> People streaming HD video from cell towers is simply crazy.
Most people aren't objecting to rationing, per say. (Though, misleading advertising of available bandwidth does lead to disappointed customers.)
What most are objecting to is unequal provisioning of bandwidth. This incentivizes users to use a VPN (doubling aggregate bandwidth consumption) or use steganography to make the traffic look like voice calls (at significant reduction in transfer efficiency).
Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
Instead, they're doing the exact opposite... encouraging P2P developers to encrypt the traffic and then use the ciphertext bitstream to drive an Nth order Markov model that makes it look like compressed voice or HTTP traffic... sort of LZMA in reverse. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game where even the cat loses in the end.
> Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
So what you're saying is, I can run a few iptables rules on my phone and prioritize all my traffic ahead of everyone else's? Sweet.
QoS in a LAN is fine, QoS using untrusted devices just plain doesn't work.
By all means, have a great time with your high priority 56 kbps, you amazing haXX0r, you, while my background phone app install gets wildly swinging bandwidth between 0 and 2 Mbps, averaging 750 kbps. That's the reduced bandwidth portion of my comment. Give the application the ability to make explicit bandwidth vs. latency tradeoff decisions, or at least hints, that the routers otherwise need to make via heuristics.
Sure there is, it just wouldn't fly here. It's the same solution to the last-mile problem. You stop carving up the spectrum into tiny chunks. Government owns the tower and all spectrum coming out of it, runs the fiber back to a central pop, cellphone carriers tie into that pop and route traffic appropriately - (the access is sold on a per-tower basis to recoup the costs). Lowers the barrier to entry for new providers and should create actual competition based on services instead of based on who has the most money to buy up and sit on spectrum.
The only reason we even have real competition at this point is because the FCC blocked AT&T's acquisition of tmo. That NEVER would've been blocked in our current climate.
In layman terms, if we built domes and increased the pressure slightly by pumping in more air then we would have increased the amount of air around us and raised the limit on how much air we have to allocate.
Define "usable frequencies". You are making pretty ridiculous sounding claims btw. I would rather believe that we can max out cell tower wired connection bandwidth, than completely saturate radio frequencies. Obvious solution, as non-professional, is to use more towers/higher frequencies. Give more information, if you want people to believe you. Go technical and say how things really are, no need for that "layman" stuff.
Modulation is already taken into account when talking about channel capacity. If you don't have any kind of modulation you essentially just have a sine wave and can't transmit any data.
The number of bits per hertz is bounded by the amount of noise in the signal. There are natural sources of noise, so a noise free channel is impossible. The mathematical basis for this is the Shannon Hartley theorem if you're up for some reading.
Higher frequencies don't provide more bandwidth. It's the width of the channel that matters. A 20mhz channel provides the same bandwidth regardless of whether its centered at 100mhz or 900mhz. The main difference is the 900mhz signal won't travel through solid objects as well.
People sometimes turn to higher frequencies for more bandwifth simply because there's more spectrum available because it's far less useful. For instance, cell towers sometimes communicate with other cell towers using frequencies around 60ghz. The downside is you need direct line of sight on frequencies that high, so it works for tower to tower, but not tower to phone.
But is forcing infrastructure upgrades via legislation really going to be a value add for the economy? Is hi def video streaming really that important?
Hi def isn't, but expansion is. Our economy is based on growth.
Is it really a value add for the economy for Verizon to turn a higher profit which they funnel to their executives? Or do you think that money would be better spent buying infrastructure which requires thousands of jobs to build?
Why force it by legislation? Verizon could instead let the infra sit stagnant and overpopulated, and watch all of it's customers go to another carrier who upgrades their network to handle the traffic. The market can handle this just fine. All those in favor of net neutrality just want the carriers to be forced to treat bits like bits, not some bits being more special than other bits. Common carrier doesn't force infra expansion.
Just want to point out to sibling comments that "The cell towers cannot support the requested bandwidth" was the argument used to prevent companies from making phones with full web browsers.
Caps can't help with that in highly populated areas. The radio spectrum is simply finite. It's physics.