 'casualty' of the job that doesn't exist anymore?
As a CSO of a much larger victim corporation, will you feel better or worse when the email inbox in question didn't really need an external SMTP capability at all, and would have likely done just fine in
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Are you drunk?
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Are you drunk?
if you're questioning the proof in my blood, it's zero. If you're questioning the proof in my claim, turn off your spam filter. Be careful if you leave it off. Others might start questioning if you're drunk.
The discussion was about bandwidth being utterly wasted. Companies waste a lot of money to sustain a large enough internet connection to piss away a lot of it on incoming shit they don't want or need. And that's before you consider the cost of anti-protections to justify an unfettered browser on eve
Re: How much bandwidth is being used for tracking? (Score:2)
Still drunk.
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Still drunk.
Do yourself a favor and sober up before posting next time. It's a bit too early for a hypocrite to be that damn drunk.
Re: How much bandwidth is being used for tracking (Score:2)
"98% of email is unwanted spam. And yet corporations insist it still holds value in business"
My mistake, apparently. You're not correct, you're a fool. Email, despite the abuses, is still an entirely useful tool. I don't see the replacement on the horizon. I think I understand your argument, I'm trying to quote you accurately, as in verbatim. If I were you I would have stuck with drunk.
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98% of email is unwanted spam. And yet corporations insist it still holds value in business.
And the corporations are right. Since it turns out it is trivial to filter out 99.9% of that unwanted spam the number of email messages that hit my inbox are overwhelmingly used for the primary purpose of relevant communication.
Also I'm not a TikToker and have no problem reading more than 240 characters. You're lucky by the way, since your post is in fact over 240 characters. It nearly didn't get read.
Re: How much bandwidth is being used for tracking? (Score:2)
They need to free up low frequency (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They need to free up low frequency (Score:5, Insightful)
No they don't. All three carriers have ample low frequency holdings at this point. T-Mobile has 600MHz (Band 71) licenses nationwide. They have 700MHz (Band 12) in most locales. Verizon has a nationwide 700MHz license (Band 13), that came with rules [cornell.edu] they pretend don't exist, and 850MHz licenses (Band 5) in almost all markets. AT&T has a nationwide 700MHz (Band 14), allegedly for FirstNet [wikipedia.org], but also available for commercial use. They further have 850MHz and additional 700MHz (Bands 5 and 17) licenses in most markets.
Throwing more spectrum at the problem is not going to make your phone work better indoors. The only way, at this point, to solve that problem is for the carriers to bring more cell sites on air, so there's sites closer to whatever buildings are problematic for you. That will solve many problems but there will always be buildings that are just RF dead zones. You most likely have to just accept this fact -- if Wi-Fi is available that's what Wi-Fi calling is for -- but some buildings (e.g., convention centers) will have enough people in them to justify the expense of building a DAS [wikipedia.org] for indoor coverage.
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Because it will improve the reach of 5G, ever since the switch to 5G it's harder to get voice calls and reach into centers of buildings and basements because higher frequency waves attenuate faster.
There is nothing under 3 GHz on the table.
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It is probably more likely that the phone modems have become less sensitive. In the old days you had maybe a 4 band phone, and now is well north of 20 bands (sorry I left the cell industry almost a decade ago, and at that time it was at 20 bands). A lot of those bands never get used by a given phone, but the Apple's and Samsung's of the world want a single model to work in every country for every carrier, so you pack in every possible band into the phone. Front end loss has steadily grown, requiring more
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ever since the switch to 5G it's harder to get voice calls and reach into centers of buildings
No it's not. 5G waves attenuate the same as any other waves because the technology also operates on the same lower frequency waves as before. Actually you're extra wrong since 5G radios have better RSSI limits allowing 5G to work where LTE didn't even using the same frequency and transmission power.
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No it's not. 5G waves attenuate the same as any other waves because the technology also operates on the same lower frequency waves as before. Actually you're extra wrong since 5G radios have better RSSI limits allowing 5G to work where LTE didn't even using the same frequency and transmission power.
There is no meaningful difference at the same frequency. They both use the same modulation and both have the same properties.
Wasn't 5G supposed to solve this? (Score:2)
I thought 5G both used a system to make better use of a given frequency and also let providers create smaller, shorter-range networks so that they could accommodate larger numbers of subscribers by segmenting. Now we need more spectrum why? Is it because 5G doesn't do what it was supposed to, because carriers are using it incorrectly, or both?
