Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) News

Interview on Plutopia News Network Podcast

Plutopia News Network - STEVE STROH: BROADBAND ACCESS

(April 29, 2021) With Scoop and Jon, technology writer and broadband consultant Steve Stroh discusses broadband access, rural wireless Internet providers, satellite-based Internet, fiber networks, and much more.

“If you can get fiber, do it. Because it is the best, highest quality – not just fastest, but it’s the best option for broadband Internet access. Because, basically, it’s pure data. You’ve got a pair of glass fibers dedicated to you, typically straight between your house or business and the central office. Or wherever it’s going to be hubbed out of. It’s immune to electrical interference, it’s generally immune to everything – water doesn’t bother it, it’s not shared with other people, and about the only thing that can take out fiber is squirrels or backhoes.”

Steve writes about about Broadband Wireless Internet Access systems and technology. In 1997 he started a column about wireless for Internet Service Providers called Wireless Data Developments in Boardwatch Magazine in April, 1997. He’s currently thinking and writing about Independent Broadband Networks, small broadband networks usually in rural areas.

Direct link to MP3 audio file of the interview:
https://media.blubrry.com/plutopia_news_network/s/plutopia.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Steve-Stroh.mp3

...

My wonderful wife Tina frequently accuses me of under-promoting myself, and I'm guilty as charged. I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago as soon as it was publicly available.

This interview was a fun conversation with Jon Lebkowsky, a techie of long-standing (exceeding my long standing techie-ness) and his podcasting partner-in-crime Scoop Sweeney on their eclectic podcast Plutopia News Network.

This interview came out of writing my story Why Starlink Will Win Rural Broadband. Jon and I are participants in "a certain online community (which I cannot name)" and as part of the discussions in that community about Starlink, Jon invited me to do an interview. Jon and Scoop were easy to talk to and asked good questions. They teased out the quote which quite dramatically starts the podcast. The hour plus of our conversation flew by quickly.

Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-05-13
Portions Copyright © 2021 by Steven K. Stroh

 

Dish Networks Really Wants To Buy Sprint

It's not googleable (shame on WISPA for poor coverage of their own event) but if you listened carefully during Charlie Ergen's talk at WISPAPALOOZA 2011, it was obvious that Dish Networks was going to be getting into some kind of Broadband Internet Access. Charlie was surprisingly open that Dish was seeing the effect of "cord cutting" and inroads of Netflix, and Charlie invited the attendees to "talk to us about what we could do together".

Flash forward a year or so - December 2012, and Dish gets its hands on some spectrum. So, now that they have some spectrum, they're a now a credible player in Broadband Wireless Internet Access... right? Well, um, no. The pro's snickered, knowing it's HARD to build terrestrial wireless infrastructure on a national scale. Oh, and it's expen$ive! Sure, you can just pull out the money gun and point it at the largest tower companies and fire away... but that gets you the SITES. That's all. Then there's all of the backhaul. And the equipment choice(s). And the Installation. And the Maintenance. And the Network Operations Center. And the Security. And.. And... And...

In short, it's really, REALLY different than the "simple"* bent pipe model of 99.9% of what Dish does. Dish transmits up to the satellites, customers passively receive from the satellites. Scaling from 1 to infinite is pretty possible (assuming you can handle getting and keeping the installers, maintaining minimal installation standards (hint - running satellite coax through a rain gutter is a bad idea - true story from my Father-In-Law's latest Dish installation), and of course the billing issues (always a challenge given the recent cord cutting frenzy causing a lot of churn).

So today's announcement of Dish really wanting to buy Sprint makes total sense. In buying Sprint, Dish buys an existing terrestrial Broadband Wireless (Internet Access) infrastructure. They also buy expertise in managing a terrestrial infrastructure. They even buy a footprint of retail stores where they can co-sell wireless phones and satellite television service. And theoretically, they can blend television via satellite and television via Broadband Internet.

Softbank is good, but Charlie Ergen is meaner, hungrier, and a better dealmaker. I'm betting on Charlie to win in the end.

