Other than the 1200Mhz [0] from the 6Ghz Band, the requirement of 6Ghz Certification ( New WiFi Chip, Antenna, and FCC Certs ) means that WiFi 6E brings opportunity to fix everything that went wrong with WiFi 6.
The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz.
Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2.
I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems.
[0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work.
For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway.
At this juncture, interference and noise are more of the problem with WiFi today. It’s not larger bands capable of faster speeds. We need more spectrum to mitigate interference and provide more landscape for multiple AP’s in tight geographical spaces to CO-exist without competing too much for airspace.
Bonding 80Mhz channels for 500+ Mbps is overkill and hogs airspace. 40Mhz channels are more than adequate for 90% of devices out there if that channel is stable and free from congestion.
I’m super against the FCC granting more spectrum only for routers/APs manufacturers to default to hogging more chunks of the airspace. It’s a race to the same shitty experience we see today. We should parcel out chunks that are allowed for high channel bonding, leaving the rest of the space to max out at single 40 MHz bands.
Can't the spectrum be allocated dynamically, so routers don't "hog airspace" unless someone is actually using it and their TCP connection is actually going up to those speeds?
Well... that’s about software and less about spectrum and the regulation of it.
The problem is the box in the aisle of BestBuy that say “FAST 2.5 Gig WiFi” sells better than “Dynamic Signaling” so the incentive to just make really crappy radios that have more throughout outweighs the incentive to actually make decent and smart software defined radios.
That’s why I think the FCC needs to just set some band rules. They do this already in the commercial WISP space.
>For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway.
Yes I thought it was clear with the WiFi 6E mention, but turns out not everyone is up to date with things as shown in other replies, so I apologies for the confusion.
I agree with everything you said, but my opinion is it should be down to Wifi to enforce Dynamic Signalling as mandatory in WiFi 6 ( too late now may be WiFi 7 ) spec rather than having regulation. And I thought OFDMA is part of the solution?
If I remember correctly that is what the WiFi 7 / 802.11be committees were looking into. But then again judging from their Opera happening in WiFi 6 I am not too sure if they are capable of doing it.
I live in a high density urban living area and my MacBook currently reads at least 20 AP excluding their 5GHz naming counterparts. So I do feel the pain with crappy WiFi.
That's exactly how wifi works. If there's no data to be transferred, the radio's transmitter is off and it is not using the spectrum. That said, periodic beacons and keepalives defined in various protocols will cause data to be sent from time to time.
Interpreting an SSID closes to me, with 0 activity (noone connects there). According to wireshark, beacon takes 516µs at 6Mbit/s with 40 beacons/s, which equals 500e-6 * 40 = 0.02 = 2% airtime goes to a single SSID with 0 traffic. Typical settings are 10 beacon/s which would be 0.5%, but 2.4Ghz has 1Mbit/s default rate, so about 3%.
With 20 idle SSIDs on 2.4Ghz with default settings, roughly 50% of airtime is spent on SSID broadcast.
It just hit me that all of what is now sold as WiFi 6 does not in fact have a 6 GHz radio. The incompetence is breathtaking, it's been a year since they revamped all of their naming and it's already fucked again.
The intent of "Wi-Fi 6" is to start versioning Wi-Fi numerically (i.e. the next major rev will be Wi-Fi 7) instead of the IEEE's ever-lengthening 802.11 alphabet soup.
It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.
The alphabet soup still makes more sense than names like USB Gen 3.2 2x2.
Then again, because the door has been opened now by marketing guys to stray away from engineer driven names. It won't be long until WIFI 7 ULTIMATE ULTRA EXTREME 4 PRO EDITION is a thing.
That’s actually fairly standard naming in networking, like cat5 cables, cat5e is cat5 but after fixing a few bugs in the standard. Cat6 came out later and supersedes cat5 and cat5e.
Think of it like 6.1 instead of 6E. Minor revision to the existing standard.
It could be worse. You could have a business facing physical layer made by the same people and spend weeks trying to decipher what someone means when they says 802.3bj as opposed to 802.3-2015 when referencing 100GBASE-CR4, or it's medium-less counterpart: CAUI-4.
The real question is really "why isn't most of the spectrum like this?" - people sharing it rather than it being sold off to private holders to be owned
To understand the thinking find a copy of the 1959 paper "The Federal Communications Commission" by Ronald Coase. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927 (pay-walled). It's the thesis behind the modern property-rights spectrum regime, and has bled over into many other federal regulatory regimes.
As interpreted by many modern, mostly conservative, regulators and scholars, the idea is that by giving private property rights in spectrum you incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies.
There's plenty to critique, especially as it applies to spectrum. See, for example, the famous Salon.com article summarizing David Reed's arguments: "The myth of interference" (2003), https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/ But if you want to understand your adversaries' thinking, Coase's paper is the place to start.
> incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies.
As with software patents, I think there's an argument to be made that this is no longer true. Digital modulation schemes are leagues more efficient than older analog techniques, both in terms of power and bandwidth. Spread spectrum schemes in particular are even reasonably resistant to being plopped on top of each other.
The spectrum ownership scheme allows established players to sit around on their asses using loud, inefficient modulation schemes with huge dead zones in between channels because they don't need to do any better than that.
