[DMCA-Activists] Re: [C-Fit_Community] Weinberger: Why Open Spectrum Matters

[Douglas Galbi]

>I think I understand that roughly you mean, don't put effort 
>into redefining the language; just use the right, though 
>different, language. I'm thinking you mean don't talk about 
>"open spectrum," but rather something different. What is 
>that? 


I would encourage experimentation.  This works for discussion
as well as technology.

>Be more specific. I did read your thing, some time ago, 
>took some snippets out intending to comment on them, then 
>that passed over time. What complexes do you think should 
>be worked out? 

Human beings have a natural psychological resistance to change, 
to thinking differently, to trying to engage sympathetically with 
persons and ideas outside of their group.  This is now a major 
problem in the wireless industry.  It also seems to me evident 
in aspects of wireless policy discussion.       

Connectivity isn't just about technology.  It's also about the 
psychoanalytic structure of the person, the logic of social fields, 
and class distinctions.   


>>> Seth Johnson 01/03/03 01:04AM >>> 

Douglas Galbi wrote: 
> 
> >In this context, spectrum has nothing to do with 
> >electromagnetic waves and auctions. It is far more 
> >fundamental: Spectrum is connection. 
> .... 
> 
> >The conversation about Open Spectrum needs to be re-framed. 
> >We cannot afford to talk about it in terms of interference, 
> >pipes, scarcity and property any more. Those metaphors are 
> >getting in our way. 
> 
> Has so much effort gone into building the brand "open 
> spectrum" that it must be used? Talking differently is likely to 
> be more effective than talking about talking differently. Talking 
> differently is also likely to be more effective than trying to re-define 
> words so that one can talk as usual but mean something different. 


I'm pretty sure David Weinberger would engage you in a 
discussion on this. I'm not exactly sure what you're 
saying. You speak of talking differently rather than 
talking about it, but I don't understand what different 
speaking you're referring to. 

I think I understand that roughly you mean, don't put effort 
into redefining the language; just use the right, though 
different, language. I'm thinking you mean don't talk about 
"open spectrum," but rather something different. What is 
that? 


> "Revolutionary Ideas for Radio Regulation" (available at 
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=316380 
> and at http://www.galbithink.org) highlights other ideas that 
> ordinary persons have used for centuries to discuss how to get 
> along together. One such idea is of course free, as in free 
> speech. Finding a good way to talk about radio regulation is 
> important. Maybe we need to work through some complexes here. 


Be more specific. I did read your thing, some time ago, 
took some snippets out intending to comment on them, then 
that passed over time. What complexes do you think should 
be worked out? 

Seth 

-- 

DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! 

New Yorkers for Fair Use 
http://www.nyfairuse.org 

[CC] Counter-copyright: 
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html 

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or 
distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. 
Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but 
only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual 
practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no 
claim of exclusive rights. 


>>> Seth Johnson 01/01/03 08:30PM >>> 

> http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html 


Why Open Spectrum Matters 
The End of the Broadcast Nation 

David Weinberger [1] 
address@hidden, www.evident.com 
Last updated: 12.5.02 

The End of the Broadcast Nation 
We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age 
of the Internet. 

We are in the Age of Connection. 

Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our 
economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger 
are our government, businesses, science, culture, education 

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized 
control points that have been the gatekeepers of our 
economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you 
had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast 
networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few 
with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve 
office, you had to be one of the few with access to 
corporate coffers and national media. 

But we are on the verge of being able to connect to anyone 
and everyone, whenever and however we want. No gatekeepers. 
Ubiquitous connection. Connectedness thats always there and 
always on. 

This isnt about getting more TV channels. Change the way 
were connected and youve changed everything, from the 
economy to governance. This is how fundamental 
transformation occurs. 

In this context, spectrum has nothing to do with 
electromagnetic waves and auctions. It is far more 
fundamental: Spectrum is connection. 

We will connect. The human drive for connection is too 
strong to be stopped. The market and the electorate are 
clamoring for this. Consider just some of the more obvious 
changes: 

When consumers are connected, we turn off the marketing 
messages and tell one another the truth about what we buy. 

When students are connected, they teach each other and work 
collaborativelyeven if they are still being graded as if 
each assignment were done alone in a cell. 

When citizens are connected, we put our money and our votes 
with politicians who join the fray. Safe, phony words and 
please-everyone positions sound more hollow than ever. We 
want our government to recognize and reflect the values 
connectedness brings. 