* Yeah, I know. Not really simple at all. But simpler than trying to build and operate a national footprint terrestrial wireless network.

 

By Steve Stroh

Personal note - it's good to be back. I've missed all of you.

Two Great Articles

I wish I had written both of these articles - they're extremely well written, and they'll give you a perspecitve on wireless that you won't get from any of the conventional sources.

I recommend them highly, and I think they're both exactly correct in their assertions.

Harold Feld - My Insanely Long Field Guide To LightSquared v. the GPS Guys. 

Matt Larsen - Rural Broadband, Picture Essay. 

 

Thanks Guys - you've inspired me to get back on the wagon in the saddle.

 

Steve Stroh

 

Of iPads, BWIA, And The Future Of Small Computers

Slashdot tumbled me onto this excellent blog post by Charles Stross - The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash. I recommend it highly.

Stross seems to have 50,000 foot view of tech, and removed as he is from the day-to-day comings and goings of tech (read his bio - interesting background!) I think he's got a good overall perspective that merits consideration.

Stross posits that Apple's moves to date with iPhone, iTunes, App Store, and now iPad are all part of a master plan to allow Apple to stay relevant in the coming total commoditization of all small computers, operating systems, and applications software. Basically, we'll all have cheap, commodity computers, ubiquitous Broadband Internet Access, and all apps and data will live in cloud services, and we'll all like it that way because we no longer have to be expert enough to maintain the OS and security - all of that will just be part of the cloud services.

Stross makes a compelling argument. He seems to intuitively understand how BWIA changes nearly everything, and how BWIA is is the key to tying cheap commodity hardware to cloud services. I think Stross nails it - he's expressed a kind of grand unification theory of computing f1or the 2010 decade:

• Cheap, commodity hardware
• Ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, Broadband Internet Access (often wireless)
• Cloud computing services that handle anything you want to do

Supporting this...

• Amazon's aggressive moves with the Kindle ecosystem - Amazon wants to, essentially, lease you books via the cloud.
• Netflix is trouncing everyone around with their low-cost streaming of movies, which suits perfectly the way most people want to consume movies purely for passing entertainment.
• Microsoft sees the same thing Stross sees... and is terrified that their lucrative desktop PC cash cow will dry up in the face of no-cost "boot loader" OS' based on Linux that will just act as a cloud computing services smart terminal.
• Google (mostly) proving the cloud computing model with steadily more capable (and seamless updates and bug fixes) cloud-based apps. Google's not perfect, and sometimes they don't get it right... but generally they do.

Stross doesn't come to a conclusion of how he thinks it's going to turn out. But I will.

I don't think Apple's current model of a closed ecosystem for the iPhone and iPad - (desktop) iTunes, iTunes Store, or App store being the only sources of content and apps will stand for more than a few years.

Ultimately the world does want choice, and when there is choice, a lot of people will take choice over the certainty of Apple's approach. One of the things that chafes me about the iPad is that Apple makes it damn difficult to get one's own data onto the iPad. You have to resort to tricks like mailing it to your iPad account, syncing through iTunes (desktop), etc. It would have been trivially easy to include a SD Card slot on the iPad and just mount the SD card as a file system. But that would relinquish too much control for Apple, and in leaving that gaping void in capability, there will be many, many variants of the iPad concepts by other companies. Apple can't sue them all into oblivion (just the stupid ones).

In keeping the iPhone and iPad locked down, I think Apple is playing right into Google's hands. Google can afford to be patient, letting its hardware partners perfect their versions of the iPad, while it continues to encourage "everyone else" to continue refining Android and Chrome OS. All the while making their cloud computing services even more compelling.

I fondled an iPad again over the weekend. Yeah, I want one... but that stupidity of putting up a (purely artificial) wall between the iPad I buy (and then own) and bringing all my data onto the iPad so that it could become truly, incredibly usable to me, is sobering. It's enough to make me want to wait at least a little longer to see if 1) Apple gets the message and loosens up enough to allow people to bring their data onto the iPad, and 2) see the Android / Chrome OS versions of the iPad to start showing up to see how they stack up against the iPad.