I think radio technology would be better across the board if spectrum were open, and if people had to compete by using better, more efficient, more interference-immune modulation schemes, or risk getting stepped on by someone else. If we had a system like this, the noise floor would just slowly increase in heavily used parts of the spectrum, rather than what we have now, which is a whole bunch of legally mandated quiet zones punctuated by huge narrow carrier spikes.
The technology to do this exists... you can go buy a broadband SDR and put together a system like this in GNU radio fairly quickly for experimental purposes, but it's not really legal to actually use this anywhere.
The thing is, that the QoS and power efficiency of e.g. LTE isn't attainable if you have uncontrolled interference. It's a general issue with far-side crosstalk.
Interference is largely a property of the specific scheme. 5G schemes are better than LTE when comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. aggregate bandwidth on the same bands in the same geographic area), whatever comes after 5G will continue moving the ball forward, and the theoretical limitations on how much further we can keep kicking the ball are still out of sight.
Thus the question isn't what regulatory regime is best for squeezing the most out of LTE, but rather what's the optimal pace of radio communications evolution and how to achieve it. That's a drastically different type of question that almost certainly has a drastically different answer, or at least a much more complex answer.
The ideal spectrum allocation scheme would be a by-the-minute rental.
Whenever anyone wants to use spectrum, their device automatically bids and gets allocated whatever size slice of spectrum and transmit power they ask for. Then the device maker or the user pays the bill at the end of the year, perhaps with some minimum free amount each year per person, which could cover all except the biggest spectrum users.
If you didn't like the government allocation scheme, you could rent your own block and do your own sub-allocations, for example some kind of packetized system with microsecond long packets wouldn't want to have to contact a government server for every 1 microsecond allocation.
That gives a strong incentive to use efficient allocation schemes.
An "ideal" scheme is once again derailed by reality, where predictability is valued; where antennas and signal processing equipment are physical objects, that cost money to procure and install, and are subject to engineering limitations which limit their flexibility.
Remember, the free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low.
As a quick example, I’ve been doing a bit of work with land-mobile radios lately (LMR). We rent a very small slice of spectrum from the government (12.5kHz wide, IIRC), and all of the radios use that frequency. They work anywhere (within the range of our license anyway). They run independent of a repeater or any kind of fixed base station.
If I’m out in the middle of nowhere with my team and we’re using these radios because there’s no cell coverage, a) how would a given radio “bid” on a piece of spectrum, and b) how would the other units in the talk group know to listen to a particular frequency for my message?
That's a neat problem. You may hear N other stations, but they may not hear each other at all. Its very difficult to know whom to tell about coordination information, or even how to calculate it. Solve that, even heuristically, and make a $B
Coase actually argues in that paper, in true UChicago fashion that the spectrum should be completely unregulated in a free market for private efficiency. He’s actually arguing against the FCC. As he also touches on in The Nature of a Firm. Read Section 5 of the paper you’ve linked.
Yes. But the explicit premise in that section is that there are exclusionary property rights in the spectrum protected by traditional property and contract law, and that contiguous ranges of spectrum can be subdivided and sold exactly analogously to a piece of land. For example, he explains that while there are technical interference issues at the edges of spectrum bands whereby the user of one range could incidentally interfere with the user of another range, the same type of problems occurs with land (e.g. nuisance) and are similarly manageable with a traditional property rights regime.
In Coase's view the government shouldn't be auctioning spectrum for limited times or with strings attached, as we commonly do now. (What the FCC does now is a quasi-Coasean spectrum regime.) In Coase's view spectrum usage would be most efficient by selling all spectrum (from 0-infinity) in a one-time auction to the single highest bidder. That bidder could (and, crucially, would in Coase's view) then subdivide and sell the spectrum according to market demand.
Coase's logic is solid; it's the premises that are problematic. First, it ignores transaction costs, or at least assumes they're de minimis. Even before the Law & Economics field took off (which is the field Coase most influenced), it was understood that one of the purposes of legal rules was to minimize transaction costs. Sometimes a market is made more efficient by specifying a fixed rule, and even more often by specifying a fixed default rule, then by permitting perfect contractual freedom. Of course, this begs the question of when you can know whether to intervene. But that's the only legitimate question, not whether you should ever intervene. In Coase's time his argument was more practical as widespread independent and even individual broadcast usage wasn't a commercially realistic scenario; transaction costs would always be born by economic behemonths and therefore would be de minimis relative to their price. But that's not Coase's actual argument; his actual argument is categorical and absolute, and that's how most modern proponents (IME) apply it as well.
Secondly, the notion of spectrum rivalrousness is contentious. If something isn't rivalrous, a property regime is unnecessary and usually strictly inefficient.[1] Without getting into the science (and I'm not an electrical engineer so I'd just make mince of things), as a practical matter spectrum usage is only partly rivalrous (rivalrous mostly deriving from the technical environment, not from the fundamental character of spectrum, as with physical goods and real estate). Your ability to enjoy maximal channel bandwidth between two physical points is limited by how sophisticated your transmitter and receiver, and ultimately by computational power, not by coincidental usage, per se. (Not unless someone is actively trying to screw you.) As WiFi has born out, we're all in an arms race for buying and using the latest, greatest gear. In one sense this is just a convoluted price signaling scheme--the people most in need of bandwidth just pay for fancier equipment--that might be less efficient than a simple property regime. But arguably in practice this process plays out slowly enough (especially with moderate power limits, carve outs for emergency use, etc) that these transaction costs are far less than the transaction costs we see in a market where we expect Verizon's or AT&T's spectrum usage rights to trickle down to ad hoc groups and individuals of spectrum users in the same way William the Conqueror's lands in England were slowly subdivided until every Englishman could build his own castle.
