Re: It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless Spectrum

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: May 16, 2007 2:09:02 PM EDT
To: "'David P. Reed'" <dpreed () reed com>, "'Bob Frankston'"  
<bob37-2 () bobf frankston com>
Cc: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com, "'Dewayne Hendricks'"  
<dewayne () dandin com>
Subject: RE: [IP] It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for  
Wireless Spectrum

If you want to carry a television signal over a long distance then  
use that
darn Internet. The problem is that we have layers upon layers of  
simplifying
assumptions and we pile them on instead of rethinking. This is a key  
point
in Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe" (a DPR recommendation).

We tend to solve problems as if they exist in isolation. We do need to
decompose problems in order to deal with them but there isn't a unique
decomposition and we have to be open to rethinking the decomposition.

In the early 1900's the first decomposition was to assume that
"communications" is a unit. We then decomposed that into voice and  
video. We
also had wired vs wireless. The accidental properties of wires led us  
to use
them for one-to-one communications because they were point to point
connections. Wireless signals couldn't be contained hence they were
broadcast to all. It doesn't help that "radio" and "telephony" are  
now used
to describe business rather than technologies thus making it hard to  
talk
about the basic assumptions separate from the market assumptions.  
This is
why TV over wires is not treated as a point to point medium -- it was
originally implemented as shared antenna system and our policies  
continue to
make that implicit assumption.

Today this decomposition is extremely dysfunction. We now understand the
concept of bits as a common representation for information and that is a
very effective point of decoupling as we've seen with the Internet.  
We can
then use packets to organize the bit transports.

This decoupling of the communications from the bit transport (as in  
TCP/UDP
vs IP) is very hard for people to accept because we base our  
understanding
on the naïve assumption that we are simply relaying sound waves through
electronic tubes. There is assumption that you must preserve the
relationships between the bits as in isochronous and QoS models. This  
was a
defining assumption for analog telephony and the solution,  
eventually, was
digital telephony and then packet telephony. We treated the answer as  
way to
make analog telephony work better without using the new understanding to
question whether we were asking the right question in light of our
understanding. Digital technology freed us from the constraint of
isochronicity and thus allowed us to get many orders of magnitude in
improvement (by various measures). But it was an answer the put a lie  
to the
decomposition that defined the industry that asked the question in  
the first
place and thus they had a stake in failing to understand the answer they
got.

Once you decouple the bits from the interpretation you can view wired  
and
wireless bits indifferently and can dispense with the complexity and  
expense
of slicing and dicing the transports and the use of special kinds of  
wires
and gear for each particular message.

Yet we continue to argue as if it is still 1934 and every bit is  
special -
sort of like the $100 Japanese Honeydew Melons but far pricier.

These concepts extend far beyond "telecom" into our basic  
understanding of
how systems work. The isochronous assumption has a parallel in the
assumption that we have to solve problems as stated and that if any
component fails the system fails. Thus the Y2K scare and the presumption
that we must govern systems lest people do things the "wrong" way --  
alas
wrong often means finding that we've solved far more interesting  
problems --
we may have wanted a guidance system for airplanes but we got digital
computers instead. We presume music comes from record companies and not
musicians and thus we preserve a particular industry structure rather  
than
allowing for musicians to be heard.

Telecom is useful case study because it's a simple problem and the  
price of
continuing to live in 1900 is higher than we should have to bear.

Too bad this fight over slivers of spectrum is treated as if it were any
more real than the rest of professional wrestling. The entertainment  
value
doesn't make up for the collateral damage.



-----Original Message-----
From: David P. Reed [mailto:dpreed () reed com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 12:40
To: Bob Frankston
Cc: dave () farber net; ip () v2 listbox com; Dewayne Hendricks
Subject: Re: [IP] It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless
Spectrum

To amplify Bob: The standard term for unhooking functions from transport
is "transport independence".

There is no fundamental reason whatever that television pictures work
best over the VHF portion of the spectrum, for example.  (Please don't
start yet another debate about how VHF goes longer distances - I won't
engage unless you can tell me how much energy is in a VHF photon or how
that relates to its diffusion through multiscale structures of building
and living materials and its diffraction through the fresnel zone of the
earth).

There is no spectrum to liberate.  There is no real object called the
spectrum.   There *are* allocations of rights to radiate certain
waveforms - in other words, collections of words on paper that control
the legality of actions that involve applying power to collections of
electronic gear that create electromagnetic waves - and those
allocations are phrased in terms of wavelengths or frequencies and
maximum power at certain locations within the US airspace.