Put it this way... I'm an Apple (hardware) customer right now. Apple offers cloud services for a fee, and although I paid for it a while ago, I never used it, and likely never will. I'm also a customer of Google, and don't pay them - the free services are that good.

But if Google said tomorrow that their free services were going to be severely restricted or terminated and if I wanted to continue to use them, I had to start paying...

I'd fumble for my credit card and sign up happily.

Apple and Microsoft don't engender that kind of loyalty and willingness to pay.

And the BWIA angle? In the above scenario, I don't care what Broadband Internet Access I'm using. Home Wi-Fi? Corporate / College Wi-Fi? LTE? WiMAX? 3G? DON'T CARE! As long as I've got some. Isenberg was incredibly prescient that the Stupid Network is what we really need and want. In this, Verizon, AT&T, and all other big carriers are in the "uh oh... commoditization ahead lifeboat with the PC builders - no value add wanted or needed (or willingness to pay) - just move the bits.

By Steve Stroh
May 3, 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Steven K. Stroh

LTE vs Mobile WiMAX - Steve Stroh's Perspective

In the contest between "2.5G / 3G" Broadband Wireless Internet Access systems such as 1xEVDO and HSxPA vs Mobile WiMAX, the outcome was generally a draw.

(Although I'm citing Wikipedia entries as links, there's a lot in their descriptions that I don't agree with, but they're the overall best links that I've found.)

The 2.5G / 3G systems were the outgrowth of the architectural and network constraints imposed by the existing wireless telephony (cellular) infrastructure. 2.5G / 3G provides adequate Broadband Wireless Internet Access, but hardly optimal.

Mobile WiMAX was designed from the ground up to be able to do Broadband Wireless Internet Access. It's designed to support TCP/IP and be much more efficient, scale better, and provide a much more optimal Broadband Wireless Internet Access experience than 2.5G / 3G. Voice capability is provided via Voice Over Internet Protocol, and works well with specific provisions for VOIP in the Mobile WiMAX infrastructure to minimize jitter, latency, packet loss, etc. that all affect VOIP quality.

Summarizing:

• 2.5G / 3G was about backwards compatibility and provides decent BWIA
• Mobile WiMAX provides great BWIA, but no backwards compatibility with existing wireless voice infrastructure.

LTE vs Mobile WiMAX

LTE is merely 2.5G / 3G taken to the next level, with provisions for providing better (mostly faster) BWIA. We'll probably see some test deployments of LTE by the end of 2010, but not widespread deployment until late 2011 or 2012.

By then, Mobile WiMAX will have been in active deployment and continuous evolution and refinement for 4 or 5 years.

On paper, the BWIA experience between LTE and Mobile WiMAX will be equivalent.

But my estimate is that when fully deployed under real world conditions, Mobile WiMAX will prove to be more scalable with a better BWIA experience.

In real world deployments, LTE loses out because it will inevitably be subject to the constraints imposed by compatibility with the existing wireless voice infrastructure. LTE will have to work with the existing billing systems, existing authentication systems, existing management systems, existing backhaul, etc.

But Mobile WiMAX will "lose out" because it won't be deployed by major carriers in first world countries. In those situations, LTE will be the overwhelming choice because of its backwards compatibility and comfort factor to the carriers of "the same old vendors we're used to" providing compatibility, training, support, etc.

All that said, I think there's one last factor in LTE vs Mobile WIMAX that may prove to be the most significant long term: deploying LTE requires an entity with the resources of a telco. By definition, LTE systems are designed to be part of a, and rely upon a telco's infrastructure - voice routing through a telco switch, for example.

Mobile WiMAX can easily be a standalone system, potentially as simple as a single site with a single Internet connection, and scales up from there relatively easily. That why there's a lot of Mobile WiMAX being deployed - that you'll never hear about. A lot of carriers in developing countries that have deployed GSM systems and wanted to provide BWIA have done the math and decided not to disrupt their efficient and cost-effective GSM voice infrastructure, and instead deploy Mobile WiMAX rather than LTE.