Nobody will ever sell me rights to spectrum for use within a 10-meter or even 100-meter radius, even though it's possible and would open up a tremendous wealth of opportunities. Cordless phones (POTS, not cell) and WiFi could only have happened with unlicensed (i.e. unowned) spectrum, in contradiction to Coase's argument.
[1] Exception--if food wasn't rivalrous because we all had free Star Trek-style replicators I imagine obesity would be an even worse problem than it is today, we'd be more sickly, and so we'd probably want to impose costs to maximize aggregate wealth. (See soda tax.) And if we did that we might want to make those costs transferable (e.g. carbon credits) rather than centrally figuring out the most efficient price for each individual.
That’s a mistaken view. Coase argues precisely that the market would self-regulate by broadcasters determining the spectrum interferences with each other and drafting financial agreements to ameliorate those interferences. Not by having an initial legal monopoly, which was abhorrent to the Chicago School. He believes that the natural institution of private property in the sense of contract through the traditional court system is enough of a regulation and no special regulation (e.g. FCC) is needed.
Section 5 sophisticatedly exposits the specific case on how the free market solves frequency interference in admonishment of the special regulation. Excerpts of his discourse:
“All property rights interfere with the ability of people to use resources.What has to be insured is that the gain from interference more than
offsets the harm it produces. There is no reason to suppose that the optimum situation is one in which there is no interference”
“The operator whose signals were interfered with, if he had the right to stop such interference,would be willing to forego this right if he were paid more than the amount by which the value of his service was decreased by this interference or the costs which he would have to incur to offset it.” He goes on to talk about the case of deliberate interference. This is about deliberate spectrum preference overlap not accidental interference.
And Coase disambiguates his advocation if it still isn’t clear: “What this analysis demonstrates,so far as the radio industry is concerned, is that there is no analytical difference between the problem of interference between operators on a single frequency and that of interference between operators on adjacent frequencies.”
“It has been the burden of this article to
show that the problems posed by the broadcasting industry do not call for any fundamental changes in the legal and economic arrangements which serve other industries.”
You’re mistaking market efficiency, transactional costs and externality. It’s argued that legal rules are necessary to instead reduce externalities by market failures, which existed long before Coase. Coase instead contributed to the limits of cost savings about transaction costs provided by the formation of business and maintenance of markets in The Nature of the Firm (aside from his free market advocation of the spectrum), which became Coase’s theorem.
I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true. Even amongst a single broadcaster within his own spectrum he runs into constant constraint and trade off by his own bandwidth.
I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist. Especially since Coase didn’t think externalities were unfortunate, instead he thought that was a “dirty word”, and seldom found a case for a government all to eager to specially regulate.
> I’m educated as an Electrical Engineer; it’s clear to us spectrum rivalry isn’t contentious but true.
But it's rivalrous in a distinctive way--it's a function of contemporaneous and evolving limitations of the existing state of technology and usage patterns. To quote a famous IEEE Spectrum article, "Moreover, interference is not some inherent property of spectrum. It's a property of devices. A better receiver will pick up a transmission where an earlier one heard only static. Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved. Consequently, the extent to which there appears to be a spectrum shortage largely depends not on how many frequencies are available but on the technologies that can be deployed. Many regulations intended to promote harmony of the airwaves have instead, by putting artificial limits on technology, created massive inefficiency in spectrum utilization." https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-end-of-spectr... What that's referring to are techniques like MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, etc.
As David Reed is quoted and paraphrased as saying in that Salon article: '[We have stupid radios not because we haven't figured out how to make them smart but because there's been little reason to make them smart. They're designed to expect signal to be whatever comes in on a particular frequency, and noise to be everything on other frequencies.] 'The problem is more complex than just making smart radios, because some of the techniques for un-confusing the receiver are best implemented at the transmitter, or in a network of cooperating transmitters and receivers. It's not simply the radios. It's the systems architecture, stupid!' https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/
We're only beginning to scratch the service of the channel discernment improvements that can had with MIMO, beamforming, beam steering, and other techniques, but we're limited by the larger ecosystem of devices and regulations, which is largely an artifact of a system which assumes a fixed interference burden across vast geographical areas. The channel capacity of a band of spectrum is, in the absence of coherent interference, point-to-point as a theoretical matter because non-coherent electromagnetic radiation does not interfere. To reiterate, interference as typically experienced is a function of the inability to differentiate a signal which is present or which could be present if the transmitting and receiving systems were more sophisticated, and (according to the theoretical work) this is ultimately a computational problem.[1] Thus "spectrum scarcity", at least in the context of P2P wireless networks, is a function of technology, not an intrinsic, fixed property.
Taking that context into account--that interference and thus the degree of rivalrousness for any band of spectrum is a complex, dynamic function that dissipates as technology progresses--we can end up drawing different conclusions than from the technological presumptions behind Coase's argument. For example, as someone else mentioned, maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi. Similarly, a lot of theoretical radio techniques are first explored and applied by the military precisely because of the adversarial context, and they're consistently fruitful because the physical limits of what's possible are still quite distant.
