Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The End of Spectrum

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 10:33:41 -0400

The End of Spectrum
By Kevin Werbach, Thu Oct 02 12:15:00 GMT 2003

There are two basic problems with the rules governing the radio spectrum: there is
no such thing as spectrum, and we don't need any rules.

As we all know, wireless communication can occur because governments parcel out
access to the radio spectrum, a limited resource divided up into frequency bands.
Without governments partitioning spectrum, there would be a cacophony in which no
one could communicate effectively. Agencies like the Federal Communications
Commission in the US must decide who can do what, in which frequencies. The
alternative is chaos.Don't be so sure. Everything I've just said is a lie.
Familiar lies. Lies which were probably worth telling eighty years ago, when the
basic structures of wireless regulation were established. But lies nonetheless.
It's time to tell the truth about wireless communication, and to change the
fundamental framework of wireless policy.Spectrum is an intellectual construct
that helps us grasp a deeply alien phenomenon. We take wireless communication for
granted because it is such a significant element of our lives, and has been for a
century. But how many of us really understand how it works? Radio signals are
electromagnetic radiation, governed by the mysterious laws of quantum mechanics.
Even Albert Einstein could only explain radio by describing what it is not:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in
New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio
operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The
only difference is that there is no cat."

Einstein's "cat" is spectrum. It is the physical medium we imagine carrying radio
waves from one point to another.  When governments assign exclusive licenses to
wireless frequencies, they are carving up the cat among a limited number of users.
(One must hope it has at least nine lives.) Yet there is no cat. Regulators are
actually just telling owners of wireless devices at both ends of the transmission
what they can do with their equipment. Why does this distinction matter? Because,
as deep thinkers such as Yochai Benkler and David Reed have argued, the spectrum
metaphor no longer holds up the way it once did. At the end of the 19th century,
Guglielmo Marconi developed a technique for multiplexing radio signals based on
frequencies. (Before that, only one radio could operate in any location.) Using
frequency bands to separate systems was a design choice, not something inherent in
wireless communication. For many years, though, frequency division was the only
mechanism that was technically and commercially viable. If two radio or television
transmitters were physically close together and broadcast on the same frequency,
receivers would experience interference. Therefore, it was reasonable to regulate
those services by giving them exclusive licenses for frequencies.

Wireless technology has come a long way since

Marconi&#8217;s day. For example, many systems now use spread-spectrum as an
alternative to frequency division. WiFi and CDMA cellular networks are two
examples. In both cases, devices share the "same" frequencies, using computational
intelligence to distinguish one signal from another. The ultimate form of
spread-spectrum is ultra-wideband (UWB).  UWB systems can transmit at extremely
low power, so low that they appear invisible to licensed systems operating in the
same bands. The US Federal Communications Commission authorized commercial
deployment of UWB for the first time in February 2002, and devices should start
coming on the market next year. Other novel forms of wireless sharing include
angle-of-arrival (for example, distinguishing a satellite transmission coming from
overhead and a terrestrial wireless signal moving horizontally); mesh networking
(relaying signals from other users); and cognitive radio (sensing the environment
to find temporarily open "holes," and moving out of the way once another signal
appears).If frequency division isn't the only technical mechanism for
differentiating wireless systems, why should it be the primary method of
regulating those systems? With today&#8217;s technology, rules that grant
exclusive control over frequencies make spectrum artificially scarce. They
prohibit alternative approaches that would not actually create harmful
interference.