I think we'll have a schism between the LTE / Mobile WiMAX for the foreseeable future, with each technology becoming dominant in their respective niches:

• Mobile WiMAX infrastructure being deployed in smaller markets markets by entrepreneurial companies, and developing nations
• LTE infrastructure being deployed in larger, mature markets in developed nations by incumbent, dominant telcos.

Given the relentless march of Moore's Law, BWIA user devices will eventually merge LTE and Mobile WiMAX to work with infrastructure of either, just like Wi-Fi eventually combined 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios for the same price as 2.4 GHz only.

Yes, given the relentless march of Moore's Law, the user devices could will eventually merge the two technologies so user devices work with either, just like we saw Wi-Fi grow to encompass 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios for the same price as 2.4 GHz only.

But, at the current level of technology, we won't see combined LTE/WiMAX; we haven't even really seen combined GSM/CDMA (other than devices having two completely separate radios in one case, at twice the cost.

But, for the moment, just like we haven't a merging of GSM and CDMA technology into low-cost end user devices, the same will be true for the merging of LTE and Mobile WiMAX end user devices.

We will eventually see LTE/Mobile WiMAX/1xEVDO/HSxPA it eventually, but it'll take a few more years of technical evolution.

(My thanks to DLH for pointing out the really awkward prose in that last paragraph.)

By Steve Stroh

Copyright 2010 by Steven K. Stroh. All rights reserved.
It's OK to excerpt from and link to this article, but please be considerate and don't copy it wholesale without obtaining permission.

Television Broadcasters Need To Embrace Whitespace Usage... Or Else

In his post White spaces could be the broadcaster's best hope, Brough Turner says, in part:

But fighting the White Space Coalition is short sighted. The NAB faces a much bigger and more powerful enemy — mobile operators.

The White Spaces Coalition merely seeks permission to use spectrum where NAB members are not using it, i.e. on a non-interference basis as "secondary users" with purely secondary rights.  

The mobile industry wants it all.  They'd prefer that broadcast spectrum be taken back and auctioned off for mobile use.

I saw the same thing Brough sees, back in March 2008 in a post called The White Space Sucker Punch in which I said, in part:

What the CTIA knows in its filing is that television broadcast white spaces is merely a brief stopgap on the way to severely consolidating the television broadcast spectrum(s) considerably more. Remember that there were originally 83 television broadcast channels. 70-83 became the original (analog) cellular telephone band and the 800 MHz public safety and commercial two-way radio bands. Now we've given over channels 52-69 to more commercial and public safety communications use. It's just a matter of time ... and demand... before there's yet another round, or two, of further consolidation of television broadcasting and "freeing up" of, say, channels 31-50 - a further 120 MHz.

But license-exempt communications use of television broadcast white space would make another reallocation of television broadcast spectrum totally impossible! Once there are millions of license-exempt devices (and networks of devices) out there "in the wild", they couldn't be recalled. The television white spaces would be "forever polluted" for the kind of "stupid wireless" command-and-control communications systems that wireless telephony technology uses. WiMAX is no different than wireless telephony systems in this regard - there are no "cognitive" capabilities in "licensed" communications systems because the license is "the intelligence" in the system that insures that systems function well and don't cause interference. Cognitive techniques, on the other hand, assume that there will be interference, and accommodate interference when it does occur... and keep working.

The wireless carriers are thinking strategically... that's why they're positing the current problems in delivering reliable service as a "lack of spectrum" issue. They have allies within the FCC that are sympathetic to that position. (That the FCC is sympathetic is a byproduct of most FCC personnel being lawyers and thus seeing "spectrum as property", and the wireless carriers [arguably] need more spectrum/property, but that's a discussion for another time.)

In comparison, the television broadcasters are thinking tactically, that they don't want to share their spectrum with white spaces usage. They think they're winning the fight by requiring Whitespace devices to use a central database and a "Mother, May I ?" "permission-to-transmit" paradigm, but that paradigm will just make it very easy to "clear out" those devices when television broadcast spectrum is reassigned yet again to wireless communications use. What the television broadcasters need to do is to acquiesce to uncoordinated (but non-interfering) usage from not only Whitespace devices, but also things like neighborhood television transmitters (even lower power than low power TV, and usage by Amateur Radio operators.