> I’m not arguing for or against the ideas of Coase, only correcting that public presentation of his ideas as an interventionist.
I never had the sense that Coase was characterized as interventionist, at least not in the context of FCC reforms. If refuting that is your goal, fair enough. IME, however, in popular discourse anything "free market" is generally considered non-interventionist, and as compared to FCC regulations contemporaneous with his paper that's a fair characterization. But from my perspective (and AFAIU of many others, especially in the SDR community), establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist, no less than it is with copyrights and patents, relative to the baseline of nothing. Nobody claims taxi medallion systems are non-interventionist, even when medallions are a freely transferable property right (e.g. NYC, sub-class of medallions in SF, etc). Uber would certainly disagree.
> But it's rivalrous in a distinctive way--it's a function of contemporaneous and evolving limitations of the existing state of technology and usage patterns.
> Whether a new radio system "interferes" with existing ones is entirely dependent on the equipment involved.
With this definition then there is no other type of rivalry. This is true for any resource with tragedy of the commons, where an externality is encountered. This goes for land, agriculture, pollution, oil, etc. The limit here is always the efficient production from some resource using technology. This is part of the ceteris paribus of rivalry.
For what you're discussing, for non-interfering waves with the same spectrum, you would need a QAM or some other modulation scheme, with more granular phase detection, which requires exponential more energy, thus capital, per degree resolution of phase detection at the same distance. Thus, the rivalry always exists because enterprises prefer the method leading to the cheapest production with the same product.
> maybe we should be promoting technological development by letting people freely interfere, which can be done by imposing no rules whatever, not even a property regime. Absent power limits, that's pretty much what we do with WiFi.
As I'll continue discussing in your other comment this is exactly what Coase advocated for.
> establishing a private property regime is still rather interventionist
It is in the sense you're discussing with the FCC but not in the Coase's sense where private property is in the strict abstract sense by enforcement of contracts between consenting individuals. Coase's point is that it shouldn't be specially regulated differently than the enforcement of any other private contract. Unless for specific cases which can only be known through experience
> Not by having an initial legal monopoly, which was abhorrent to the Chicago School.
In the Chicago School monopolies are impossible; or rather, monopoly pricing is a fiction.
I can't find a direct top-down subdivision quote (my copy isn't searchable; he might not literally say it at all[1]), but efficiency of the single initial auction winner scenario can be logically inferred from what he explicitly says. For example, on pp 20-21 he says that in a property regime broadcasters would be able to assemble larger bands through free market purchases, subject only to their ability and desire to pay. Efficient aggregation and subdivision of spectrum is a built-in presumption.
AFAIU, applying Chicago School principles, the price at which a single owner of all spectrum would subdivide and sell a portion would have no (or at least de minimis) monopoly profit component. Another way to look at it is that ownership of any contiguous range of spectrum, just as with a contiguous piece of land, is by definition monopoly ownership. Breaking contiguousness might require a premium, but only proportional to the economic value from contiguous usage. Breaking contiguousness of all spectrum would require a premium proportional to the marginal additional usage value, which for all spectrum is pretty much nil. What usage of all spectrum has a value greater than the aggregated value of using two, smaller portions? More likely there's greater value in the latter than the former. At some point subdividing becomes inefficient, but certainly at that point we're no longer dealing with a single, contiguous band of spectrum. The initial, profit-maximizing owner has already subdivided most it, and probably no longer owns any of it--our hypothetical bid winner was probably a specialized broker banking on extracting value by subdividing it.
Of course, judging by your comment, we both believe that monopoly profits arereal. Minimally they're approximately equal to the transaction costs required to buyout or break the monopoly, which is approximately equal to the cooperation costs for victimized buyers, which in practice would be born by a prospecting broker. (What we intuitively think of as "monopoly profit" are the opportunity costs to buyers having to pay a premium over the price paid in a competitive market. But we don't include those costs in the buyout/breakout scenario because they're recovered after the fact in the hypothetical and cancel out.) AFAIU, according to the Chicago School these transaction costs are de minimis, especially with large, liquid financial markets. This is why they're such fans of financial market deregulation, derivatives markets, short sellers, private equity, etc. But many people, including some Chicago School luminaries after 2008 (e.g. Greenspan), aren't so sanguine about those costs.
And this explains why AT&T and Verizon don't behave like the efficient economic actors in Coase's world--they won't subdivide or sublease their spectrum down to the levels required for WiFi-like usages because the costs of all of us cooperating to collectively bid is too high. Actually, that's not strictly true--the costs of cooperating can be trivial if we move beyond simple market theory. All we need to do is democratically choose, directly or indirectly, for the FCC to expand unlicensed spectrum, marginally rolling back a regime we previously democratically created.
Yes, I get that Coase in particular was appreciative of transaction costs in other contexts, such as in the theory of the firm. But Coase, and people in general, often make implicit assumptions about relative quantitive costs that become assumptions about qualitative costs that in turn become judgments about whether transaction costs are substantive. The transactional costs of subdividing and transferring spectrum among TV, radio, military, and other large, traditional broadcasters undoubtedly looked de minims in 1959. Certainly they were lower than the costs of FCC central planning, and that much I can't disagree with. But 40 years later the environment had completely changed.