The problem is that any set of pre-defined parameters will eliminate some systems
that could increase wireless capacity. Whether a new wireless system can coexist
with existing systems is a fundamentally contingent question. It depends on the
technical characteristics of all the systems involved, and on the types of
services those systems provide. There's no way to build all of that into the rules
ahead of time.So is there any way to exploit the potential communications space
outside of frequencies, while at the same time protecting existing systems? I
think there is. It requires us to borrow from a completely different domain of
law: tort liability. Torts are injuries or accidents. If you punch me in the nose,
I can sue you based on a tort theory. Tort doctrine balances your right to swing
your arm against my right to avoid a bloody nose. No government agency decides
ahead of time how either of us can act or grants exclusive rights to perform
certain actions.A tort-like system could be used for wireless communication.
Every owner of a wireless device would have a baseline fundamental right to
communicate, in any way he or she desired. Others could sue the owner for damages
if his or her transmissions caused harm to their own communications. The legal
system would balance the interests involved to determine who was actually at
fault. The parties would have incentives to take appropriate care and factor the
risks before engaging in any form of transmission. Technical standards or other
baselines could be set as "safe harbors" to protect against liability if followed.
This system could be implemented alongside the existing frequency-based
allocations, creating new communications capacity without undermining legal
obligations and business expectations.With advances in wireless technology, any
set of rules that declares some forms of transmission acceptable and others
unacceptable will be inefficient. Something that interferes today may not
interfere tomorrow, as devices get smarter and more adaptive. So let&#8217;s
eliminate the rules, allow everyone to transmit however they wish, and use a
liability system to deal with conflicts. By killing off the illusion of a concrete
spectrum resource, we would open up massive new opportunities for wireless
communication.

============================================================================

1 comments above threshold

IAWood, Fri Oct 03 12:59:55 GMT 2003

Whilst your article is well written and argued I have to say that the experience
of trying to use mobile telecoms in The States shows that Spectrum is
important!Take a look at Peter Cochraine's article on the silicon site
http://www.silicon.com/opinion/500018/1/6057.html in which he talks about 4G
mobile that fits his model of parascitic networks which think for themselves and
find the best carrier network.This has a long way to go before we can see any of
this. I also think that those who hold telecoms franchises are going to protect
there investment in infrasruture etc.

Regardless of how thin Bush & Co want government to be they are not going to let a
freemarket happen in telecoms, they collect too much in licence fees to allow such
a libertarian systems. Just an opinion but I think I can defend it!
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100112

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---

From: "Todd Ellis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 11:14:01 -0400

Oh goodness.  This writer's philosophy is more than somewhat flawed.  Going
well past the obvious, let me provide the absolute worst-case scenario I
have found in a real-world environment.  No rules??  Who needs stinkin'
rules?

In the Arabian Gulf region of the Middle East, you have a cluster of
nation-states such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Iran, Pakistan, and
the UAE.  This area is roughly the size of the eastern coastline between New
York and Philadelphia.  Each nation-state has its own operating group for a
Ministry of Posts, Telephone and Telegraph (MoPTT).  Each MoPTT issues
licenses and states rules for operation of radio devices.  

Now here's where it gets hairy.  Many of the rules governing use of the
radio systems do not mesh.  Aside from that, there is no complex, engineered
frequency coordination to speak of in any of these countries, let alone an
inter-coordination between nation-states.  So what happens then, with the
mish-mash of rules and little if any frequency coordination?

Here's what happened to me.  A customer, an oil company owned by two Middle
East nations and one Asian nation decided to install a unique two-site
multi-channel simulcast ship-to-shore radiotelephone system that me and my
team engineered.  During the initial tests (this was back in '95 before I
had access to propagation prediction tools) I had to physically be present
to "drive test" the system - across an area of about 4,000 square miles.  It
was a daunting task, but I was given "command" of a 60-foot, 17-knot ship
for a week to do what I had to do.  I got a great tan in the process, and
ask me about the lobsterfest sometime.

The base stations were located at a land location with antennas at 350 AGL
and 45 miles offshore at 200-250 feet AGL, depending on the tide.  Each
channel was operating at about 25 Watts ERP at 350 MHz, 25 KHz channel
spacing.  My ship's antenna was at about 25 feet above the water line.  As
soon as we got about a half mile from land, we started hearing a lot of
chatter on our test frequency.  In Arabic.  Oh no.

At 50 miles offshore, the signal never abated.  Ours did what it had to do,
and well.  However, the other signal was capturing our land/offshore signals
and it was getting intolerable.  Saudi Arabia had issued our license.  Where
was this other signal from?  One of the oil company executives had joined
me, and realized from the radio calls that this guy was from a taxi company
in Kuwait.  He decided to chat with the dispatcher, who was getting very
irritated by all of the English *on his channel* that was interrupting his
duties.  In Arabic, they got into an interesting debate whether either party
had the right to use the channel, which party was going to get off the air,
and what kinds of gymnastics each other's mothers were capable of in the
late evening hours.  The taxi company was operating at 350 Watts ERP and was
probably being heard nearly everywhere within a hundred miles or more of
coastline.  