That's... if they want to stay in the "spray modulated RF energy across a wide area" business. Eventually, they won't be. The question they have to ask is if now is the time they want to be forced into consolidating their operations into an even smaller chunk of spectrum from the onslaught of the wireless carriers. If yes, then they'll keep fighting Whitespace operations and won't invite Amateur Radio operators to use their spectrum on a non-interference basis.

Steve Stroh

If I Was In College, And Interested In BWIA...

I recently had an undergrad student in India contact me to critique his application letter for US Grad Schools. While he knew some of the buzzwords, he didn't seem to know much about what was really going on in BWIA. Here's some advice for students in a similar position.

1. Get an Amateur Radio license and get on the air in some capacity, even if it's a 2 meter portable working through repeaters (but you'll have more fun experimenting with things you didn't imagine possible, like SoftRock. This isn't just advice for US students - Amateur Radio exists in almost all countries. You'll learn more about the real world of wireless communications actually getting some hands-on experience than anything you'll learn in a class. The physics of wireless are universal, like the relationship of frequency vs wavelenth vs antenna length. You'll learn simple, but profound things like that when you try to build an antenna that actually works the way the Matlab model says it should.

Some words of warning that shouldn't be required, but unfortunately... are. Amateur Radio is infested with way too many crusty old farts who just seem to hate the idea of someone under the age of sixty getting an Amateur Radio license to use "their" frequencies for something other than Morse Code (CW). Just get your license and proceed to ignore them and use Amateur Radio to learn and experiment. You have as much right to be using Amateur Radio spectrum as the old farts. More right, in my opinion, in fact, because students are the future of Amateur Radio, if it's to have one, and they're the past.

A good start / challenge is to get Amateur Radio digital gear up and running using Linux, and then proceed to write some "good stuff" for Amateur Radio with open source / Linux code. Two great pieces of software I recommend highly are D-RATS and Xastir.

2. Become familiar with all of the work that you can possibly find about the use of open source software and hardware as it applies to wireless communications. Gnu Radio is a great place to start.

3. Off the top of my head, some promising areas of research related to BWIA that a grad student could dive into, in my opinion, are:

• Self organizing wireless mesh networks and peer-to-peer wireless networks
• Use of IPv6 in wireless networks
• The license-exempt spectrum allocation model, and why it works. Bonus points and personal attention from me if you can ferret out an explanation of my Darwinian Effect of License-exempt Wireless and give me a cogent synopsis. (And for those of you really paying attention... GREAT topic for a thesis.)
• Software Defined Radio
• "Smart" (adaptive) antenna systems / Phased Array Antenna systems
• Use of 60 GHz band for both LAN and point-to-point metro use
• New generations of satellite technology (we're never going to fiber the entire world)
• Coexistence of 802.15 wireless technologies with 802.16 wireless technologies
• Adaptive use of bands occupied by licensed systems, like television broadcast whitespace
• Use of license-exempt systems in a coordinated way (using cheap GPS receiver chips as a highly accurate timebase) to create wide-area coverage similar to cellular
• User-scale wireless mapping systems that can plot coverage of wireless systems (which could then feed in to adaptive antenna and dynamic power control to help fill in the gaps)
• Wireless "maker" devices that can combine license-exempt services in new and innovative ways like citizens band radio, Family Radio Service, MURS, pico-power FM broadcast transmitters, Zigbee, wireless USB, etc. (look it all up - you're supposed to be good at research)
• What went wrong... and what went right with Metricom Ricochet (bonus points, and again, personal attention from me if you can ferret out the original inspiration of Metricom Ricochet)
• Another great topic for a thesis is why the US Military RADARs are vulnerable to interference from simple, cheap 5 GHz Wireless LAN devices.
• "Stealth" wireless communications techniques - if you can't be "heard", likely you're not causing interference.