[1] I distinctly remember seeing illustrations of this arguing-to-the-extreme concept, but the illustration itself was probably from another author as a gloss on Coase's work.
It can instead be logically inferred that it must not be what he's arguing.
Coase: “Or, alternatively, if this operator had the right to cause interference, he would be willing to desist if he were paid more than the costs of suppressing the interference or the decrease in the value of the service he could provide if interference were barred. And the operator whose signals were interfered with would be willing to pay to stop this interference an amount up to the decrease in the value of his service which it causes or the costs he has to incur to offset the interference.”
Why would the operator have to pay to stop this interference if he owns that spectrum? If I go onto your land do you have to pay me to get me off of it? No, you have legal protection protecting that property right against non-consensual trespass.
Similarly, we can then conclude the operator must not have a property right of that spectrum if he must pay to prevent trespass, otherwise the operator would be able to file a criminal injunction to prevent the interfering individual from continuing to disrupt his signal at little cost--as you would do for a land trespass.
You're confusing the specific bill he mentions in the preceding section about the legal etiology of the FCC, which had proposed to do exactly what you're mistaking as the argument of Coase; where Coase thinks only that that specific bill shouldn't have been dismissed so trivially and as a resolve to the current situation where the FCC has already sold partial licenses--but leaves it thoroughly short of an advocation as he develops the case of no special regulation for broadcasting rights.
I think that in practice the idea of privately owned spectrum really came into its own with the original scheme used for analog cell phone service. The incumbent phone companies were given their own exclusive spectrum and the competitive cell phone company (originally there was only one) got their own exclusive spectrum. This A band, B band system actually worked fairly good compared to the sort of thing happening with the landline monopolies.
Obviously the system couldn't be expanded to a market with more than two entities without causing a lot of inefficiency. The regulators did this expansion anyway and that led to the insanity we have today.
As an operator of large wireless networks I prefer to purchase licensed spectrum over using shared bands every single time. It's hard to overstate how much more reliable and performant the network can be when there is some assurance you won't be interfered with.
I would concur, but there are not many non-licensed bands. So all sorts of traffic is more congested in those. If there were more unlicensed bands I think it would probably improve those use cases.
To an extent, but that entire band is only 75MHz wide. There are only 2-4 proper channels, and it has twice the range of 5-6GHz, which puts you in competition with an order of magnitude more hot spots.
The microwave at my house would reliably murder my wi-fi connection whenever you turned it on, which was great fun while playing real-time multiplayer games.
This is one of the things I have trouble understanding too. It’s a complex issue, but it seems like it would be best opened to the public where next generation radio technologies can evolve. I don’t think 5G/LTE will go away but there may be new technologies which are more open and integrate within the existing frameworks. I imagine some kind of public mesh net/CDN that goes out to LTE/5G only when necessary to access information not in the local context.
I think fears are overstated and used as a pretense to sell off spectrum to private entities, which can provide private investors a handsome reward for their monopoly on the spectrum. Consider "junk" unlicensed WiFi spectrum (i.e. 2.4ghz). Normally private owners would argue, "We can't allow anyone to broadcast, it'll be overcrowded. We need a gatekeeper to solve this." In reality, yes it can be overcrowded in dense areas, so packets still get sent, but at a lower rate. This creates demand and people start gravitating to less crowded, unlicensed spectrum (i.e. 5.2ghz) for crowded indoor use scenario. It's more bandwidth and better attenuation with your neighbors. Consumer radios are also certified to only produce so much power on the spectrum which adds additional safeguards. So the free market and a dash of radio certification/regulation ends up providing an efficient decentralized communication medium.
With other shared mediums, we police the spectrum (e.g. light, sound, etc...). If a user starts blasting out FM, or too much 2.4gz and so on, it can be detected, traced and prosecuted. It's 2020, we don't need FM, we need high speed IPv6 radios and improved routing tables/algorithms. Lift FM channels into the digital realm and let's get on with it.
The reason why WiFi has poor performance in dense environments is because there is no central coordinator for spectrum usage. Stations pick a random frequency and start talking. If another station is talking when you want to send a message, your station will wait indefinitely for the channel to be free. The result is that you get random latency spikes; your VoIP call just gets dropped, you get disconnected from your online game, your video call freezes up. There is no concept of determining what's best for everyone; anyone sending a message checks if the channel is clear and goes about their business.
This all sounds somewhat fair, but the problems really start when not all the stations can hear each other. Station A can hear Station B and Station C. Station C starts sending a message to station A. Station B can't hear Station C, so starts sending a message to station A. The result is that both messages are lost and the effective channel capacity goes to zero. This is obviously a big problem.
The fundamental problem is that radio is very much half-duplex. Only one station can use a certain amount of spectrum at a time; if someone is using it, you can't. It causes problems everywhere; with WiFi, with air traffic control, etc.
Centralized frequency allocations get around this with better protocols. All the stations know about each other, and can be told when they can transmit by a centralized coordinator (TDMA is an example of such a protocol). As a result, each station has a predictable amount of airtime, and therefore guaranteed bandwidth and latency; no time is wasted with two stations talking over each other. (There are other sharing schemes that are more interesting and popular than naive time-sharing; CDMA, spread-spectrum, and GPS's "Gold Codes" are all interesting reading.)
