by supernova
June 22, 2007 at 3:03 am
· Filed under Session Content
Huge shift in broadcast industry with shift to analogue to digital. Most important aspect is that the spectrum vacated by broadcast will be made available. Possible to enter the market quickly into huge greenfield spectrum. Come to market at time that new techs are leapfrogging the incumbents. EDVO etc. bring broadband speeds to people’s mobile devices. Processing power’s rising to a level where a palmtop device can give a desktop experience.
Take all this together, gives an opportunity to change the game, compared to the first-mover incumbents. This is the application industry, very innovative, not about the access layer. Debate in Washington is moving away from that, and the application providers are not going to assume that the access is there, but want the government to guarantee that access is there. But that rapidly comes down to the gov’t setting rate, terms and conditions for access - but those best able to regulate will set conditions and get access to the network. This isn’t the model we’ve seen that’s been successful.
Opportunity for apps people to play in the access layer, to have concepts of open access. If this is what consumers need and want, the carriers will have to provide it.
This opportunity is one that you people in this room have excelled at. Innovation and game-changing business plans shatter the first-mover advantage of the incumbents. If it’s taken, it will change how we view the relationship between application and access layers.
David Weinberger: Great success is broadband, is actually a failure - it’s not an open market, it’s regulated. The market forces you think is going to change things is non-existant. In this group there’s expertise will suggest that opening up a good slot of 700Mhz, free the 700.
JK: The spectrum will be auctions. Network builders will have an opportunity to build on that.
[Audience is disagreeing about whether the gov't should set rates, terms and conditions]
DW: Open up the lines and allow fair rates.
JK: Fair decided by whom? The marketplace.
Audience in unison: There is no marketplace.
Q from floor: You’re saying folks in apps layer should participate in access, perhaps through bidding. What are the alternatives.
JK: There is an opportunity. If open access is a good, then the market will bear that out. participate in the auction, build open access and users will come. If there isn’t, then you’re looking for arbitrage which is inefficient. Recently added spectrum for wifi, aim to have multiple carriers in access layers. If there is consumer benefit, these carriers will make it available. If you are relying on Washington to make your case for you, it will be innovative lawyers who make your case.
Doc: What are the rates, terms and conditions for Wifi? What would have happened if wifi had been auctioned.
JK: We made the wifi spectrum available.
Doc: What was auctioned for wifi?
JK: They weren’t.
DOc: Why can’t we do that in the 700 space?
JK: This is a wide-open greenfield space. More people want to make use than can. Way you resolve that is to open to auctioned. It’s been successful decide. Let the carriers prevail and choose amongst competing standards. Not gov’t decided standards. Massive investment in wifi and wimax. That doesn’t take place if there isn’t an environment that says there’s an opportunity.
Doc: Why not open up some of that spectrum.
JK: Which? We’ve just opened up more spectrum. If there’s spectrum that’s lying fallow because of interference concerns and someone can demonstrate they solve that problem, we can release that spectrum.
Q from floor: I’m not sure you addressed the previous question. Wifi wasn’t auctioned, it isn’t owned by any company, any carrier. Yet I think everybody in this room, or most, would agree that wifi is the most innovative sector in the entire spectrum. So if it wasn’t auctioned and it’s not owned, then there’s no business model, no carrier and no market.
JK: And there’s no network.
Q: So you’re talking about market forces…
JK: But wifi is a local access to get to the underlying network. It doesn’t lend itself to building out broad networks, although lots of innovators are challenging that. But it does not lend itself to building a network to scope and scale.
Q: So you’d make the same arguments for the the last mile of fibre, DSL, cell? These could potentially say those aren’t network either.
JK: Nodes aren’t a network, but tied together they are. If the issue was 5 ghz… to put together a network demands non-regulation, because you can’t have competing interests that need to be resolved in an efficient way. If the gov’t controls the bottleneck, the best way is to resolve in an auction.
[Note: I hope that I took these notes accurately - please comment if I have misheard or misunderstood. There was a lot of jargon and heated discussion.]
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So they spend years trying to grab the 700mhz back from the incumbent only to auction it to another incumbent, probably going to stuck it for another 50 years?
How much allocated-yet-unused spectrum FCC wants to create?
[...] Suw Charman’s notes [...]
You can’t compare 700Mhz or even 5Ghz bands as being competitive with Fiber and DSL. If 700Mhz to 800Mhz will be available that’s only 100Mhz to be shared across a whole metro area. You have to carve it up to do spatial reuse and even then you have to share 10’s of Mhz amoungst a very large population.
Fiber can give multiple gigahertz to every house. Not shared until it gets to a meet point where gigabit switches are cheap.
And as he said, it will be carriers competing for the 700Mhz anyway, so the oligopoly (not market) continues.
[...] Mark Cooper: John Kneuer while running NIST, shamelessly continues with the primary weapon of mass deception — any regulation is total regulation. The Computer Inquiries were light handed. AT&T and later the Bells hated them primarily because they were so successful in promoting an open communications environment that they could not control. [...]