Re:Wasn't 5G supposed to solve this? (Score:4, Insightful)
also let providers create smaller, shorter-range networks so that they could accommodate larger numbers of subscribers by segmenting
Segmenting (aka: densification) was not a new concept with 5G. That has been a thing literally forever. How do you think a city like New York City delivered reliable voice service in the AMPS [wikipedia.org] era? How do you think Verizon delivered then acceptable speeds on their 3G network when EVDO topped out at ~3Mbps per carrier?
What 5G did, on paper, was make the backend management systems less labor intensive, more self-healing/correcting, and ultimately easier to manage in a ultra-dense scenario. It wasn't a new concept though. A lot of the groundwork was laid with 4G networks. Densification remains an expensive proposition, even in urban areas where power and backhaul are readily available, and you can get away with comparatively cost effective things like these. [reddit.com]
Is it because 5G doesn't do what it was supposed to, because carriers are using it incorrectly, or both?
More spectrum is useful in some circumstances. The carriers are never going to turn down additional spectrum. The problem, as I see it, is the FCC used to apply a public interest test. Now they simply auction off spectrum to the highest bidder and the money goes into the US Treasury. This is a perverse incentive, IMHO. The carriers love gobbling up as much as they can, it raises the bar to any future competitor, and the Treasury loves billions of dollars of "free" money. Meanwhile, other users of the radio space get crowded out, because they don't have the lobbying power of the CTIA [ctia.org] or tens of billions to throw at bidding on spectrum licenses. :(
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It is indeed perverse. The spectrum is a public good, and high auction prices are effectively a tax, since the cost is passed on to the consumer, AKA the public that should be receiving the benefits of that public good. Instead we pay extra for access to it.
Who is using all of that bandwith? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Oh the carriers would rather leave 4G behind and decommission the equipment. Notice 3G is, well, pretty much gone.
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LTE is way fast enough for streaming, web browsing, texting and phone calls
5G isn't about streaming or bandwidth. It's about subscriber numbers. This isn't about your mobile phone, it's about your house's power meter and the traffic lights at the end of your street. It's about the paramedic's 2-way radio when they come collect you after your mind is blown after hearing that not every technology exists to serve consumers like your or I.
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it's about your house's power meter
Power meters are read by a dedicated mesh network. Utility switched to GPRS years ago and spent tens of millions switching out meters. Then when the telecoms said "Your 3G is going away" the power company switched to their own system. Fool me once ...
and the traffic lights at the end of your street.
The city owns it's own fiber optic network. What cretin would serve fixed locations with a wireless system?
It's about the paramedic's 2-way radio when they come collect you
No cellular coverage in my neighborhood. I hope like hell the paramedics keep a system that actually works.
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There are a TON of technologies involved for the radio backhaul, from licensed 200MHz and unlicensed 900MHz systems. There are also systems using fiber optic networks (using a built in ONT or external ONT), and yes, cellular b
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Many of these support bridging - so just because it's a mesh 900MHz network doesn't mean it doesn't go to a collector that uses a cellular uplink to relay the data.
The overarching principle behind utilities switching back to their own systems is "We will never be fooled again."
5G is a collection of technologies
True. And utilities, law enforcement and other entities using wireless comms may in fact be using "5G". But they are increasingly doing so on their own allocated bands. Choosing to avoid telecom operated systems like the plague.
Corruption at work (Score:2)
"Americaâ(TM)s technological leadership has been accompanied by a willingness to pursue daring regulatory and policy ideas such as spectrum auctions"
Yea well that daring US government spectrum auctioning scheme cost mobile phone subscribers hundreds of billions of dollars while massively favoring and ensuring continued dominance of a tiny number of large carriers... so "mission accomplished" I guess.
If mobile carriers want better 5G service all they need to do is deploy more cells. They don't need any
Airwaves occupied by US agencies (Score:2)
government uses at times aren't efficient and they should share space with new commercial technologies
True. But often they are life critical. Not something you want to pit against some autistic little gamer who is whining about his latency.
Anyway, nice try making an argument to scoop up public bandwidth and then turn around and sell it back to the public. At a profit. This is just an attempt to corner a market.
Obvious solution (Score:1)
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430 terahertz (Score:1)