The easiest way to implement this is not to write a standard and then ensure that everyone buys a standards-compliant device, but rather to give chunks of spectrum to companies, and have companies distribute devices that work they way they want. It's easier for the regulatory agency ("pay us money and do whatever you want"), and doesn't cap innovation. Verizon can collect your phone tomorrow and give you a new one if they want to use whizbang new technology. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it is of course a compromise. (Faster innovation, less government interference with technology... but at the cost of making it impossible to start a cell phone provider on your own.)
I guess my TL;DR is: it's not that simple. You could let everyone do whatever they wanted. That's how it was in the early days. People used spark-gap transmitters that generated so much noise that there was effectively only one half-duplex channel for the entire planet to use. Regulators saw that that wasn't going to scale and invented spectrum allocations, and here we are today. It's not perfect, but technology is improving how we used the unlicensed bands. (I am not as up to date as I want to be on WiFi specifically, but if you look at the amateur radio community, it's routine these days to communicate around the world with 5-10W of power. 20 years ago, it would have taken two orders of magnitude more power and 20x the bandwidth to do with voice what we do with FT8 today. People are still idiots, though, and generate plenty of QRM. It only gets worse when people without licenses start operating the radio stations.)
You already can't do whatever you want, even in ISM bands (... a WiFi AP with 5 kW transmit power would be really bad for everyone. It's also fairly illegal.) Having some rules forcing devices to cooperate (... perhaps more intelligently than WiFi currently does) would be welcome... but there is a difference betweeen "having to be nice and coordinate with each other" and "needing explicit permission from a centralized authority to do anything whatsoever".
Actually, the proposal already contains this: "An automated frequency coordination system would prevent standard power access points from operating where they could cause interference to incumbent services." We could absolutely have central authority assigning time slots in congested areas in a fair way, while staying decentralized everywhere else. A bit like the way air traffic control works.
But there are already protocols (DECT I'm looking at you) that design all this stuff in, that can happily share channels and do exactly this sort of thing
Well US DECT only has 5 channels (everywhere else it's at least twice as many)
DECT base stations are capable of detecting when two (or more) stations are on the same channel and sharing transmission slots between them.
With 10 channels and 12 full duplex slots/channel you can handle 120 people sitting on top of each other, spread them out a bit and then you can handle many more - probably a small number of hundreds if done right
Good. Let's see if this actually happens and if Europe follows (I doubt the whole 1200MHz are free here, at least not on paper)
The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band.
At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities.
But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...
I think governments and their industrial buddies greatly prefer the hub-and-spoke model.
Mesh networks aren't good for paid prioritization, bandwidth overage charges, arbitrary disconnection on copyright claims, paid peering, or location/origin-based censorship, all of which the current model supports very well.
Strongly crosslinked local communities are much harder to centrally govern. The entire US society is built around hub and spoke media.
Nit... "White space" spectrum is where you use the unused TV channels in a particular area. The 600-900 MHz spectrum has no TV in it anymore and and is just regular spectrum that various wireless phone providers have government granted monopolies on. They got exclusive access to that spectrum in return for large financial kickbacks.
> But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...
But isn't the spectrum owned by the government? There is no compelling profit motive for government-provided services. The sale vs granting to the public likely had to do with the revolving door between interest groups and government.
802.11 is inefficient? What are you talking about. It is more efficient than cellular systems in terms of bits/second/Hertz. Unlicensed does not mean inefficient.
Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.
CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹
At 6 GHz. This is super exciting. I have a huge backlog of fun wideband radio projects (radar, spread spectrum, etc.) that I've never been motivated enough to start because it would technically be illegal.
This does nothing to make your projects legal. "Open" spectrum like this only allows you to operate certified devices where the vendor made some assurance that they actually stick to their band and power limit, and don't interfere on some random harmonic.
To build your projects you need a ham license, and if you have that you have the ham allocations.
> This does nothing to make your projects legal. "Open" spectrum like this only allows you to operate certified devices where the vendor
Yes, most radio transmitters are certificated (including Part 15 transmitters like Wi-Fi routers), but homebrew devices should still be possible under Part 15 without certification. Part 15 allows the use of unlicensed radio transmitters built for personal use, not marketed, not constructed from a kit, and built in quantities of five or less, without going through the process of certification by regulators. See [0].
However, whether it can be implemented within the technical requirement and limitation of Part 15 is another question. Usually, Part 15 is very limited, it may or may not be usable for your project, unlike the amateur radio service (Part 97), which is a more powerful service.
> actually stick to their band and power limit, and don't interfere on some random harmonic. To build your projects you need a ham license.
Same for ham. The only difference is that certification by a regulator is not needed, and the technical standards that need to be satisfied is different, but regardless of what service you operate in, you must test your equipment by yourself to ensure the technical requirements are not violated.
Admittedly I'm hazy on the details, I just stowed away the bottom line ;).
AFAIR what it boils down to is that if you have a ham license, there is a presumption that you know to some extent what you're doing (15.15.a?); so if you do break something it probably makes the distinction between "reckless" and "accidental".
Honestly if you do it well the question won't come up. So either you learn your shit well enough for it to not matter, or you get the ham license for insurance at the cost of at least proving you got the gist down. shrug :)
> can you do encrypted communications with a ham license?
No. It's prohibited internationally and enforced by all ITU member states, the only exception which encryption is acceptable is the control uplink to aircraft and spacecraft. Although in some countries, using encryption domestically, purely for access control (not for confidentiality) is acceptable under some circumstances, if you publish your key.
