The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons.

There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office.

We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd.

On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation.

Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum.

A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis.

Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.

>Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.

That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical area, and provides the base station and backhaul infrastructure to support their network.

It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room"; it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of that room than T-Mobile does.

The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage and network performance. Sharing spectrum would effectively require mutualization of base station infrastructure. You would effectively have a single monopoly with the networks operating as virtual operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good outcome, to me, at least.

They could share spectrum with different equipment in the same way multiple WiFi routers can share spectrum. The underlying reality is cell networks don’t actually need a lot of spectrum, instead their trading owning a lot of spectrum to reduce the number of cell towers because they aren’t charged the full price of that spectrum. Add some significant property taxes for that spectrum and you bet they would be selling or handing a lot of it back to the public domain.

I bet they would just pass on the extra property tax costs to the customers and keep their spectrum.

> That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it?

I think it can be done at the legal layer - just require roaming agreements between providers. They can already roam across borders so there's no technical barrier.

I'd rather the telephone industry spend $1 on hardware than see them spend $1 on license fees.

The story now is "$80 billion in license fees" and "$20 billion in hardware" and that seems the wrong way around -- when most folks play poker the stakes are supposed go up, not down.

The money is made up! The FCC could sell spectrum for pennies, or give it away, or restrict access to The Right People, or wash their hands of it, or do another auction. They've done all of these things at various points. The license fees are made up.

The way it's now done, will put the spectrum there, where there's the most value. However the result is that it's actually a tax which the consumer will indirectly pay.

> where there's the most value

It's where there is the most money, not value.

> The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons.

That’s the spin.

Yes, the FCC is the steward. But it’s also a bureaucratic, underfunded, somewhat backwards agency.

SIGINT is pretty cool, and FCC has some cool things and people that interact with them, I’m sure. But the outward face of FCC and how they appear to operate seems to have hardly changed in past years. I respect that typically, but it’s like an old bowling alley kind of respect; it’s fun, but it’s old and dirty, and the nachos aren’t bad but they aren’t good. The Lysol sprayed in those shoes is for psychological comfort. You don’t need to know the real reason.

FCC should just bill per joule emitted.

All licenseholders should add up their transmitted joules of energy at the end of the year and pay the FCC. It will be in everyone's best interests to make most efficient use of the spectrum because then they can get their information to its destination with fewer joules.

Devices like home wifi routers should be able to buy upfront a license for X number of joules/year, and the cost of that is included in the purchase price of your router/laptop.

> The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion.

If market rate were justified for everything then we wouldn't even have space reserved for HAMs.

> There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile.

There's plenty of industries with enough demand. There's just no way they can compete with the money that mobile offers. That's a damn shame given that money shouldn't be the only, nor even the main, driver.

I think OP was using a rather consequentialist and capitalist economic model, where the value of a thing is by definition equal to the money that you can get for it on the open market.

Or maybe just that governments rarely pass up on that kind of revenue unless it's a huge PR win, in this case it wouldn't be very noticeable.

This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi standard.

It's our spectrum to sell or not sell. No industry needs to "buy" public bands, we can just decide to allocate them for the public.

It very much depends on which band that spectrum is in. If 400MHz was worth the same everywhere, it's doubtful that amateur radio would have >4.7GHz of it allocated on a primary basis in the EHF band, for example.

Give it time. Once these bands become more utilized, and more hardware gets pumped into the system, this bandwidth allocation for hams will shrink just like it has in every other band. They'll find any reason to reduce these allocations in favor of some industrial monopoly that may or may not even use what it takes (cf. UPS).

Kinda wild that there's such a steep market rate for being allowed adequately communicate over the open air.

What about 5GHz wifi? How does it work?

It "works" but it is a mess. Large chunks of the spectrum require some combination of radar detection and power reduction, and if you live near a radar station you basically cannot use 160mhz wifi.

I will also add that 60ghz works great, but it will not penetrate walls. I have found it penetrates my doors and thus makes a great replacement for 2.4ghz/5ghz mesh networking in my apartment, but not much else.

> if you live near a radar station

This is actually incredibly annoying, especially in a residential setting where the 2.4GHz band is incredibly noisy (5GHz doesn't penetrate as well so it ends up being less noisy).

At that frequency, it becomes really hard to penetrate walls or travel without direct line of sight.

This would be more believable if Dish Network wasn’t squatting on a ton of spectrum.