Those allocations of permission (so-called license rights) are indeed
scarce. They are scarce by fiat.  There is a pretense that they must be
scarce because of laws of physics.   However, the laws of physics say no
such thing.

The information carrying capacity of the electromagnetic field is vastly
underutilized as a result of this badly designed system.   It was a good
system in 1934 because engineering barely knew how to use the field and
its waves.  It is not a good system today, knowing what we know.   And
there is a lot more that we could know, if we could invest in improving
the system as engineers, rather than being stopped by ignorance on the
part of lawyers, politicians and "policy experts".







Bob Frankston wrote:
> This is portrayed as a battle between those who want to "liberate"  
> slivers
> of spectrum and those who want to keep control or, to put it  
> another way,
> about who will divvy up the spoils. We're so mesmerized by the  
> theatre of
> this epic battle that we don't ask whether spectrum allocation  
> makes sense
> either as a basic concept or the way we approach it. This spoils model
> provides fodder for Cleland to call openness closedness.
>
>
> Even if think spectrum allocation is necessary for technical reasons
(though
> as David Reed and others point out, it's not) tying bits to the path
> minimizes the value by designating particular service providers as  
> owners
> rather than providing common paths for bits.
>
>
> It's also annoying that that the story itself shows a lack of
understanding
> of the cellular industry. One of the major "advantages" of CDMA is  
> to fix
> the bug in GSM that gave the user an even break -- you must indeed use
> instruments approved by carriers in order for the carriers to deign to
allow
> you to use "their" network. As I've pointed out, just because my  
> phone lit
> up four bars in Australia, Telstra wasn't going to annoy Verizon by
letting
> me use my phone.
>
>
> The article doesn't seem to show an awareness that a GSM phone fATT  
> (faux
> ATT) would work just as well on T-Mobile. It's likely that fATT will
> disabled this to prevent the phones from being used on other networks.
> There's also the question of what protocols the phone uses for its
services
> and whether they are network-independent. I don't know the answers  
> though
> hope to learn them soon.
>
>
> Too bad the article is fixated on the theater of the wrestling match
rather
> than providing or solid information about the particulars and about  
> the
> larger issues. No matter who gets these slivers of spectrum we'll  
> all be
> losers.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 09:26
> To: ip () v2 listbox com
> Subject: [IP] It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless
Spectrum
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
> Date: May 16, 2007 3:58:14 AM EDT
> To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for
> Wireless Spectrum
>
> [Note:  This item comes from reader Randy Burge.  DLH]
>
> It's Silicon Valley vs. Telcos in Battle for Wireless Spectrum
> Frank Rose Email 05.16.07 | 2:00 AM
>
> <http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/05/uhf_spectrum>
>
> Apple's iPhone may be the most eagerly awaited gadget of the year,
> but when it finally goes on sale some time next month, only 30
> percent of US mobile phone customers -- those who subscribe to AT&T's
> wireless service -- will be able to use it. Verizon subscribers might
> have had a shot, but executives at that carrier nixed the idea of
> letting an Apple device onto their network years ago. It's as if Mac
> owners had to connect to the internet through AT&T because their
> machines wouldn't work on Verizon, Comcast or Time Warner Cable.
>
> The wire-line internet doesn't work that way, and wireless doesn't
> have to either. By the end of this year, the FCC is expected to start
> auctioning a frequency band that could be used for a wireless network
> that any device -- be it a cell phone, laptop, desktop, TV or toaster
> -- would be able to connect to.
>
> A proposal to build such a network has been presented by Frontline
> Wireless, a startup backed by three of Silicon Valley's biggest
> players: Venture capitalist John Doerr, Google angel investor Ram
> Sriram and one-time Netscape CEO James Barksdale. But Frontline will
> be bidding against behemoths like Cingular and Verizon, and whether
> it has a chance will be determined within the next few weeks, when
> the FCC sets the rules for the auction.
>
> The spectrum that's coming up for grabs is prime stuff: A large, low-
> frequency band that's currently being used by UHF television
> stations, which have been ordered to vacate it when broadcasting goes
> digital in February 2009.
>
> UHF may not be as good as VHF, which operates on even lower-frequency
> spectrum. But it has the ability to carry information through
> forests, buildings, even mountains, regardless of the weather, and
> that makes it ideal for broadband wireless, or for mobile-phone
> service. Ever wonder why Cingular and Verizon, the biggest and most
> successful U.S. carriers, can offer more reliable service than Sprint
> or T-Mobile? Because the big boys already own a large band of
> spectrum near the UHF band, while the little guys are stuck with
> spectrum that operates at double the frequency and is far less
> powerful as a result.
>
> <snip>
>
>
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