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Four Stories About Spectrum
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Tuesday, June 08 @ 16:31:16 EDT Telecommunications
In the last couple of days, I've seen four particularly interesting stories about spectrum allocation policy. Let me see if I can do them justice in a quick roll-up post:
  • First, this piece on interference between cordless phones and 802.11b WiFi, both of which use some of the same ("unregulated") pieces of spectrum. The phones seem to win: under the total-energy rules the FCC imposes, older devices tend to win. (See here for a quick tutorial on interference issues with spread-spectrum devices.)
  • Second, the same sort of problem is happening in airports, where WiFi-based baggage handling networks, phone stores, and WiFi for the travellers all bump up against each other. Here, the airports, as the nominal owners of the real estate, have been trying to establish some rules creating geographic segregation between these different uses of the same frequency bands.
  • Journalist Declan McCullagh thinks that it's all the FCC's fault. If individual pieces of spectrum were in private hands (Declan wants them divvied up both geographically and along the spectrum range), the owner of each chunk could impose rules to prevent this kind of emergent, unexpected interference.
  • David Isenberg of Wireless Unleashed agrees that the FCC should go, but wants it replaced with a commons, not with a property right. People shouldn't need anyone's approval, be it the FCC or a spectrum "owner," to set up cool new applications.
My thoughts inside . . .

Why do these four stories belong together? Because the first two stories are both indictments of the current system and cudgels that the "property" and "commons" proponents wield against each other. And because Isenberg ends with a point that tends to get dropped in the spectrum wars:
The question remains whether the low-level technology is operating properly. So there's still a need for a Federal Device Commission. Because the Internet architecture creates a clean separation between the physical medium and the application by interposing Internet Protocol between them, the Federal Device Commission would have a much simpler task. It would regulate simply to provide unabridged freedom of speech and the press simply by regulating the well-specified physical-layer properties of devices.
This point is important, folks. The problem with spectrum right now is that the FCC is forcing all sorts of application-layer issues into the physical layer. Not only does the FCC tell TV stations at what power they can broadcast, it also tells them that they can only send TV signals -- and not, say, scrap their TV station to set up, say, a bunch of radio stations, or an IP multicast, or whatever. The resulting inefficiency hurts us all.

At the same time, neither a pure "property" nor a pure "commons" system will actually get the government out of the business of regulating spectrum. It'll just get the government into something easier to enforce. Declan's geographic divvying up of spectrum will still need power-limiting rules to keep neighboring regions from swamping each other; David's Device Commission will need to make sure that devices in a particular area of spectrum use compatible technologies. Both of these roles are divorced from application-level decision-making: the agency tells you the basics of how your devices will transmit and receive, but doesn't try to interfere with the content you transmit and receive.

 
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