Upgrade and Repack; Repeat Forever

The DTV transition increased TV program capacity by three times while reducing TV’s spectrum footprint by half. The method that made his happen has general application. Contrary to some of the claims you’ve heard recently, clearing spectrum by upgrading existing systems and reassigning their excess spectrum is a sustainable practice. In fact, it’s the only sustainable practice. Read on to see why.

August 8, 2012 3

Spectrum and Wishful Thinking

There are two very good pieces on spectrum today.  Jonathan Salter at Mobile Future has a written one of them (Spectrum Sharing and the Elusive Silver Bullet) in Fierce Broadband Wireless. …

July 30, 2012 0

The Impractical PCAST Report

Here’s the press statement we issued from ITIF about the PCAST report: Contact: Steve Norton Communications Director 202-626-5758 [email protected] WASHINGTON (July 23, 2012) -Richard Bennett, Senior Research Fellow at the…

July 23, 2012 0

Peter Rysavy Addresses Complexities of Spectrum Management

Engineer Peter Rysavy, who has been a contributor to High Tech Forum, recently released an important paper “Mobile Network Design and Deployment: How Incumbent Operators Plan for Technology Upgrades and…

July 2, 2012 1

Van Schewick’s View of Net Neutrality and Quality of Service

Network Quality of Service (QoS) is the technical issues that lurks behind the policy issue of net neutrality. While there are many subtle variations of net neutrality, the concept as…

June 14, 2012 0

A ‘Competitive’ Alliance in Name Only

The language in the policy debate over the future of broadband ranges from the imprecise to the Orwellian. An “open” Internet, for example, means to some an uncensored one, to…

June 14, 2012 0

Spectrum Talk

But they are not enough to solve wireless capacity problems—not when nearly half the American adult population owns a smartphone and data usage continues to explode. For example, AT&T’s 30,000 Wi-Fi hotspot network is the largest provided by any U.S. wireless carrier, but it offloads a mere 1% of all the mobile data traffic we carry …

June 13, 2012 2

Five Ways the Internet is Not Open

“Keep the Internet Open” demands the chief Internet propagandist of Google in the New York Times last week. Earlier in the week I saw the same Vint Cerf open the…

May 29, 2012 0

Hanging up on the Phone System

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend The End of the Phone System conference at Wharton in Philadelphia last week as a respondent to one of the papers….

May 24, 2012 4

Correcting a False Assertion About the Internet

The main reason for creating his blog was to correct false impressions and spin about technical subjects with policy implications. It’s common practice these days for folks with a policy…

May 23, 2012 0