When an economy is connected, goods and services move 
faster. Little players get a foothold against the giants. 
Innovation skyrockets. Risks are taken and investments are 
made. The old gatekeepers of connection find their treasure 
is now a commodity. But that commodity fuels an outbreak of 
economic growth that will last for decades. 

When a society is connected, it becomes more fair. 
Broadcastings lock on the channels of communication is 
broken, so more voices are heard and people are better able 
to determine their own individual and collected fates. 

The Age of Connection will begin with a fundamental change 
in metaphors and a basic reframing of the issues. 

Reframing the issues 
The conversation about Open Spectrum needs to be re-framed. 
We cannot afford to talk about it in terms of interference, 
pipes, scarcity and property any more. Those metaphors are 
getting in our way. 

Not how we can slice up the spectrum ham ... but what will 
bring the greatest connectedness? 

Not spectrum as a thing ... but as an open standard. 

Not who owns spectrum ... but whether we even need a 
handshaking "etiquette" to allow devices to communicate 
wirelessly. 

Not how many bits can be carried by a particular slice ... 
but how do we move information from every A to every B most 
efficiently? 

Not whether this megacorp should be allowed to own that 
particular station in some specific city ... but how can we 
turn an audience into a conversation? 

Not how scarce is bandwidth ... but what can we best do with 
the abundance? 

Not how can we tinker with the current policies ... but what 
policies would create the most freedom, wealth and value 
given the new technological possibilities? 

The old metaphors are broken. The new metaphors will change 
the way we connect with one another and thus will change the 
world. 

How we got here: Technology and bad metaphors 
Current spectrum policy is based on bad science enshrined in 
obsolete ways of thinking. The basic metaphors weve used 
are just plain wrong. 

Pipes. The first metaphor treats spectrum as if it were a 
pipe. A pipe has a measurable capacity: a predictable volume 
of water can flow through a municipal water trunk. Of 
course, this analogy makes certain assumptions, such as that 
water can't be compressed effectively and you can only send 
one stream of water through a pipe at any one time. In the 
context of these assumptions, it made sense for the Federal 
Communications Commission to begin licensing spectrum as if 
it were a scarce resource under the framework established by 
the Communications Act of 1934. 

Interference. The second metaphor thinks of the 
electromagnetic energy as waves that can be deformed by 
interference. In fact, electromagnetic waves can pass 
through one another without distortion. The policies set in 
1934 by the FCC prohibiting two broadcasters from using the 
same frequency treat interference as a law of nature rather 
than as a limitation of the technology of that time. 

Consumption. The third metaphor thinks of wireless 
communications devices as consumers of bandwidth. Every time 
a broadcaster receives a license, the amount of available 
spectrum goes down. Spectrum is not only a finite resource, 
it is a scarce resource, at least according to this 
metaphor. New technology, however, increases bandwidth with 
the number of users. 

Property. The first three metaphors lead to a fourth. As a 
pipeline to an audience, a licensed slice of spectrum has 
had tremendous value. Because same-frequency waves would 
interfere with one another, the broadcaster had to be given 
exclusive access rights. Spectrum thus took on the practical 
characteristics of property: something of value to which 
someone, by legal right, has exclusive access. 

Three advances past the old metaphors 
These metaphors are misleading and outdated, reflecting the 
state of technology over 70 years ago. They came before 
information theory, the Internet, and Hedy Lamarr made 
obsolete any policy based on interference and scarcity as if 
they were laws of nature. 

1. Spread spectrum. Before Hollywood made Hedy Lamarr "the 
world's most beautiful woman" she was an Austrian aristocrat 
married to an arms merchant who was so possessive that she 
had to drug his maid in order to escape. In Hollywood, she 
became friends with George Antheil, an avant garde composer. 
One day, while playing four-handed piano with him, she 
realized how to defeat the jamming devices used to keep 
radio-controlled torpedoes from hitting their target: rather 
than staying on a single frequency, the transmitter and 
receiver could be synchronized to switch bands like four 
hands moving around a piano keyboard. She and Antheil were 
awarded a U.S. patent on the invention in 1942, eer we even need a 
handshakinand in 1958 
electronics were sophisticated enough to enable the U.S. 
Navy to begin using frequency hopping as the basis of its 
communications. [2] 

Spectrum-as-pipe does not make sense in a frequency-hopping 
world. In fact, Lamarr's invention directly contradicts the 
essence of the pipe metaphor: that there is a single medium, 
contained by hard walls, from A to B. [3] 