Worse yet, in an article I wrote back in '95, I mentioned sporadic E in the
Gulf.  Some reports state that weather patterns, geography, and lots of luck
attribute to E cloud formations that can last as long at *8 hours* in
duration over the Gulf.  That means that VHF high band transmissions in
Pakistan at the northern tip of the Gulf can be heard all the way to the
Strait of Hormuz at the southern tip, clear as a bell. 

And Kevin says we don't need any rules or regulations.

Todd Ellis

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 10:34 AM
To: Urban Technology & Telecommunications; [email-masked]; WFHSG
Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The End of Spectrum

The End of Spectrum

There are two basic problems with the rules governing the radio spectrum:
there is
no such thing as spectrum, and we don't need any rules.

As we all know, wireless communication can occur because governments parcel
out
access to the radio spectrum, a limited resource divided up into frequency
bands.
Without governments partitioning spectrum, there would be a cacophony in
which no
one could communicate effectively. Agencies like the Federal Communications
Commission in the US must decide who can do what, in which frequencies. The
alternative is chaos.Don't be so sure. Everything I've just said is a lie.
Familiar lies. Lies which were probably worth telling eighty years ago, when
the
basic structures of wireless regulation were established. But lies
nonetheless.
It's time to tell the truth about wireless communication, and to change the
fundamental framework of wireless policy.Spectrum is an intellectual
construct
that helps us grasp a deeply alien phenomenon. We take wireless
communication for
granted because it is such a significant element of our lives, and has been
for a
century. But how many of us really understand how it works? Radio signals
are
electromagnetic radiation, governed by the mysterious laws of quantum
mechanics.
Even Albert Einstein could only explain radio by describing what it is not:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his
tail in
New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And
radio
operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them
there. The
only difference is that there is no cat."

Einstein's "cat" is spectrum. It is the physical medium we imagine carrying
radio
waves from one point to another.  When governments assign exclusive licenses
to
wireless frequencies, they are carving up the cat among a limited number of
users.
(One must hope it has at least nine lives.) Yet there is no cat. Regulators
are
actually just telling owners of wireless devices at both ends of the
transmission
what they can do with their equipment. Why does this distinction matter?
Because,
as deep thinkers such as Yochai Benkler and David Reed have argued, the
spectrum
metaphor no longer holds up the way it once did. At the end of the 19th
century,
Guglielmo Marconi developed a technique for multiplexing radio signals based
on
frequencies. (Before that, only one radio could operate in any location.)
Using
frequency bands to separate systems was a design choice, not something
inherent in
wireless communication. For many years, though, frequency division was the
only
mechanism that was technically and commercially viable. If two radio or
television
transmitters were physically close together and broadcast on the same
frequency,
receivers would experience interference. Therefore, it was reasonable to
regulate
those services by giving them exclusive licenses for frequencies.

Marconi&#8217;s day. For example, many systems now use spread-spectrum as an
alternative to frequency division. WiFi and CDMA cellular networks are two
examples. In both cases, devices share the "same" frequencies, using
computational
intelligence to distinguish one signal from another. The ultimate form of
spread-spectrum is ultra-wideband (UWB).  UWB systems can transmit at
extremely
low power, so low that they appear invisible to licensed systems operating
in the
same bands. The US Federal Communications Commission authorized commercial
deployment of UWB for the first time in February 2002, and devices should
start
coming on the market next year. Other novel forms of wireless sharing
include
angle-of-arrival (for example, distinguishing a satellite transmission
coming from
overhead and a terrestrial wireless signal moving horizontally); mesh
networking
(relaying signals from other users); and cognitive radio (sensing the
environment
to find temporarily open "holes," and moving out of the way once another
signal
appears).If frequency division isn't the only technical mechanism for
differentiating wireless systems, why should it be the primary method of
regulating those systems? With today&#8217;s technology, rules that grant
exclusive control over frequencies make spectrum artificially scarce. They
prohibit alternative approaches that would not actually create harmful
interference.

