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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

If he can't see it where he is then by definition it isn't being used in that location. Use on some other part of the planet isn't relevant because these frequencies don't propagate far.

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OP's impression seems to be that because of it's unused, it's being "wasted", and is therefore bad. However, that doesn't factor in that most of the usage occur in urban areas, where most of the country's population lives. The consequence of the spectrum auctions/allocations is that someone living in rural wyoming can't use the 1Ghz to 7Ghz band (numbers made up) for himself, even though nobody else is using it. Is that a shame? I suppose, but only if he's a radio enthusiast. For the vast majority of the population, this unused spectrum doesn't impact their lives. They can still use their 802.11ac 5Ghz routers and get 500 Mb/s transfer speeds in their homes.

If he could use it, tech that is useful to him would be developed, allowing him greater connectivity at lower costs. Say he owns a ranch and wants to have fully autonomous ranching hardware that benefit from connectivity for example...

When considering whether spectrum is used or fallow, we really need to consider the location as part of the function - if a given block piece of spectrum is only used in large cities (say mid- 2GHz TDD band) for capacity in urban environments, that spectrum is fallow for perhaps 99.9% of a country's landmass, and maybe 70% of its population (depending on their urban city density).

With some of the work coming through the pipelines though, in future it will be feasible to deploy your own small cell, either independent of an existing operator, or in partnership with a co-op or other facilitator who provides the mobile core capabilities, and run a mini network in your local area. This is already happening in the UK in various commercial trial projects.

My impression is that internet speeds are lower in the rural setting because it's more expensive to lay cable over longer distances. My nomination for unused bands is fast rural internet.

Cost to deploy fiber is going to be lower in rural settings due to fewer obstacles and easier right of way. However the reason connectivity is more costly to provide is due to lower density of customers.

It’s true. However there’s a question of what to do about this. You can’t sell a wireless device to someone in Ohio and expect it not to be used in New York City. And certain emergency frequencies might be rarely utilized but very important when used.

That said, I’d like to see more allocation of spectrum for consumer use. It’s very frustrating that cellular companies get more and more spectrum but we can’t feasibly deploy public LTE for example.

Perhaps if the wireless device has GPS and network connectivity we could give the government permission to enable and disable extra frequencies depending on location. Though of course this scheme invites suppression of dissent.

The UK now has a "use it or share it" regime for operator spectrum.

I can go and get prime operator spectrum if it isn't in use in my local area, and use it at certain agreed power levels. That license is just for one location.

There's also dedicated "held back for sharing" spectrum in the N77 5G band (3.8 to 4.2 GHz), which is more widely usable without detailed coordination (but you still need a low cost license)

With modern spectrum access systems (see CBRS for example), geolocation of the radio is used to determine via a coordination server what spectrum can be used in a given location. Whether that's at risk of suppressing dissent or not is another discussion however - most radios in cellular networks will have some kind of backhaul and coordination management plane for interference avoidance and management - the threat model in cellular technology is a bit different still, and the communications are there to enable spectrum requests to be made in real-time. Spectrum coordination wouldn't need to be done by government - there's conceivable ways to do sensing and avoidance, but at the risk of tragedy of the commons scenarios.

What do Ofcom do to enforce it?

They used to have a number of spectrum monitoring stations, however they were decommissioned, I know someone that bought bits of it at auction.

I believe any enforcement Ofcom do these days is reactive, and in response to reports from licensed operators.

A lot of the new "shared" access licenses do not give guarantees of interference protection though, so I imagine Ofcom enforcement would be on a best-effort basis there.

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