The Future of Wireless Broadband?

Adroit Ape asks: "The FCC is scheduled to begin auctioning the radio spectrum salvaged from analog television by February 28, 2008. Public interest groups are calling for auction rules that give new entrants a fair shot at the spectrum, which includes 60Mhz in the 700Mhz band. Are we likely to see groundbreaking innovation in wireless broadband? Who do you foresee to be the major players in the auction and subsequent technologies?"

Just let them keep the power down

[mrcaseyj]

The beauty of 802.11b is that the power is low enough that the spectrum can be used by many people at once. If you need long range you can use a high gain antenna. If you use an omnidirectional antenna, your signal wont go far enough to screw up too many other people. Also don't make the 802.11g mistake and make the whole spectrum one big channel so that just one user can screw it up for everyone. Also don't let the channels overlap like they do with 802.11b so that one user can ruin two of the three available bands.

Re:Wait..

[c4colorado]

The Federal Communications Commission is a department of the US Government that regulates RF transmissions in the borders of the USA.

The money collected for this goes to the government and is used for administrative costs such as issuing licences, tracking down violators and other general expenses.

Over the years since we first started modulating RF energy to send encoded data and voice transmissions the FCC has grown to regulate many other aspects of broadcast media. As it relates to your question, the various frenquency bands need to be regulated because, as we all know, you can't just trust people to "do the best thing".

The FCC allocates frequencies for radio stations, commercial, H.A.M Radio, various consumer technologies such as 802.11x, CB, walkie-talkies (usually implemented on the CB bands), cell phones, and just about anything that transmits a radio signal of any kind. These frequencies can become very crowded and oftentimes overlap (for example H.A.M Radio operators are allowed to transmit on 2.4 GHz in the same band that wireless networking is allocated).

At one point the bands were allocated according to what they determined to be the "Best Public Use" (or something like that). Now they just auction it off to the highest bidder. Some qualifications and guidelines are set out for both who can bid and what the frequency can be used for, how much power they can transmit on that frequency, etc.

FCC Aucitons Website: http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=a uctions_home [fcc.gov]

Re:Groundbreaking or not...

[popeyethesailor]

Maybe that's just a lack of understanding? Most banking websites rely on transport-layer security(SSL-TLS). The transmission medium hardly matters here. Even if someone is eavesdropping on a wireless signal, they'd need to break SSL-TLS to get yer data. you are far more susceptible to phishing and spyware attacks compared to wireless hacks.

Re:Groundbreaking or not...

[AlXtreme]

While certainly no encryption is unbreakable, I still believe I fare better odds placing my data on hard wires, where individuals would have to be specifically targetting it, rather than letting it flow free and open into the air for all to capture and (attempt to) abuse

Don't forget about Van Eck [wikipedia.org] phreaking. Even by using a computer monitor, you are already sending out data than can be captured without having to tamper with any wires.

*runs to grab his tinfoil hat*

Re:Just let them keep the power down

[markov_chain]

802.11g uses the same channelization as 802.11b.

Re:Just let them keep the power down

[nuintari]

Also don't let the channels overlap like they do with 802.11b

Yes they do.

802.11anything is poorly suited for broadband delivery. It was designed for roaming around your home or office with a laptop, and performs steadily worse the more customers you add to the access point. Omni directional antennas tend to have problems with the "invisible neighbor," which is a well known 802.11 problem that occurs when two client radios off the same AP cannot see each other, and as a consequence do not receive "clear to send" packets with any reliability, and end up transmitting at the same time. Even sectorized radios with long range customers eventually develop the problem. The timing used for 802.11 is completely useless, allows one radio to monopolize most of the timing slots without any special tweaks, it just happens.

The beauty of 802.11b is that the power is low enough that the spectrum can be used by many people at once.

Yeah, that is why I can't use 2.4 ghz band for anything, because 802.11 is noisy in its own little tiny voice way, there is a shitload of it deployed, and there are a dozen wisps in every city who seem to think that the solution to all the problems they are experiencing with 802.11 for long range delivery is "more power!" Yeah, people amp the living hell of of their gear, which causes more problems when their competition has to amp their gear to compensate, so they amp their client side radios, more problems, competition amps their clients, more problems, I could go on and on.