> does spread spectrum qualify?
No. There are additional rules governing spread spectrum communications, but it doesn't automatically imply encryption. Many spread spectrum systems use weak PRNG and not meant for encryption.
The motivation is to keep (accidental) unlicensed users out of amateur radio service. For example, 2.4 GHz is both an unlicensed band usable under Part 15, and simultaneously an amateur radio band usable under Part 97, these are very different rules. Since amateur radio operators can use any public protocols (including 802.11) on the air, there is a risk of accidentally exchanging communication with devices owned by unlicensed operators (such as your neighbor's laptop), which violates radio regulations. Under this circumstance, some people believed that in the United States, encryption with a key published in a publicly accessible place is allowed (and there are still other people who says it's not allowed, but the debate has never been legally challenged until a high-profile abuse appears in the future, but so far there is none, so currently it is a de facto acceptable practice).
No doubt to prevent abuse and allow identification of violators.
Encryption would open the bands to general commercial usage. My uncle works in Canada's spectrum enforcement. You would be surprised at how many small business attempt to violate band licenses to save a few bucks. Think taxi or logging services with commms on protected bands.
You have it backwards. They can't violate the rules now because it would be obvious. If encryption were allowed it would be impossible to know if a transmission is violating certain rules or not.
Like what? Plotting to kill somebody over the radio? Logically there must be rules about hogging spectrum or harassing people but I'm having a hard time imagining how encryption could stop someone from knowing if you're breaking another law.
It served three important purposes. (1) To persuade the governments to allow the existence of amateur radio, (2) To force the publication of technical specifications, and (3) To restrain its use (abuse?) by commercial vendors.
First, it's important to understand that radio communication is a modern creation, not a post-modern creation like the Internet. From the beginning, telecommunication and radio communication was/is an area under heavy regulations by powerful governments. Since a hundred years ago, almost all aspects of communications (modulation, equipment, content, frequencies, price, recipients), even whether one is allowed to listen a broadcast station, were heavily regulated, often under the name of national security (and commercial interests). Today's regulations still follow the same framework. Amateur radio service was created to allow noncommercial technical experimentation - encryption is prohibited as parts of the compromise made by experimenters, in exchange, Big Brothers allowed experimenters to perform noncommercial communications under greatly reduced regulations, this even includes some authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union. Without such a compromise, amateur radio service wouldn't even exist at all. Unless the underlying political landscape and framework of radio and telecommunication is changed greatly, such as the vision advocated by the supporters of spectrum commons theory [0], this situation will remain.
Second, what has been prohibited is not encryption itself, but all forms of encoding that cannot be understood by others ("secret code"), this includes encryption, and also includes proprietary protocols. This regulation forces all communicators and commercial equipment vendors to document the technical information of the communication protocols being used to facilitate experimentation, thus it serves as a barrier against the use of proprietary protocols that is detrimental to the community. There is only one major flaw - there are no rules about patents, and there are already protocols designed by commercial vendors that cannot be legally decoded without obtaining a patent license. Nevertheless, the non-encryption rule works well to keep all protocols open, at least, its specification.
Third, amateur radio is, by definition, non-commercial, and it's not negotiable. There is the fact that the existence of amateur radio frequency allocation is constantly under the threat of reallocation to commercial services (the latest one is 5G). And there is also an opinion commonly held by many in the community, that there's always a trend that some commercial users may choose to abuse amateur frequencies to avoid the costs of using a commercial radio service, and that if proprietary protocols or encrypted communication is allowed, there's a danger of a de facto commercial exploitation of the amateur radio service when the nature of communication cannot be determined.
So, in conclusion, encryption was originally prohibited for "national security" to allow the existence of amateur radio, and many members in the community today believes the rule is still necessary to keep the proprietary protocols out of amateur radio, and/or to keep commercial abusers out of amateur radio. Although there are many situations which encryption can be beneficial for the community, but the consensus seems to be that, even if the state allows it (which is unlikely), its threats to the community is greater than its benefits. Any argument to allow encryption in amateur radio will be faced with suspect by many that it's only a disguised attempt to introduce proprietary protocols or commercial uses.
Amateur radio has usually been sold to regulators as a way to encourage international goodwill. Setting up a private point to point link is inherently in opposition to public goodwill. Like the difference between zoning real estate for public park to increase public happiness, vs zoning private warehouse space; they can't coexist in the same location.
The FCC provides elaborate services ... to SOME services. If you interfere with aviation navigation signals, ambulance dispatching, or megacorporation broadcasting they have in some cases visited with swat teams. If you have no borders and no categorization there can be no differential services. If some idiot decides to use the middle of the 80 meter ham radio band for broadcasting and spectrum enforcement is a free for all then nothing will work for anyone anymore. This was the justification for a TV broadcast license costing roughly 1e5 times as much as a ham radio license, which also makes problems. The real estate analogy is no zoning at all of any kind usually doesn't sell very well to endusers once its explained what will happen. No one likes excessive zoning regulation, but none at all is usually worse.
