The FCC tried to control it all but it made one mistake. It created several unlicensed portions of the spectrum for the intended use by hobbyists – the rest was auctioned off to the highest bidder. However their short-sightedness will ultimately cause their own downfall. While giving a thin sliver of the radio spectrum to the hoi polloi may have been seen as a charitable notion, it will ultimately drive the FCC out of business. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/3954/the-evaporation-of-the-fcc/
The Evaporation of the FCC
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I hope you are right that the FCC will put itself out of business, but I could easily imagine the FCC, like all government agencies, just moving itself into areas it does not currently control. “National security” would probably be the FCC’s excuse, so it can track “terrorists”. When things become popular the government feels a need to move in. Satellite radio is a good example. With Howard Stern moving into that medium, and driving its growth and popularity, a few congressman are already speaking of regulating it’s content. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149692,00.html
All the spectrum the FCC ever regulated was seized from the unregulated spectrum
I’m afraid I see no difference between THIS unregulated portion and the original spectrum, except that the FCC ONCE regulated it.
All the easier for them to take it back, then. The regulators giveth, and the regulators taketh away. Mostly taketh.
Watch out, Mises.org, the moderators over on slashdot.org have allowed something “pro freedom” through their filters.
Hopefully the servers here can take the beating.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/1728259
Several other noteworthy wireless standards which are being implemented are:
- 802.11e – this is dedicated to smoothing out Quality of Service issues so that multimedia services (such as VoIP) can be “handed over” properly, efficiently and effectively to other devices
- 802.11n – this substantially increases the WiFi bandwidth to a real-world 100 Mbps+ rate (and quite possibly 500+)
- Bluetooth 3.0 and Ultra-wideband – these two short-range network technologies are marrying one another and will one day provide fast, secure and reliable ways to whomever weilds the magic living room wand
- WPA2, if you’re worried about security/privacy issues (e.g. your handheld might be hacked) this new standard implements the AES encryption technique to protect your devices from prying eyes and ears (through the use of 802.11i)
- Recently the FCC opened up the 57-64 ghz portion of the spectrum for unlicensed use. This Techworld article has some good commentary discussing the ramifications of such a move
Hey, isn’t it the same with gold? Businesses are given “a charitable option” of accepting payments in gold (say, through e-gold account) on the condition that gold is converted to paper money not at will but on exactly the same day of each week or month. Should we expect that some day “gold hobbyists” will drive paper money out of business?
Thanks to .net 2, and a certain web programmer whose initials are DV-R, we aren’t even feeling the crush. The link again is right here.
The “quality” of comments on the above linked-to Slashdot article is why I no longer bother posting there. Numerous objections to Tim’s critical outlook on the FCC go something like this: “Bandwidth is scarce. Increased demand for usage will make it even more scarce, even if we have innovations. Hence, the FCC has to regulate it.” That is, we need to have socialism for scarce resources. What complete nonsense.
Correction: IPv4 without hacks like NAT can address approximately 4 million addresses, not 4 billion.
Yes, the /. comments relating to economics left much to be desired. Perhaps a stronger case could have been made if Mr. Swanson had concentrated on the economic aspect of FCC intervention, rather than letting technical inaccuracies distract from the message. As it stands, most of the comments are dealing with the latter.
It actually is 4 billion:
IPv4 = 32bits = 2 ^ 32 = 4294967296
Of course some is lost though various conventions, but if it was only 4 million then we’d have been long since out of IP addresses.
Network-designer/manufacture Linksys, has developed a Skype-only phone for home and office use.
Also, Skype is not the only VoIP company that encrypts their calls, VoicePulse (from California) incorporates this feature in all their plans.
Forget about trying to keep up with the tech talk.
I need to go tomorrow to have the lesperson show me how to set up thge voice mail [which means he is going to do it of course].
Z.
Why Have Any Spectrum Property At All!
I agree with others in that “homesteading” of spectrum is a lot better than what the FCC has now. But really, people are more than motivated for spectrum not to intefere anyhow. If you want to communicate wirelessly – you can’t likely do so in a way that interferes with them with out them interfering with your communications as well. There is plenty of motivation for things to work out naturally even without any rules at all. Even if you just spew interference to be a jerk or jam people, that wastes your time effort and money and is vulnerable to technical and location work arrounds or RF improvements. Basically, attempts to controll or interfere are made difficult by market forces.
In fact, to see how silly both “homesteading” and the FCC are, consider the spectrum frequencies we are the most familiar with …. VISIBLE LIGHT! The Sun spews trillions of watts of spectrum interference every second, yet we are still able to communicate visually without any problem at all. In fact, we expolit the sun light as an advnatage. In fact, you could shoot 20 zillion laser beams across the city and chances are they wouldn’t intefere at all, but if they did the information they transmit could still be mathematically seperated without much difficulty. There is no scarcity problem with spectrum even if it is in the same space, frequency, and time. The only scarcity problem is with peoples will to effectively utilize it. So save free markets for the later, not artificial ones for the former.
Not to get hung up by any of the Slashdot comments, one did hit home more than others: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158743&cid=13297478
The poster has some sort of beef with my statement regarding DSS and how it permeates in a 360-degree area evenly. I’m not sure if he’s aware of it, but that is exactly one of the main features DSS sold itself with. For further information, please read: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question326.htm
In fact, I am not the only guy to use that phraseology: “DSS (Digital Spread Spectrum) was a whole new way of sending the cordless phone signal from the base to the handset. It spread the cordless phone signal 360 degrees so there were no dead spots and distance went up to half a mile.” From: http://www.affordablephones.net/HistoryCordless.htm
His other points were superfluous (all he had to do was read that News.com article on xMax to answer all of them).
Actually, everyone should read that xMax article, or this one from Techworld before making any more haphazard comments regarding that technology.
I think the only real mistake I may have made in the article was not being clear about unlicensed and unregulated (an accidental conflation).
I have to admit that the 360 degree statement didn’t flow well. There seemed a missmatch, like saying that something weighs 3 meters. The above, which specifies transmitting *evenly* through 360 degrees clarifies what is said such that there wouldn’t be this seeming missmatch.
Anyway, I too found the pervasive public-school level socialism frustrating, but also a good opportunity to exercise basic argument points.
One last comment, a reader was wondering why I mentioned IPv6 at all. I did not clearly elaborate exactly as to the magnitude this has on the mobile telecom industry.
In a nutshell, an IP address is kind of like a phone number, unique to a particular computing device. Now because each of these devices would be an entity unto themselves, they can in essence, become their own ISP (internet service provider) — that is, if they have the features listed above (read up on MIMO and frame bursting too).
And due to this technologically independent nature of their existence, the network is infinitely scalable.
Then we all transform into cars and fight decipticons.
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