David wrote @ June 28th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
The US broadband marketplace is very much closed. The US broadband definition itself is brain dead. Defining broadband as anything over 200k in one direction is like describing a puddle of water in your driveway as a major inland sea. At best, any given place in the US has two choices for broadband (usually large cities), at worst no choice. Where you have choice, the best price always requires purchasing a bundled deal. Bundling by definition is not optimal for the consumer (less competition between the same service from different vendors and the act of bundling itself raises the entry barrier for smaller players). No major infrastructure player (i.e. cable TV or phone provider) is required to allow competitors access to their hardware (as is the case for most electricity providers). Phone companies used public funds to build their infrastructure and yet still have NOT delivered on their promises of true broadband they used to secure that funding; now they want to charge their customers AGAIN for that increased bandwidth that we already paid for. And all of these issues can be traced back to the corruption in our political system. John Kneuer says that new government regulation would interfere with the marketplace. That is a misdirection. We already have government regulation; the problem is current regulation favors the established players and eliminates competition. In other words, our current regulation ALREADY interferes with the marketplace. What we need is regulation that levels the playing field. And that is what the established players are fighting tooth and nail to stop.
yup wrote @ June 28th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
> You have to carve it up to do spatial reuse and even then you have to
> share 10’s of Mhz amoungst a very large population.
This is a load of gibberish. You clearly have no concept of modern communication. Frequency division multiplexing is neither the only nor the preferred way of multi-user access. Look up software defined radio or cognitive radio to see how spectrum can be shared as a commons.
freddy wrote @ June 28th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
The telcoms fear a self-organizing network composed of nodes owned by the users, like wifi and wimax but with expanded radio-to-radio relay capability. It would be an ever-growing overlay on the net. As hotspots grew, linked and meshed, traffic through the underlying wired network would dwindle. To prevent that they must prevent open spectrum.
n1kko wrote @ June 28th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Telecom obviously has some serious plans with the spectrum, and they will do whatever it takes to grab it. Controlling all methods to provide one type, or even multiple types of services seems like total bullshit.
If I told you that all the donut shops in town were owned by 3 companies, and the bagel shops started selling donuts, those dam donut shops are going to attempt to take the bagel shops. It’s their domain in a sense. But the bagel shops aren’t usuing as much sugar and are made up of less fat, better for the consumer, and cheaper. So the donut shops wage war! A small donut battle takes place, with donut pawns, attempting to set the story straight.
John Kneuer, you are in fact a donut pawn.
Rick wrote @ June 29th, 2007 at 12:27 am
wifi isn’t a good analogy. it’s intended to be short-range, where 700 is capable of long-range. unregulated 700 would be chaos, operators trampling each other even accidentally. wifi by design limits interference. wrogn analogy. compare 700 to wimax or gsm/cdma - u have to manage and allocate these spectra, or chaos reigns.
but the issue of net neutrality and JK’s proposal for the app layer to get involved? B.S. will i need a receiver for Google, another for Yahoo!, and then my cable modem? and a wifi card for the coffee shop, unless they say here, use this access code and you’re on the wimax link? i just laid out maybe 5 different nets. a network for each app player? thats more chaos.
net neut also is an issue about honesty. suppose my cable vendor throttles youtube, and points me via adverts and intercepts to their websites. i complain about youtube, they say they don’t control youtube performance - a partial lie. how can i prove it and ask for redress? and can i? who’s network is it? theirs, cause they built it, or mine, cause i pay for it???
ultimately, net neut is crucial, though if some player comes through in the 700 space and avoids all the problems that lead to throttling, etc, they could drive the others out or force change - the marketplace. sadly, no one can avoid the problems that lead to throttling without spending big for network, and that costs, and there goes the marketplace.
JK also spits out nonsense about spam. one group says 99% traffic is spam. another group says 75% traffic is p2p torrents. who’s right? it doesn’t take an ‘open’ network to know this, just competent monitoring and measurement.
net neut is crucial. throttling will seriously damage internet usefuless, and cost us more $.
m wrote @ June 29th, 2007 at 1:28 am
the telecomm business spreads so much misinformation, it seems to work since a lot of anti-net neutrality complaints i see from the population ( non-lobbyist ) were quoted from their book.
It’s the ISPs responsibility to offer a quality of service for the last mile…
I have no interest in the last mile neutrality ( whatever that means )
what I’m afraid of is the following.
ISPs and media conglomerates will team up together to secure their investments, let’s say company A buys Social networking site 1, company B develops a better site with minimal investment , Company A calls up ISP A, B and C , asking them to slow down access to Company B.
because company A “pays” for priority, it crushes company B..
and how is that a free market?
Bloodshot wrote @ June 29th, 2007 at 10:10 am
For the love of whatever you hold dear, don’t use gray on white for such a small font! Seriously, your eyes don’t hurt after reading this article?
freddy wrote @ June 29th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Rick, range depends on power and antenna directionality. Too much range? Lower the power. 750 MHz is fine for short range. In fact any band is fine for short range. Any band is fine for self-organizing mesh. There is no good reason for what you call management anymore. Mesh controller software can manage better than telephone company and FCC bureaucrats.
Still don’t like 750 for mesh due to some religious prohibition? Swap bands with some other service.
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