We're exiting a local maxima of personal freedom and for most of the lifespan of the technology the idea of letting people say what they want on the radio is on the downswing along. The easiest way historically to deal with "this speech is not a hate crime if spoken in Morocco but is a hate crime to be heard in Germany" or similar was always to make encryption illegal thus abstract out the technology of radio. This also helps with espionage. If its illegal to send encrypted codes (internationally and locally), and you don't send any, its kinda hard to get prosecuted for sending CP or industrial secrets or hate speech or whatever.
Your link isn't arguing that encryption being prohibited is silly, it's arguing that proprietary protocols like D-STAR are effectively "intended to obscure the meaning of the communication" (for profit rather than secrecy) and shouldn't be allowed.
My understanding was under one interpretation encryption was always permitted by the FCC on ham bands over 50mhz but by a 2:1 majority common wisdom within the community (and the ARRL itself) hadn't come around to this line or reasoning[1]. Specifically encryption is not allowed if it's "for obscuring meaning except for the following circumstances" of which authentication and securing network operations are two. I would want some legal precedent or an amendment to the code before weighing on this too heavily to see which of the two interpretations takes priority.
That article isn't the final word but it's interesting following the work of the broadband-hamnet folks - particularly in Texas[2]. They mostly say one can't use encrypted traffic. They are however relaying IP traffic but imply one shouldn't use https.
During National Emergencies (like now?) a lot of the rules around call signs, power, and presumably encryption fall by the wayside. In practice it looks like the FCC grants per disaster waivers[3].
Your guess is as good as anyone's; it's US-only but I would expect some other countries / regions to follow for at least part of the band if not all of it.
Do most routers and other wifi devices need a new frontend to leverage the new band? Or could they conceivably receive a firmware update to unlock this?
I'm curious how Ajit Pai squares his faith in the property rights-based Coase Theorem approach to spectrum management with increasing the unlicensed bands. It's probably a dissonance a politician (despite his background, that's what Pai effectively is, now) can't be bothered with.
The cynic in me notes that unlicensed, Mhz-range spectrum would have been a game changer and created a serious challenge to incumbent cellphone and broadband companies. Unlike Mhz spectrum, the 5Ghz spectrum he mentions (as an alternative) in that old opinion and the 6Ghz spectrum in the recent notice is limited to private usage within a building. You can't do anything long range, not even from down the block--at least not in a commercially viable way. Using unlicensed Mhz spectrum you could provide competitive broadband directly from the street (if not further), removing all the expense of leasing or running wires to people's homes or paying extremely costly fees to incumbent cellphone companies.
I reconsider what I said about dissonance: there is none. His past and current positions are consonant with the view that rivalrous spectrum usage is best resolved by auctioning private property rights in spectrum--the classic Coase approach. By effectively being limited to within structures, 6Ghz spectrum isn't rivalrous even from a person in Pai's perspective.
Note: I went to George Mason Law school which has a faculty that's extremely active in the FCC spectrum debate, and I know Pai is intellectually (and in some cases personally) friendly with some of that faculty. The faculty are vehement advocates for private spectrum auctions. I've had more than one intense debate advocating for more unlicensed spectrum usage and none of them were the least bit kind to that approach. But that was 10 years ago; perhaps opinions have softened since then.
One is frequency, the other is bandwidth. So 1.2 GHz of band width in the 6GHz band.
The actual frequency band is 5.925 GHz to 7.125GHz[1] which is 1.2GHz from bottom to top (that is how "wide" the band is)
That spectrum is broken up into channels that can be up to 160 MHz wide which allows for a lot of data all at once, but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does do don't think of it easily covering your house.
Wrong. 20MHz is the channel width (bonded together to make 40, 80 and 160MHz aggregate channels). There are three non-overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz band (so 60) and "many" in the existing 5GHz allocation. In some countries there's an extra usable channel in 2.4GHz. Once you bloat up to 160MHz (which is needed to achieve the highest marketing speeds) it is hard to find clear gaps in today's 5GHz because it isn't contiguous.
> but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does
I was under the impression that the higher the frequency, the more energy the wave has, and thus does a better job of passing through walls. Is that incorrect?
That is incorrect. If a electromagnetic wave can penetrate stuff is not a linear function. E.g. visible light can not penetrate through a body but higher frequency such as x-rays can, however in the microwave spectrum it's different. Somebody said that short waves are really low frequency and can therefore go around the world, however they can really only do that because they cannot penetrate the ionosphere and are reflected back. In certain parts of the EM spectrum you can make certain assumption.
It's actually the opposite. Shortwave (3-30Mhz) goes around the world whereas a high frequency such as 5G (5Ghz) cell data you have to have a node on every light pole.
Shortwave is 100 to 10 meters wavelength compared to 5G which has wavelengths measured in millimeters.
A radio station emitting long waves can be heard almost anywhere on earth. With poor quality, of course. I used to listen to radio stations at 20 000 km away for fun.
With a decent enough antenna setup, the quality isn't poor. I've had stations come in super clear from eastern europe while I was sitting in southwest Wisconsin using an antenna that was just a bunch of speaker wire thrown up into a tree.
5 and 6 should be similar in terms of range at same power levels. BUT, 6 GHz will have lower transmit power than 5 GHz until database aspect of 6 GHz is built. Still great though..
To be pedantic, there are the thermal effects, which is why the EIRP is limited to a number low enough that the normal blood circulation can take away the extra heat, even in more sensitive parts like the eyes.
The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz.
Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2.
I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems.
[0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work.
[1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan-blue...