2. Information Theory. The next blow to the old metaphors 
came from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949 with 
their development of Information Theory. The carrying 
capacity of a water pipe can be known with near certainty. 
Likewise, how many beer bottles can be filled per hour can 
be predicted based on the speed of the conveyor belt. But 
spectrum is carrying neither water nor bottles. It's 
carrying information. And information is not a hard-edged 
good: It can be compressed, in many circumstances it 
survives some loss, and it is independent of the medium 
carrying it. A system optimized for carrying information, 
rather than for preserving the integrity of waves, would 
look much different than what we have today. And it would be 
much more efficient. In fact, current research indicates 
that the amount of information a frequency can carry 
increases with the number of users. The only question is how 
much it increases.[4] 

3. The Internet. The Internet teaches us three lessons loud 
and clear. 

(a) Open standards work. Rather than building a network that 
connects A to B to C by touching copper to copper, the 
creators of the Internet built a network by establishing 
standards for how information is to be moved. It is because 
the Internet was not built as a thing that it has been able 
to bring the world many orders of magnitude more bandwidth 
than any previous network. Our current policy, however, 
treats spectrum as if it were a physical thing to be carved 
up. By focusing on open standards rather than on 
spectrum-as-thing, the medium can become far more efficient 
and offer far greater capacity. 

(b) Decentralization works. Keep the architecture clean and 
simple. Put the smarts in the devices communicating across 
the network rather than in centralized computers. In fact, 
central control and regulation would have kept the Internet 
from becoming the force that it has. 

(c) Lowering the cost of access and connection unleashes 
innovation beyond any reasonable expectation. 

Open spectrum will do for wireless communications what the 
Internet has done for networking computers. 

Todays technology 
As a result of decisions based on the science of the early 
1900s, we built a system that works around technological 
limitations that 21st century technology has overcome. 
Advances over the past ten years knock into a cocked hat our 
most important assumptions about wireless communications: 

To get good reception, lock onto a signal. Not any more. 
Just as a highway that allows cars to change lanes will have 
greater capacity than one that locks them into single-lane 
tunnels, bandwidth increases with adaptive radios that can 
change their frequencies, modulation, and information 
routing to compensate for and exploit the current 
conditions. 

A radio is a receiver. Until recently, a radio was a 
hard-wired device that could do one thing only: play music, 
receive voice data, etc. But software-defined radios are 
computers, capable of being reprogrammed on the fly. They 
can be upgraded after they are sold, and that they can 
dynamically be put to a wide variety of uses, enabling 
innovation far beyond simply providing more stations to 
listen to. 

The more you put into a network, the better it is. The 
Internet an eeer we even need a 
handshakinnd-to-end network has proven this idea to 
be backwards. Its precisely because the Internet wasnt 
optimized for any particular application that its useful to 
the broadest range of innovations. Spectrum can be 
architected the same way: as an information transport 
utilized by smart devices such as adaptive and 
software-defined radios. 

The more users, the less bandwidth. Shannon and Weavers 
Information Theory that guided the development of broadcast 
and point-to-point networks did not consider the 
implications of the way our cellular networks currently 
enable multiple simultaneous users. In the past decade, a 
variety of research teams have begun to explore this unknown 
corner of the theory, and have shown a variety of 
counterintuitive results that show that our assumptions 
about capacity and interference are just wrong. [5] 

Its all about the waves. No, its all about information. 
Digital communications techniques such as error detection 
and correction, maximum likelihood estimation, Rake 
receivers, and other techniques developed based on Shannon's 
information theory and Digital Signal Processing provide a 
rich set of techniques that have not been used in radio 
systems deployed before 1990 (the bulk of commercial 
systems), i.e. before digital cellular telephones. 

Interference is a law of nature. Very wideband modulation 
techniques such as DSSS (802.11b AKA WiFi), OFDM 
(802.11a/g), UWB and many others use new technologies to 
spread information across many frequency bands, creating 
very high transmission rates at low cost with very little 
degradation even in noisy environments. They do not require 
"exclusive" use of those frequency bands, especially in a 
network that uses modern adaptive error-correction 
techniques, and they do not interfere with older 
technologies (such as TV) that uses the same frequencies. 
[6] 

What could be 
Imagine a world in which we've changed policy to adapt to 
the new metaphors. There will be changes in three 
dimensions: short term, long term and deep term. 

