Re:The Rent Seeking Economy
by sliverstorm on Monday April 15, 2013 @04:17PM
(#5554016)
How exactly to you propose affordable consumer hardware is going to accommodate hundreds of radios covering the entire range of useful spectrum?
They won't have to. The market would naturally have big players find it in their best interest to organize spectrum interference around their usage, and would avoid ranges used by other big consistent players in a region. The average consumer should barely see any change, besides variable range on their devices as other hardware comes up and goes down in a frequency band they use.
But for use cases that require consistent signaling, or really high throughput, enabling radios that utilize vast swaths of frequencies in parallel can increase the throughput.
Frequency would be scarce in highly concentrated areas in an open-frequency region, but it would be less so than if you artificially restricted access. What would naturally follow is that the demand would distribute itself (within the realm of possibility, ultra low and high frequencies have either range or bandwidth disadvantages that make them ill suited for, say, digital packet signaling).
I also wonder what kind of innovation you might see in an open band environment in terms of wifi - if you weren't limited to the few bands of 802.11, maybe routers would pop up that dynamically enable multiple transmitters (like how a modern router would have multiple antennas to transmit in parallel, maybe you would see many-hundred low power antenna radios to interface with devices over the largest clear possible frequency range available?)