The problem is that any set of pre-defined parameters will eliminate some
systems
that could increase wireless capacity. Whether a new wireless system can
coexist
with existing systems is a fundamentally contingent question. It depends on
the
technical characteristics of all the systems involved, and on the types of
services those systems provide. There's no way to build all of that into the
rules
ahead of time.So is there any way to exploit the potential communications
space
outside of frequencies, while at the same time protecting existing systems?
I
think there is. It requires us to borrow from a completely different domain
of
law: tort liability. Torts are injuries or accidents. If you punch me in the
nose,
I can sue you based on a tort theory. Tort doctrine balances your right to
swing
your arm against my right to avoid a bloody nose. No government agency
decides
ahead of time how either of us can act or grants exclusive rights to perform
certain actions.A tort-like system could be used for wireless communication.
Every owner of a wireless device would have a baseline fundamental right to
communicate, in any way he or she desired. Others could sue the owner for
damages
if his or her transmissions caused harm to their own communications. The
legal
system would balance the interests involved to determine who was actually at
fault. The parties would have incentives to take appropriate care and factor
the
risks before engaging in any form of transmission. Technical standards or
other
baselines could be set as "safe harbors" to protect against liability if
followed.
This system could be implemented alongside the existing frequency-based
allocations, creating new communications capacity without undermining legal
obligations and business expectations.With advances in wireless technology,
any
set of rules that declares some forms of transmission acceptable and others
unacceptable will be inefficient. Something that interferes today may not
interfere tomorrow, as devices get smarter and more adaptive. So let&#8217;s
eliminate the rules, allow everyone to transmit however they wish, and use a
liability system to deal with conflicts. By killing off the illusion of a
concrete
spectrum resource, we would open up massive new opportunities for wireless
communication.

Whilst your article is well written and argued I have to say that the
experience
of trying to use mobile telecoms in The States shows that Spectrum is
important!Take a look at Peter Cochraine's article on the silicon site
http://www.silicon.com/opinion/500018/1/6057.html in which he talks about 4G
mobile that fits his model of parascitic networks which think for themselves
and
find the best carrier network.This has a long way to go before we can see
any of
this. I also think that those who hold telecoms franchises are going to
protect
there investment in infrasruture etc.

Regardless of how thin Bush & Co want government to be they are not going to
let a
freemarket happen in telecoms, they collect too much in licence fees to
allow such
a libertarian systems. Just an opinion but I think I can defend it!
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100112

---

From: Todd Marshall <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 10:55:55 -0500

The leading buggy whip manufacturer of 100 years ago now makes fishing 
line. Drywall has replaced lath and plaster. Romex has replaced aluminum 
conduit. PVC has replaced iron pipe with screwed joints. Two pilots fly 
airplanes. Trains no longer have cabooses. Grocery scanners are ubiquitous.

In every one of these cases we heard "This has a long way to go before 
we can see any of this."  And in each case the way to go was made long 
by people saying (and seeing to it that) "This has a long way to go 
before we can see any of this."

As an old person who as seen many moons and has few left before all 
light dims, I wish we would just grasp the inevitable and embrace it. 
After putting spectrum squatting behind us we still have anti-gravity to 
work on.

Lets get on with it.

Todd Bjorn Marshall
Spring, TX

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---

From: sparkie_rf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 01:16:20 -0000

--- In [email-masked], "Todd Ellis" <tellis1@n...> wrote:
> Oh goodness.  This writer's philosophy is more than somewhat 
>flawed.  Going well past the obvious, let me provide the absolute 
>worst-case scenario I have found in a real-world environment.  No 
>rules??  Who needs stinkin' rules?

Just wait next week, this nut is going to be calling for the End of 
Traffic lights.

One thing that does strike me here is that these nutjobs are too 
focused on the technology. The challenge is how do we organize 
people to pursue opportunities. Chaos is not a good coordination 
strategy.

Furthermore they completely ignore how we got to the present. 
Companies invested BILLIONS in these networks, the capital markets 
would've NEVER organized that amount of capital for the irrational 
pursuit of chaos. Just reflect on the dotcom bubble, that era didn't 
finance hard assets, that era fleeced the gulible.