From the automobile to the television set, technological breakthroughs often have demanded legislative breakthroughs. This is an era of profound and far reaching breakthroughs in wireless communications. I congratulate Senator Pressler for rising to this technological challenge by providing the necessary legislative breakthrough: a set of proposals for spectrum reform that will go far toward opening the way to dramatic advances in spectrum technology. I fervently support his five major initiatives — spectrum privatization, spectrum management cooperatives, spectrum bloc grants to states, federal spectrum convergence under the FCC, and most important of all, flexible frequency sharing, as opposed to exclusive frequency assignments.
A crucial complement to the Pressler proposals is is the conversion of broadcasters — now endowed as spectrum hoarders and analog polluters — into more efficient and profitable users of cable coax and the limitless infrared spectrum of fiber optics. As Nicholas Negroponte has been pointing out for the last six years or more, in his famous proposal for a “Negroponte Switch,” broadcasters should moue onto wires and voice telephony into the air
As Paul Baran formerly at IBM and now at Sun observed in his keynote speech to the Marconi Centennial Symposium in Italy, “The major spectrum hog [and spectrum problems is analog broadcast TV transmission.” Senator Dole also targeted this problem in a bold speech two months ago. Congress could give every existing broadcaster free access to cable at a cost at least $70 billion lower than the cost of letting broadcast tycoons have exclusive control of 485 megahertz of prime microwave frequencies.
Furthermore, Congress should bring to a screaming halt the oppressive new telecom tax of federal spectrum auctions. If you subsidize something, you get more ot it. If you tax it, you get less. The US government is now punitively taxing telecom innovation. As Eli Noam of Columbia puts it, “We can agree that governments should not subsidize telecommunications under an industrial policy. We also should agree that government should not extract huge new taxes from innovative telecom companies.’ As Noam points out, this policy will surely backfire when other countries around the world begin taxing American telecom companies for their use of the so called “natural resource” of spectrum. Sure enough, the UN is now contemplating this global “resource” recently discovered and sanctified by the taxers and spenders of the US government.
Senators, the air is not a “resource.” It is the environment. The value of electromagnetic frequencies is entirely created out of thin air by the inventors of new radio and computer technology. Your job is to prevent it from being polluted by obsolete high powered smokestack emissions from analog
transmitters.
All existing spectrum policies have become obsolete as a result of radical new technological breakthroughs in wireless telecopy Converging with advances in cheap and powerful computer technology, radio is now returning to a pivotal role in technological progress. At the very moment of a fa W ish fixation with the radio frequency spectrum–aroused by the FCC’s auctions of some 200 megahertz worth of licenses for new cellular Personal Communications Services (PCS) plus an amazing proposed giveaway to the world’s leading analog polluters–new radio technologies are devastating all the most basic assumptions of spectrum regulation. At a time when the world is about to take to information superhighways in the sky, plied by pollution free data-planes, the FCC is in danger of building a legal infrastructure and protectionist program for information smokestack industries and diesel locomotives.
Even the language used in describing the auction betrays its misconceptions. Spectrum is described as “beachfront property” and the auction as a “land rush.” The basic assumption is that spectrum is like real estate; many people cannot use the same frequencies at once. Radios are assumed to be infectious, high powered, and blind; each needs to be quarantined in its own spectrum slot.
New technologies from companies such as Steinbrecher Inc. in Burlington, Massachusetts, Airnet in Melbourne, Florida, Motorola in Schaumberg, Ill., Arraycomm in San Jose, and Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego overthrow this paradigm. Not only can multiple radios operate at non-interfering levels below the threshold of noise but they can also see the signals of other users and moue to avoid them. If appropriately handled, these technologies can render spectrum not scarce but abundant. These developments make it retrograde to assign exclusive spectrum rights to anyone or to foster technologies that require exclusivity. Except for the nearly infinite expanse of contiguous waves, spectrum no longer shows any of the features of beachfront property.
Think of it this way. In the field of spectrum technology, we are in the midst of a transition resembling the moue from railroads to cars early this century. A railroad is hard wired and circuit switched; only one train can use a particular stretch of tracks at one time. Railroads have to be run and governed by a centralized authority, overseeing use of a particular network of connected tracks.
A highway, by contrast can accommodate thousands of automobiles, trucks, campers, bikes, motorbikes, and vans at one time, each under its own power and control. What makes the superhighway function without top down control? Essentially, it’s smart antenna technology: human eyes.
Human eyes are smart antennas with a bandwidth of some 300 trillion hertz or cycles per second of spectrum. Human eyes scan the road and assure that cars do not collide with other vehicles, interfere with them, or drive them off the road. With every car responsible for its own domain, a superhighway can accommodate scores of thousands of vehicles at once, each going to its own destination.
A receiving antenna is like a pair of human eyes: it converts photons into electrons, electromagnetic waves into electrical energy. The difference until recently is that eyes are smart: they have 10 billion neurons integrating and interpreting their electromagnetic signals. Until recently , radios were dumb and blind. Thus you needed a separate radio for every frequency channel or road, and you needed to keep the way completely clear of other vehicles. Broadcasters for example, use obsolete analog signals that require megawatts of power yet cannot endure the slightest interference; they require a 50 decibel signal to noise ratio, or 100 thousand to one. Thus these blind analog radios have to control exclusively their spectrum. Similarly cellular phones today in the US usually need exclusive use of wide spans of spectrum and can only reuse frequencies in one out of seven cells.