Short term, we will see a sudden breaking free from wireless 
gridlock. This will not only bring new, smaller players into 
a broadcast industry that has been locked up by media 
mega-giants. More important, it will enable consumers and 
citizens to communicate with one another. We will create our 
own content, but well also be in constant conversation. 
>From these connections will emerge new social groupings, 
just as simple text messaging on telephones has created 
flocking behavior in Japan and Scandinavia. We will see 
innovations wherever action at a distance or ubiquitous 
access makes sense including, incidentally, 
object-to-object communications as our household and office 
devices start to talk to one another. 

Long term, we cannot predict the sort of innovation that 
will happen, any more than Marconi could have predicted WiFi 
100 years ago. Predictions range from ubiquitous access to 
"personal knowledge avatars" to even Star Trek-style 
transporters "beaming us" across space. The only certainty 
is that our current predictions are inadequate to the 
reality that we will invent for ourselves. 

Deep term, the unleashing of wireless connectivity will eat 
away at one of our last remaining social dependencies on 
broadcast media. 

"Broadcast" isn't simply an industry. It is a network 
topology, an economic model, and a social structure with 
direct consequences for the political process as well. As a 
network topology, broadcast assumes that the messages are 
sent one to many. As an economic model, it assumes the 
"channel" is an expense and revenues come from the content 
that is broadcast (via subscripeer we even need a 
handshakintion or advertising). As a 
social structure, broadcast assumes that the ability to 
communicate is unequally and unfairly distributed. 

The result of these assumptions is a population that by and 
large is presumed to be sitting quietly, facing forward, 
consuming content developed by commercial interests. The 
effects of having become a "Broadcast Nation" are profound. 
Our freedom is defined by the channel changer nearby. We 
expect power to be concentrated in the hands of those who 
have access to media. We expect politicians to be talking at 
us more than listening to us. We expect consumer goods to be 
"broadcast" the way messages are: identical goods flowing 
from a single source. We even experience The Famous as a 
special class of person whose lives are played out over the 
broadcast network. 

We can get a taste of the effect of breaking free of the 
broadcast metaphor by looking at what the Internet is doing. 
The Net enables people to connect with one another, 
circumventing the broadcast chokepoints and the 
organizational chart formalities. We are at the beginning of 
a generational phase of innovation not only in technology 
but in ways we human beings are organizing ourselves. We're 
inventing new types of groups, new ways of writing, new 
rhythms of social intercourse. 

To gauge the effect of opening up spectrum, take the energy 
of the Internet and multiply it, for all of that Net's 
passion and commitment comes from a medium that until now is 
overwhelmingly used to transmit text. It is a typed medium. 
Imagine when our connectedness is no long constrained to the 
speed of typing and the limits of a text-based presentation 
of ideas. 

Certainly new businesses will arise commercializing the new 
inventions. More important, however, is the great 
democratizing effect this will have on our culture. We will 
get up off the couch and face one another. We will expect 
demand direct responses. Cant and marketing messages will 
be worse than insulting; they will be boring. We will be 
able to organize ourselves not just around ideas that can be 
typed but richer expressions of thought and attitude. Mood, 
emotion, and art hard to convey in ASCII will re-enter 
the global connection. A bottom-up conversation can begin 
over the ether, helping to make participatory democracy 
real. 

We are not in the Information Age. We are not in the Age of 
the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. To achieve 
the ideals this country was built on equality, freedom of 
speech and thought, the basic fairness that lets people 
determine their own destinies we need everyone connected 
to everyone else. 

Spectrum is ubiquity. Open spectrum is equality and freedom. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Endnotes 

[1] Jock Gill, Dewayne Hendricks and David Reed contributed 
ideas, information, links and words to this paper. All 
errors and infelicities are mine, however. 

[2] Dave Hughes, as told to Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 
157-8. See also http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html. 

[3] The story of the invention of spread spectrum is 
actually far more complex. In fact, Lamarrs invention 
wasnt developed and used by the military until after direct 
sequence spread spectrum (DSSS aka CDMA) was put into 
practice in the early 1950s. Lamarrs contribution was real, 
but the story is so appealing that it has been 
over-playedas in the body of this very paper. For more 
information about the history of these inventions, see 
"Spread Spectrum Communications" by Charles E. Cook, 
Laurence B. Milstein (Editors), IEEE, December, 1983. 

[eer we even need a 
handshakin4] 
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art02/slides02/ree/ree_slides.pdf 

[5] David Reed, The Skys No Longer the Limit, Context 
Magazine, 
http://www.contextmag.com/archives/200212/Insight2TheSkysNoLonger.asp 

[6] David Reed provided the content for the Todays 
Technology section of this paper. Many of the phrases are 
his. 

