Unlicensed allocations have generated a massive, and to many surprising, amount of innovation and value (see the References below). The question is: Why?
Almost all of the value so far has come in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, mostly due to Wi-Fi but also to a lesser extent Bluetooth applications. There is never a single, simple answer to a Why question about a complicated nexus of technology, politics and user behavior, but my impression is that unlicensed partisans believe that it's due pretty much exclusively to the techno-economic characteristics enabled by the rights assignment regime: “openness” (Benkler), “managed commons” (Milgrom, Levin & Eilat), or “rule-based access” (Thanki).
I think it's at least plausible that Wi-Fi's undoubted success has been due to a fortuitous coincidence of band choice, physics and timing as much as to regulation: It turned out that the interference range was small enough that users didn’t really degrade each other’s performance; and the networking needs of their applications could be met by the bandwidth available around them. In other words: the capacity of the channel was larger than the number of people who interfered with each other, multiplied by the data they wanted to move.
"I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread which binds them is my own" --- Michel de Montaigne (details in the entry on my Quotes blog.)
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
The Emperor has Objections: Replies to feedback on our “Is Wi-Fi Congested?” paper
Our TPRC 2013 paper “The Emperor has no Problem: Is Wi-Fi Spectrum Really Congested?” (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2241609) has generated quite a bit of interest. Here are responses to some pointed questions and comments we've received.
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