Companies using obsolete blind radio technology–and experts in the old analog systems–haue persuaded the government to sell them exclusive licenses to spectrum. Think of them as railroad magnates prohibiting the use of cars. You can t have cars on the road, they say, cars will crash into each other, drive each other off the road. They will speed; it will be chaos. Sound familiar? I have spent hours at the FCC listening to government spectrum experts make similar arguments about the chaos and collisions that could result from a new spectrum regime that follows the inspiration of Senator Pressler’s proposals: his flexible frequency, frequency overlay, unlicensed frequency, and cooperative frequency management plans. All imply the sharing of spectrum like the sharing of superhighways or even the sharing of the air.
I’m sure that if the FCC had to assign an exclusive span of air for each person to breathe, we would all be gagging and wheezing today. We would be holding urgent Senatorial sessions to contemplate the crisis of scarce oxygen. People talk about spectrum as beachfront property., If the FCC controlled beach sand, we would all be running out of silicon for our microchips.
For a different model, contemplate the 40 million cordless phones in the US, all sharing the same tiny sliver of spectrum with burglar alarms and other appliances without significant interference. Consider the scores of thousands of unlicensed user of the ISM bands (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical), using spread spectrum technology to share frequencies. Then consider the rapidly advancing technology of smart radios–radios with antennas like eyes that can scan broad ranges of frequencies and use whatever lanes or slots are open on the highway.
Digital radios can function with a signal to noise ratio under 10 to one–ten thousand times lower than analog broadcasts. These smart digital radios change wireless from a radio business to a computer business, and that makes all the difference. With smart radios, it makes no more sense to award exclusive frequencies than to award exclusive rights to the air.
Smart radios–often called software radios or broadband digital radios–are the hottest single technology in wireless. The leading technical publication in the field, EEE Communications magazine, recently devoted an entire issue to them, noting in the editor’s introduction that several articles had been withdrawn at the last minute because they contained crucial business secrets. Donald Cox of Stanford University–formerly Bellcore’s inventor of PCS technology–predicts that over the next five years these technologies will reduce the average capital cost of a cellular customer from $5555 to $14. Last month the pioneering smart radio company–Steinbrecher Corporation of Burlington, Mass.–was bought for $93 million by the fastest growing major telecommunications equipment supplier, Tellabs.
Over the next five years, smart radio equipment will completely obsolete all the assumptions that currently govern spectrum policy. Broadband basestations that can handle a large variety of frequencies, protocols, and modulation schemes will proliferate around the world, allowing bandwidth on demand for internet access anywhere and for cheap new wireless local loops.
Even the technical difference between wires and air will largely disappear with the emergence of space division multiple access technology which can isolate a single call in a cell. Both wires and air will be seen as channels for photons. Some photons will run at infrared frequencies down fibers with limitless bandwidth over long distances, and some photons will link through the air to local base stations at microwave frequencies for mobility. Senator Pressler’s visionary proposals are a crucial first step to this new of digital wireless communications.
By contrast, the FCC is fostering a real estate paradigm for the spectrum. You buy or lease spectrum as you lease a spread of land. Once you have your licence, you can use it anyway you want as long as you don’t unduly disturb the neighbors. You rent a stretch of beach and build a wall.
With these technologies available, however, the FCC should not be giving exclusive rights to anyone who makes the highest bid. Instead, it should be imposing a heavy burden of proof on any service provider with blind or high powered systems who maintains that he cannot operate without an exclusive license, who wants to build on the beach and keep everyone else out of the surf. In coming years, it may even be appropriate for the FCC to make all the proponents of Time Division Multiple Access, whether in the American or European GSM systems, explain why the government should wall off spectrum for them at a time when exclusivity is no longer needed or desirable. The wireless systems of the future will offer bandwidth on demand and send their packets wherever there is room.
At the same time that new technologies make hash of the need to auction off exclusive licenses, Qualcomm, Arraycomm, Steinbrecher, and other companies also radically attack the very notion of spectrum scarcity on which the auction is based. Smart radios make it possible to manufacture new spectrum nearly at will. By putting a multiprotocol-basestation on every telephone pole and down every alley and in every elevator shaft, the cellular industry can exponentially multiply the total number of calls that can be handled. Dropping in price at the pace of Moore’s Law, these minicells can operate at 900 megahertz or six gigahertz just as well as at the 2 gigahertz range being auctioned by the government. It is as if Reed Hundt is auctioning off beachfront property, with a long list of codicils and regulations and restrictive covenants, while the tide pours in around him and creates new surf everywhere.
Still more important in view of the coming auction, this capability of smart radios joins spread spectrum in allowing the use of huge spans of spectrum that are ostensibly occupied by other users. The smart radio can range through the gigahertz reserves of the military and intelligence services, UHF television and microwave, and direct usage to the many fallow regions. Together with spread spectrum, which allows as many as 32 users in a particular frequency band and cell at once, and which permits 100 percent frequency reuse (all frequencies can be used in every cell), the broadband digital radio system changes the very nature of spectrum “ownership” or renal.
Unrestricted to a single band or range of frequencies, smart radios can reach from the kilohertz to the high gigahertz and go to any unoccupied territory. As such radios become the dominant technology, the notion of spectrum assignments allotted in 4887 specific shards becomes a technological absurdity.
In his speech at the radio centennial, Paul Baran summed it up: “There really is no fundamental reason for a shortage of UHF spectrum…the frequency shortage is caused by thinking solely in terms of dumb transmitters and dumb receivers. With today’s smart electronics, even occupied frequencies could be used…The present regulatory mentality tends to think in terms of a centralized control structure, reminiscent of the old Soviet economy,” where everything was scarce.
We should instead adopt the Internet model that is currently reshaping the entire landscape of information technology. The Internet accomodated a 1600 percent rise in traffic in 1995 without breaking down. In the Internet, there is no central node, no hierarchy of control, only a heterarchical system with minimal housekeeping functions at the center. A similar system for spectrum could emerge under Senator Pressler’s visionary proposals for a new world of wireless progress.