Sources and additional reading 

David Isenberg, The Rise of the Stupid Network. 
http://isen.com/stupid.html 

David P. Reed, The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business 
Review, Feb. 2000. 
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/feb01/F0102A.html#3 

David P. Reeds Open Spectrum page: 
http://www.reed.com/OpenSpectrum 

J.H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, D.D. Clark, End-to-End 
Arguments in Systems Design. 
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html


2002 (c) D. Weinberger. May be copied, reproduced and 
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copyright notice, and it cannot be part of a commercial 
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>I think I understand that roughly you mean, don't put effort
>into redefining the language; just use the right, though
>different, language. I'm thinking you mean don't talk about
>"open spectrum," but rather something different. What is
>that?

 

I would encourage experimentation.  This works for discussion

as well as technology.

 

>Be more specific. I did read your thing, some time ago,
>took some snippets out intending to comment on them, then
>that passed over time. What complexes do you think should
>be worked out?

Human beings have a natural psychological resistance to change,

to thinking differently, to trying to engage sympathetically with

persons and ideas outside of their group.  This is now a major

problem in the wireless industry.  It also seems to me evident

in aspects of wireless policy discussion.      

 

Connectivity isn't just about technology.  It's also about the

psychoanalytic structure of the person, the logic of social fields,

and class distinctions.   

 

>>> Seth Johnson 01/03/03 01:04AM >>>

Douglas Galbi wrote:
>
> >In this context, spectrum has nothing to do with
> >electromagnetic waves and auctions. It is far more
> >fundamental: Spectrum is connection.
> ....
>
> >The conversation about Open Spectrum needs to be re-framed.
> >We cannot afford to talk about it in terms of interference,
> >pipes, scarcity and property any more. Those metaphors are
> >getting in our way.
>
> Has so much effort gone into building the brand "open
> spectrum" that it must be used? Talking differently is likely to
> be more effective than talking about talking differently. Talking
> differently is also likely to be more effective than trying to re-define
> words so that one can talk as usual but mean something different.


I'm pretty sure David Weinberger would engage you in a
discussion on this. I'm not exactly sure what you're
saying. You speak of talking differently rather than
talking about it, but I don't understand what different
speaking you're referring to.

I think I understand that roughly you mean, don't put effort
into redefining the language; just use the right, though
different, language. I'm thinking you mean don't talk about
"open spectrum," but rather something different. What is
that?


> "Revolutionary Ideas for Radio Regulation" (available at
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=316380
> and at http://www.galbithink.org) highlights other ideas that
> ordinary persons have used for centuries to discuss how to get
> along together. One such idea is of course free, as in free
> speech. Finding a good way to talk about radio regulation is
> important. Maybe we need to work through some complexes here.


Be more specific. I did read your thing, some time ago,
took some snippets out intending to comment on them, then
that passed over time. What complexes do you think should
be worked out?

Seth

--

DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders!

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

[CC] Counter-copyright:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or
distribution of this incidentally recorded communication.
Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but
only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual
practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no
claim of exclusive rights.


>>> Seth Johnson 01/01/03 08:30PM >>>

> http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html


Why Open Spectrum Matters
The End of the Broadcast Nation

David Weinberger [1]
address@hidden, www.evident.com
Last updated: 12.5.02

The End of the Broadcast Nation
We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age
of the Internet.

We are in the Age of Connection.

Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our
economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger
are our government, businesses, science, culture, education

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized
control points that have been the gatekeepers of our
economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you
had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast
networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few
with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve
office, you had to be one of the few with access to
corporate coffers and national media.

But we are on the verge of being able to connect to anyone
and everyone, whenever and however we want. No gatekeepers.
Ubiquitous connection. Connectedness thats always there and
always on.

This isnt about getting more TV channels. Change the way
were connected and youve changed everything, from the
economy to governance. This is how fundamental
transformation occurs.

In this context, spectrum has nothing to do with
electromagnetic waves and auctions. It is far more
fundamental: Spectrum is connection.

We will connect. The human drive for connection is too
strong to be stopped. The market and the electorate are
clamoring for this. Consider just some of the more obvious
changes:

When consumers are connected, we turn off the marketing
messages and tell one another the truth about what we buy.

When students are connected, they teach each other and work
collaborativelyeven if they are still being graded as if
each assignment were done alone in a cell.

