AM radio, FM radio, amateur radio, and television broadcast have quite a lot of spectrum real estate. Are they being used enough to justify this allocation?
Is the gain in bandwidth for your wifi really worth the reallocation?
This change opens up 1200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz.
> quite a lot of spectrum real estate
Amateur radio is scattered all over the place, but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz... ignoring the fact that they are tiny slices, the upper limit of bandwidth you can hope to gain under that frequency is 300 MHz (for all of it), and considering that most of that is not amateur radio, you are going to be gaining a negligible amount of bandwidth that cannot be practically used for a single application because it is not contiguous.
The higher the frequency the more bandwidth is available. For high throughput applications reclaiming these relatively low frequency bands is not useful.
> but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz...
The 70cm band (420-450MHz US) is heavily used. I'm sure cellular services would love it. On the other hand, it is a secondary allocation with other users (e.g. military radars) having priority.
The 23cm band is another secondary allocation, from 1240MHz to 1300MHz-- wide enough for 3 wifi channels. On the other hand, you'd have to kick out the radiolocation service, and it's not contiguous with a big block of channels to make it worthwhile.
Then above that amateur shares frequencies with some of wifi and then microwave frequencies that are so high that they are undesirable.
The 70cm band is just 30 MHz wide in the US. The point was that none of these other allocations are wide enough to be useful for things like WiFi, which is currently using up to 320 MHz channels and needing several of those channels to avoid clashing with other nearby networks.
23cm is under fire in Europe to protect GNSS services from potential interference.
Allowing unlicenced operation there is very unlikely to ever happen.
As in, something that happens to be called Wifi but is IOT focused and doesn't interoperate with normal consumer devices. It's not a wealth of spectrum in any case, and the fact that a lot of the radiolocation services are satellite based ... they're not going anywhere.
Lower frequency means longer wavelength and longer wavelength penetrates structures better. Or is that over simplified? I’d think the goal of reclaiming some of the lower frequency spectrum is not to try and solve bandwidth issues but to augment consumer wifi with more connectivity options for devices and applications where connection reliability is more important than max throughput.
Not to high-bandwidth usage. Such low frequencies have some unique properties, but most of these properties are no longer needed nor useful, and even the cases where you do want e.g. extreme single transmitter range, we can now do that with much higher frequencies and bandwidths in much lower power envelopes than kilohertz transmitters.
It is only valuable in the sense that it is a very limited resource.
Speaking only to spectrum allocation for amateur radio, that service is a critical resource in emergencies, like Hurricane Helene.
The small amateur radio spectrum allocations cover long-wave emissions that can communicate around the planet and short-wave emissions that engage local repeater networks.
Think of it as an insurance policy - communications backup when comm is a life & death matter. Doesn't happen often, but really important when it's needed.
Good point. With that, with Starlink and soon Starlink direct to cell, this capability is becoming much less important in an emergency. Starlink already provides Internet and soon everyone will have satellite capable phone (I assume texting will be prioritized in emergency for bandwidth).
When war started with real capacity nation which did test these, do you think they will just blow up several in that orbital space so we have no low orbit devices if that disadvantage them. I would. Would you.
Let us have some so far neutral zone. Wi-Fi etc does not need those. I am not a radio guy. But let them have it.
And then it all goes down when Elon has a hissy fit.
Amateur radio is by its nature more decentralized. Even if you're using a higher frwquency and dependent on repeaters, they tend to be ran by individuals and independent groups, so you can probably find some way to get your signal through.
Some of that is because those frequencies have special characteristics, e.g., extreme long range propagation. Would you like to have a wifi router that gets interference from 300 km away or requires a certain geomagnetic storm to connect to your ISP?
Actually they don't consume a very large portion of the overall spectrum at all. Nearly all the bands you mention are in the Mhz range or less rather than Ghz and as a result they're not really even suited for WiFi use. The lower frequencies are less optimal for high speed data transfer and also broadcast to a longer range, as well as penetrate buildings more easily than their higher frequency counterparts.
As well as that those bands are already heavily used already - it would make no sense to open these bands up to WiFi.
I am not sure what we would do with the AM band. If it were me, I would very strongly convince half the stations to go dark. Allow the remaining ones to broadcast 10khz, which for some radios and their lucky owners would be a nice, attractive, more compelling signal. Loosen up regulations a bit and see what happens.
Disasters warrant keeping the band for basic news and reporting if nothing else.
FM already has improved audio. Perhaps the same looser regs would bring more people in.
I have often demonstrated that with a thought experiment where there are two stations, one high quality but boring, the other crappy quality, but compelling.
Which one do most people listen to?
But, there is more to it than that. Higher fidelity opens the door for better AD rates and a broader array of appropriate programs.
A smaller number of stations = more per station, very generally speaking.
Television in particular seems ripe to be reallocated. Didn't we go through a whole analog-to-digital conversion over a decade ago that led to TV going through wires instead of through the air?
Virtual Channel Numbers let a station pretend to be on a particular channel number. The actual RF channel number doesn't need to match. But the channel number you key in using your TV remote does need to match the virtual channel number.
In nearly all populated areas of the US, you can still receive broadcast TV for free over the air with an antenna.
Digital television stations state what "channel" they are in their signal's meta data. That allows them to change frequencies but keep their channel identity. Since TV when digital, many stations have changed frequencies, some several times. You may find the "repacking" of the broadcast TV frequencies an interesting read:
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it would cost me quite a lot of money to view my local free-to-air TV stations over either cable or the Internet, so antenna it is (for the very few times I need it).
In the USA, over-the-air stations may require cable operators to carry their channel at no charge (to the operator) or they may negotiate a charge to the operator, which the operator may refuse. The major stations have chosen the latter. Part of a cable TV bill pays for this (though the stations would day they’re just getting their fair share of the high cable bill.)
I don't know if it's true but someone told me this is the main reason why the likes of Home Shopping Network and QVC keep their over the air transmitters going in many places even though most of their viewers are on cable. It seems like a waste of spectrum space but it's so that they can force the cable operators to carry them.
That's generally not true. US cable and satellite operators are only required to carry the "primary" video feed [1], which is usually the xx.1 channel. In most markets, home shopping channels typically air on subchannels (xx.2, etc.). The exception, of course, would be if the TV station designates the home shopping channel as their primary channel.
Home shopping is usually used to monetize excess bandwidth.
I've heard about that, but I wonder what the economics here are.
Are enough people really willing to pay for the convenience of, I guess, not having to switch between antenna and cable input, or are living outside of broadcast coverage of the stations they care about?
Weirdly, it's exactly the opposite in Germany: Supposedly the public broadcasters have to pay the cable companies to get them to carry their programs.
The average American barely knows how to turn their TV on and off. Switching inputs is a scary prospect. Having rabbit ears on your tv is also def a social status signaling thing.
> Having rabbit ears on your tv is also def a social status signaling thing.
That's what I've long suspected. No wonder it's a great opportunity to save/waste money :)
Supposedly in some social classes and age groups, broadcast TV is literally unheard of, with Best Buy promoting TV antennas accordingly ("free cable!") and people suspecting it's a scam or illegal.