4. Dive deep into the capabilities of some of the more advanced wireless chipsets, like Atheros. I've been told that talented engineers have made the Atheros chipsets do things that even Atheros didn't know was possible. It also helps to learn what's possible by picking just a few good companies and learning the capabilities of their various product lines as representative of what's possible in BWIA. Two such companies that I recommend highly are Redline Communications and Dragonwave. You'll quickly realize why I recommend studying those two companies in particular. One last company to study... that's incredibly innovative in its own niche is MikroTik.

5. Do whatever it takes to utterly divest yourself of the notion, beloved in the legal industry, that spectrum is a finite resource or "property". Read all you can about what David Reed has to say about the subject.

6. Find the nearest Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) and intern with them for a summer, or a quarter. Like Amateur Radio, it will be some of the best fundamental knowledge you could ever hope for. Consult WISPA to find one nearby.

7. When you think you have enough perspective about something related to BWIA, write a book(let). Yes, really. Numerous services make it incredibly easy - Lulu, Booksense, Cafe Press, etc. Do not pay a company to "help" you - just get it out there using one of these services. If may never sell more than a handful of copies, but you'll be out there with some perspective, and you may be surprised at the results. Hint... books on demand never need become obsolete. When you've learned that some of the things you originally wrote were wrong or incomplete, revise it into the 2nd edition... then the 3rd, etc. You can do such things with a print on demand model. Hint - price the first few editions low - you're not trying to make (lots of) money - you're just trying to establish credibility. Once people have bought your book(let), you're an actual published author.

8. Form a wireless Special Interest Group at your school to meet face to face once a month or so to talk about wireless-related tech. This kind of personal interaction pays incredible dividends. Find some interesting people - cellular reps, wireless equipment vendor reps, all are delighted to come to talk to groups.

9. Try to attend a big wireless conference like CTIA Wireless or even IWCE. Believe me, I know that they don't make it easy for students or anyone but deep-pocketed corporate types, but it's really worth attending if you can find a way to get in free. Bonus points if you're hands-on enough to be able to figure out why anyone with any interest in wireless communications would want to spend an often-rainy three-day weekend in Dayton, Ohio every Spring.

10. Join IEEE as a student and soak up as much knowledge from IEEE and its member organizations as you possibly can. The IEEE has a lot of different groups (societies) related to wireless, and the IEEE standards organizations such as IEEE 802.11, 802.15, and 802.16 have, essentially, created much of the wealth of wireless technology we now enjoy.

If you use any of the advice to further your academic career and/or find it useful, I'd enjoy hearing about it, either in the comments or via email.

Steve Stroh

My Twitterbate With @wirelessmics

I was off work today for illness - something struck me suddenly and I can't stray too far from a bathroom, and I'm pretty dehydrated at the moment. So, as I slowly sip liquids to fix the dehydration, I enjoyed a rare "long session" in my home office in front of the big desktop computer. I was catching up on my Twitter tweets, and found myself enjoying a spirited debate with @wirelessmics about an apparent petition to the FCC by the TV Broadcast Band Whitespace industry-to-be.

In fairness to @wirelessmics, I haven't followed the day-to-day goings on with whitespace and wireless mics of late, but I feel that I'm familiar enough with the issues from my following the emergence of the whitespace rules, and how the wireless microphone industry shaped those rules to its requirements.

I have no idea who, or what, is behind @wirelessmics, only that they said in one of their last tweets, that they're not a PR agency as I accused. My bad.

In the exchange below, I've tried to maintain the order of the exchange, as shown on my Twitter feed (@bwianews), and I'll let the respective tweets, and viewpoints, speak for themselves.

The following exchange is ordered most recent / conclusion, at the bottom.

@wirelessmics is in bold

@bwianews (me) is in italics.

I've edited out the headers and timestamps for readability. I tried to get the ordering of the exchanges right, but if not, apologies to readers and @wirelessmics.