When citizens are connected, we put our money and our votes
with politicians who join the fray. Safe, phony words and
please-everyone positions sound more hollow than ever. We
want our government to recognize and reflect the values
connectedness brings.

When an economy is connected, goods and services move
faster. Little players get a foothold against the giants.
Innovation skyrockets. Risks are taken and investments are
made. The old gatekeepers of connection find their treasure
is now a commodity. But that commodity fuels an outbreak of
economic growth that will last for decades.

When a society is connected, it becomes more fair.
Broadcastings lock on the channels of communication is
broken, so more voices are heard and people are better able
to determine their own individual and collected fates.

The Age of Connection will begin with a fundamental change
in metaphors and a basic reframing of the issues.

Reframing the issues
The conversation about Open Spectrum needs to be re-framed.
We cannot afford to talk about it in terms of interference,
pipes, scarcity and property any more. Those metaphors are
getting in our way.

Not how we can slice up the spectrum ham ... but what will
bring the greatest connectedness?

Not spectrum as a thing ... but as an open standard.

Not who owns spectrum ... but whether we even need a
handshaking "etiquette" to allow devices to communicate
wirelessly.

Not how many bits can be carried by a particular slice ...
but how do we move information from every A to every B most
efficiently?

Not whether this megacorp should be allowed to own that
particular station in some specific city ... but how can we
turn an audience into a conversation?

Not how scarce is bandwidth ... but what can we best do with
the abundance?

Not how can we tinker with the current policies ... but what
policies would create the most freedom, wealth and value
given the new technological possibilities?

The old metaphors are broken. The new metaphors will change
the way we connect with one another and thus will change the
world.

How we got here: Technology and bad metaphors
Current spectrum policy is based on bad science enshrined in
obsolete ways of thinking. The basic metaphors weve used
are just plain wrong.

Pipes. The first metaphor treats spectrum as if it were a
pipe. A pipe has a measurable capacity: a predictable volume
of water can flow through a municipal water trunk. Of
course, this analogy makes certain assumptions, such as that
water can't be compressed effectively and you can only send
one stream of water through a pipe at any one time. In the
context of these assumptions, it made sense for the Federal
Communications Commission to begin licensing spectrum as if
it were a scarce resource under the framework established by
the Communications Act of 1934.

Interference. The second metaphor thinks of the
electromagnetic energy as waves that can be deformed by
interference. In fact, electromagnetic waves can pass
through one another without distortion. The policies set in
1934 by the FCC prohibiting two broadcasters from using the
same frequency treat interference as a law of nature rather
than as a limitation of the technology of that time.

Consumption. The third metaphor thinks of wireless
communications devices as consumers of bandwidth. Every time
a broadcaster receives a license, the amount of available
spectrum goes down. Spectrum is not only a finite resource,
it is a scarce resource, at least according to this
metaphor. New technology, however, increases bandwidth with
the number of users.

Property. The first three metaphors lead to a fourth. As a
pipeline to an audience, a licensed slice of spectrum has
had tremendous value. Because same-frequency waves would
interfere with one another, the broadcaster had to be given
exclusive access rights. Spectrum thus took on the practical
characteristics of property: something of value to which
someone, by legal right, has exclusive access.

Three advances past the old metaphors
These metaphors are misleading and outdated, reflecting the
state of technology over 70 years ago. They came before
information theory, the Internet, and Hedy Lamarr made
obsolete any policy based on interference and scarcity as if
they were laws of nature.

1. Spread spectrum. Before Hollywood made Hedy Lamarr "the
world's most beautiful woman" she was an Austrian aristocrat
married to an arms merchant who was so possessive that she
had to drug his maid in order to escape. In Hollywood, she
became friends with George Antheil, an avant garde composer.
One day, while playing four-handed piano with him, she
realized how to defeat the jamming devices used to keep
radio-controlled torpedoes from hitting their target: rather
than staying on a single frequency, the transmitter and
receiver could be synchronized to switch bands like four
hands moving around a piano keyboard. She and Antheil were
awarded a U.S. patent on the invention in 1942, eer we even need a
handshakinand in 1958
electronics were sophisticated enough to enable the U.S.
Navy to begin using frequency hopping as the basis of its
communications. [2]

Spectrum-as-pipe does not make sense in a frequency-hopping
world. In fact, Lamarr's invention directly contradicts the
essence of the pipe metaphor: that there is a single medium,
contained by hard walls, from A to B. [3]

