The Economist this week provides an interesting analysis of the future of radio spectrum regulation. Up until recently, radio receivers were “dumb devices” that could distinguish signals only by frequency, and not by direction. New capabilities in receivers and new techniques for wide-band spectrum sharing are making the old concept of carving up the airwaves obsolete. Wi-Fi devices have proven that vastly more information can be transferred using small slivers of the spectrum than had previously been supposed. Government auctions of spectrum in recent years have raised billions of dollars, but tight regulation still covers 98% of the usable airwaves, and 95% of that is estimated to be completely unused, at any given time.
Add in the new directionality capabilities, and spectrum is not only not really scarce, it is in fact much more abundant than we could ever need. Wireless internet is already an amazing service – a new 802.11n proposal will be increasing speeds another factor of 10 in the next few years. This article suggests factors of 1000 may be available in the long run. Can you imagine a world of such seamless interconnectivity? The real-life communication capabilities coming soon will make psychic dreams look pathetic in comparison.
"much more abundant than we could ever need"… Careful, there, Flanagan! :)
I’ve been noticing that human usage of resources works like a fluid: all space available will be filled, sooner or later.
I’m sure we’ll find ways to fill a directional spectrum and then need more somewhere down the road.
0.2c,
JCAB
Well, at least for a while, the telcom companies were running into the problem of too much fiber in the ground… but maybe that’s all been taken up now? I haven’t seen recent analysis of the ground stuff – anyway, the basic idea here is there’s in principle as much bandwidth in the air as you could ever get in the ground…