"Twitterbate" begins:

wireless devices "accept interference" but work...despite some transmit delay...a wireless mic with transmit delay is broken

changing the fcc's wireless mic rules will make (some) companies money, but damage live performance and art (cont'd one more time)

(some tech lobbyists) now want the fcc to make wireless mics "accept interference" like other wireless devices (cont'd next tweet)

parallel thought...music/movie piracy (@fightpiracy) undermines artists rights so that someone else gets the money...(cont'd)

Wireless mic vendors want to keep making simple, cheap-to-make, stupid FM xmitter / receivers. Don't blame 'em - PROFITABLE!

So... If wireless mics cannot evolve to forward error correction than there's ultrawideband and 60 GHz - lots of room there.

forward error correction requires more bandwidth - not less
   
see today's tweets about delay and retransmission - wifi/phone transmission techniques don't work for mics
   
efficient mic tech (spectral efficiency) will come, but mics can't be wifi-type devices - fcc rules are correct now

if you move mics to 60 GHz - existing mics would become paper weights? that sound fair to churches/schools/musicians?

Many existing wmics ARE now paperweights because wireless mic industry kept selling mics that operated in TV ch 51-69.

That FEC requires more bandwidth, not less, would be news to the entire digital communications industry.

FEC is redundant data in stream i.e. more data no retrans. (less bw for delay tolerant data, more bw for real time data)

Problem is that Ch 51-69 are now allocated for two-way communications, not (mostly vacant) TV transmission.

Shure gives rebates to replace now obsolete microphone systems - http://tiny.cc/4PxW4

FEC is interleaved realtime - entire point is that it doesn't require retransmission or delay.
   
fcc rules now (good) ch 51-69 gone - there is now a lobby for mics to "accept interference" in 2-51 - new (bad) change

Wireless Mic industry arguments remind me of the minicomputer industry on the eve of PCs becoming powerful enuf for most jobs.

Wireless Mics could have had AMPLE protection from interference by using beacons, but rejected that during FCC investigations.

mic data is real time AND hi-res - repeat, it's not wifi data (delay tolerant) or phone data (lo-res)

Your marketing dept. is a bit confused - FEC is not incompatible with realtime and high-resolution.

Apologies... your lobbying department, not marketing department, is a bit confused...

the fcc rules as written work fine - there is lobby to change (brand new) whitespace rules http://tiny.cc/9h98J explians

Expecting the follow block from @wirelessmics any second now.

wont' follow block - a debates a debate - multiple technical ways to make mics work - but they work where they are

FEC is very compatible with realtime and high-resolution - over fiber where its used for video

mics DO have AMPLE protection from interference in the FCC rules - wthout beacons - we're in favor of FCC rules as-is
   
FEC is interleaved (and more data - my words) realtime - it doesn't require retransmission or delay (correct - my word)

Point being that whitespace devices will provide new services to a vastly larger population, not just a tiny # of wmic users.

And... And, wireless mics could have had ample protection from whitespace devices using beacons, but rejected beacon approach.

And it's understandable that wireless mic industry should try to block progress because they haven't updated their tech.

The TVBD rules are less than 9 mos. old (see http://tiny.cc/y0lAn) after 5+ years lobbying. Changes now aren't progress.

wmic industry will evolve their tech - "Darwinian Effect of License-exempt Wireless". If wmics work poorly, people won't buy.
   
Yes, understood that wmics are, technically, a licensed service, but wmic industry enjoyed not having licensing rqmt enforced.

Thanks to @bwianews for today's discussion (we all have to work sometime and i do now).

Welcome to "Internet Time" :-) whitespace industry is seizing "bias towards action and progress" of Obama Admin and new FCC.
   
Put it this way... if Bluetooth can be made to work in 2.4 GHz junk band, with LOTS of users, than wmics can use better tech.

RT Learn about wireless mics and new TV spectrum regulations http://tiny.cc/y0lAn Already these new FCC rules are under attack by lobbyists!

wmic industry just doesn't want to change its tech - it's comfortable and profitable. Change is hard and uncomfortable.

RT parallel thought...music/movie piracy (@fightpiracy) undermines artists rights so that someone else gets the money...(cont'd)

RT (some tech lobbyists) now want the fcc to make wireless mics "accept interference" like other wireless devices (cont'd next tweet)

Some smart engineer will soon see the margins of wmics and invent Bluetooth, 5 GHz, UWB, or 60 GHz wmics (all with FEC) - $$$.