2. Information Theory. The next blow to the old metaphors
came from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949 with
their development of Information Theory. The carrying
capacity of a water pipe can be known with near certainty.
Likewise, how many beer bottles can be filled per hour can
be predicted based on the speed of the conveyor belt. But
spectrum is carrying neither water nor bottles. It's
carrying information. And information is not a hard-edged
good: It can be compressed, in many circumstances it
survives some loss, and it is independent of the medium
carrying it. A system optimized for carrying information,
rather than for preserving the integrity of waves, would
look much different than what we have today. And it would be
much more efficient. In fact, current research indicates
that the amount of information a frequency can carry
increases with the number of users. The only question is how
much it increases.[4]

3. The Internet. The Internet teaches us three lessons loud
and clear.

(a) Open standards work. Rather than building a network that
connects A to B to C by touching copper to copper, the
creators of the Internet built a network by establishing
standards for how information is to be moved. It is because
the Internet was not built as a thing that it has been able
to bring the world many orders of magnitude more bandwidth
than any previous network. Our current policy, however,
treats spectrum as if it were a physical thing to be carved
up. By focusing on open standards rather than on
spectrum-as-thing, the medium can become far more efficient
and offer far greater capacity.

(b) Decentralization works. Keep the architecture clean and
simple. Put the smarts in the devices communicating across
the network rather than in centralized computers. In fact,
central control and regulation would have kept the Internet
from becoming the force that it has.

(c) Lowering the cost of access and connection unleashes
innovation beyond any reasonable expectation.

Open spectrum will do for wireless communications what the
Internet has done for networking computers.

Todays technology
As a result of decisions based on the science of the early
1900s, we built a system that works around technological
limitations that 21st century technology has overcome.
Advances over the past ten years knock into a cocked hat our
most important assumptions about wireless communications:

To get good reception, lock onto a signal. Not any more.
Just as a highway that allows cars to change lanes will have
greater capacity than one that locks them into single-lane
tunnels, bandwidth increases with adaptive radios that can
change their frequencies, modulation, and information
routing to compensate for and exploit the current
conditions.

A radio is a receiver. Until recently, a radio was a
hard-wired device that could do one thing only: play music,
receive voice data, etc. But software-defined radios are
computers, capable of being reprogrammed on the fly. They
can be upgraded after they are sold, and that they can
dynamically be put to a wide variety of uses, enabling
innovation far beyond simply providing more stations to
listen to.

The more you put into a network, the better it is. The
Internet an eeer we even need a
handshakinnd-to-end network has proven this idea to
be backwards. Its precisely because the Internet wasnt
optimized for any particular application that its useful to
the broadest range of innovations. Spectrum can be
architected the same way: as an information transport
utilized by smart devices such as adaptive and
software-defined radios.

The more users, the less bandwidth. Shannon and Weavers
Information Theory that guided the development of broadcast
and point-to-point networks did not consider the
implications of the way our cellular networks currently
enable multiple simultaneous users. In the past decade, a
variety of research teams have begun to explore this unknown
corner of the theory, and have shown a variety of
counterintuitive results that show that our assumptions
about capacity and interference are just wrong. [5]

Its all about the waves. No, its all about information.
Digital communications techniques such as error detection
and correction, maximum likelihood estimation, Rake
receivers, and other techniques developed based on Shannon's
information theory and Digital Signal Processing provide a
rich set of techniques that have not been used in radio
systems deployed before 1990 (the bulk of commercial
systems), i.e. before digital cellular telephones.

Interference is a law of nature. Very wideband modulation
techniques such as DSSS (802.11b AKA WiFi), OFDM
(802.11a/g), UWB and many others use new technologies to
spread information across many frequency bands, creating
very high transmission rates at low cost with very little
degradation even in noisy environments. They do not require
"exclusive" use of those frequency bands, especially in a
network that uses modern adaptive error-correction
techniques, and they do not interfere with older
technologies (such as TV) that uses the same frequencies.
[6]

What could be
Imagine a world in which we've changed policy to adapt to
the new metaphors. There will be changes in three
dimensions: short term, long term and deep term.

Short term, we will see a sudden breaking free from wireless
gridlock. This will not only bring new, smaller players into
a broadcast industry that has been locked up by media
mega-giants. More important, it will enable consumers and
citizens to communicate with one another. We will create our
own content, but well also be in constant conversation.
From these connections will emerge new social groupings,
just as simple text messaging on telephones has created
flocking behavior in Japan and Scandinavia. We will see
innovations wherever action at a distance or ubiquitous
access makes sense including, incidentally,
object-to-object communications as our household and office
devices start to talk to one another.