Yes, propaganda must be served to keep collecting PR fees from wireless microphone industry. Everyone's gotta make a living.

I'm not a PR agency - and you believe Google/Microsoft/Dell/Motorola/HP don't engage in "propaganda" about this issue?

Editing by Steve Stroh. No copyright claims.

David Isenberg Explains Why I've Always Called It Broadband Wireless INTERNET Access

David Isenberg is a must-read for me - he's one of the five or so "read whatever he writes, whenever he writes, right away" people that I follow.

So I saw his talk / article this morning, and it really resonated (more than usual).

Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat is a great explanation, and validation, of why I've always called what I follow and write about...

Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA).

Most others call it Broadband Wireless Access (BWA). Others call it Wireless Broadband.

But from the beginning, I've called it Broadband Wireless Internet Access, because I think all four words are required to explain exactly what it is I'm talking about.

Broadband - has to be fast, otherwise it doesn't do much for you. Slow Wireless Internet Access is better than nothing... OK for email, but that's about it. You simply can't do very much with slow Internet Access these days - Google's Gmail wouldn't work, for example.

Wireless - there's a lot of situations where wireless makes a huge difference in "routing around" the unavailability of wired Broadband Internet Access, the unaffordability of wired Broadband Internet Access, or just basic reliability other issues... like when your wired Broadband Internet Access provider(s) decide to charge you userious rates for (gasp!) actually using your wired Broadband Internet Access account for completely legal things like downloading High Definition (HD) movies from Netflix or iTunes.

Internet - Isenberg makes this point very well:

In the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're connecting every person on this planet with every other person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute our small planet's limited resources. 

Put another way, if the Broadband (whatever medium) Access isn't Internet... it doesn't matter. Isenberg doesn't make reference as to why a lot of promising vital services went down to ruin, like AOL, Compu$erve, The Source, MCI Mail, even a favorite example of mine, PC Mag Net... they were closed ecosystems that ultimately paled in comparison to the riches of information available on the Internet.

Access - In the end, it matters that you can get to it by ordinary people. In my mind, that definition excluded things like backhaul, Intranets, etc. but I've since concluded that backhaul and Intranets are valuable for ordinary people, so my definition of Access has expaned to encompass backhaul and Intranets.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2009 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).

Android As Trojan Horse

Google's not perfect. It's making mistakes all the time. Sometimes it realizes its mistakes. Other times it doesn't (it has a horrible history with respect to Broadband Wireless Internet Access). But one thing Google has gotten right... sooner and faster than its competitors in the computing and Internet industry is to put heavy lifting of computing "into the background" and enable lightweight applications that need little more from the operating system than to support TCP/IP communications, printing, and a web browser.

Google has contributed two key technologies to that end - Android OS, a Linux distribution with a small footprint (both memory and CPU usage), and Chrome, a browser that does things so well it immediately (to me) feels like this is how a web browser should be. I'm using Chrome on a PC at work, and even in its current, incomplete form, it's incredibly usable... and fast. I can't wait for Chrome to be fully ported to the Mac.

But the vast majority of analysts, commenters, and observers overlook the true nature of Andoid - that it's not going to remain "confined" to mobile devices. Because Android is open source, it will be able to morph into devices much different than the classic "pocket portable" mobile device.

Android will become a major force in a new generation of inexpensive and simple desktop computers. Google's backing will combine with attention that is being paid by third parties that want to use Andoid on their mobile devices to fixing the deficiencies and lacks in Android that Google has overlooked. Combine those underpinnings of speed, efficiency, and things that only "Google Scale" can provide, like an App Store, comingled with stellar efforts in Linux desktop usability like Ubuntu, and the stage is set for a new generation of simple, inexpensive, ubiquitous, "desktop" computers.

Of course... what enables this scenario is Broadband Internet Access... and Broadband Wireless Internet Access will have a fundamental role to play.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).