Long term, we cannot predict the sort of innovation that
will happen, any more than Marconi could have predicted WiFi
100 years ago. Predictions range from ubiquitous access to
"personal knowledge avatars" to even Star Trek-style
transporters "beaming us" across space. The only certainty
is that our current predictions are inadequate to the
reality that we will invent for ourselves.

Deep term, the unleashing of wireless connectivity will eat
away at one of our last remaining social dependencies on
broadcast media.

"Broadcast" isn't simply an industry. It is a network
topology, an economic model, and a social structure with
direct consequences for the political process as well. As a
network topology, broadcast assumes that the messages are
sent one to many. As an economic model, it assumes the
"channel" is an expense and revenues come from the content
that is broadcast (via subscripeer we even need a
handshakintion or advertising). As a
social structure, broadcast assumes that the ability to
communicate is unequally and unfairly distributed.

The result of these assumptions is a population that by and
large is presumed to be sitting quietly, facing forward,
consuming content developed by commercial interests. The
effects of having become a "Broadcast Nation" are profound.
Our freedom is defined by the channel changer nearby. We
expect power to be concentrated in the hands of those who
have access to media. We expect politicians to be talking at
us more than listening to us. We expect consumer goods to be
"broadcast" the way messages are: identical goods flowing
from a single source. We even experience The Famous as a
special class of person whose lives are played out over the
broadcast network.

We can get a taste of the effect of breaking free of the
broadcast metaphor by looking at what the Internet is doing.
The Net enables people to connect with one another,
circumventing the broadcast chokepoints and the
organizational chart formalities. We are at the beginning of
a generational phase of innovation not only in technology
but in ways we human beings are organizing ourselves. We're
inventing new types of groups, new ways of writing, new
rhythms of social intercourse.

To gauge the effect of opening up spectrum, take the energy
of the Internet and multiply it, for all of that Net's
passion and commitment comes from a medium that until now is
overwhelmingly used to transmit text. It is a typed medium.
Imagine when our connectedness is no long constrained to the
speed of typing and the limits of a text-based presentation
of ideas.

Certainly new businesses will arise commercializing the new
inventions. More important, however, is the great
democratizing effect this will have on our culture. We will
get up off the couch and face one another. We will expect
demand direct responses. Cant and marketing messages will
be worse than insulting; they will be boring. We will be
able to organize ourselves not just around ideas that can be
typed but richer expressions of thought and attitude. Mood,
emotion, and art hard to convey in ASCII will re-enter
the global connection. A bottom-up conversation can begin
over the ether, helping to make participatory democracy
real.

We are not in the Information Age. We are not in the Age of
the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. To achieve
the ideals this country was built on equality, freedom of
speech and thought, the basic fairness that lets people
determine their own destinies we need everyone connected
to everyone else.

Spectrum is ubiquity. Open spectrum is equality and freedom.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Endnotes

[1] Jock Gill, Dewayne Hendricks and David Reed contributed
ideas, information, links and words to this paper. All
errors and infelicities are mine, however.

[2] Dave Hughes, as told to Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p.
157-8. See also http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html.

[3] The story of the invention of spread spectrum is
actually far more complex. In fact, Lamarrs invention
wasnt developed and used by the military until after direct
sequence spread spectrum (DSSS aka CDMA) was put into
practice in the early 1950s. Lamarrs contribution was real,
but the story is so appealing that it has been
over-playedas in the body of this very paper. For more
information about the history of these inventions, see
"Spread Spectrum Communications" by Charles E. Cook,
Laurence B. Milstein (Editors), IEEE, December, 1983.

[eer we even need a
handshakin4]
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art02/slides02/ree/ree_slides.pdf

[5] David Reed, The Skys No Longer the Limit, Context
Magazine,
http://www.contextmag.com/archives/200212/Insight2TheSkysNoLonger.asp

[6] David Reed provided the content for the Todays
Technology section of this paper. Many of the phrases are
his.

Sources and additional reading

David Isenberg, The Rise of the Stupid Network.
http://isen.com/stupid.html

David P. Reed, The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business
Review, Feb. 2000.
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/feb01/F0102A.html#3

David P. Reeds Open Spectrum page:
http://www.reed.com/OpenSpectrum

J.H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, D.D. Clark, End-to-End
Arguments in Systems Design.
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html

2002 (c) D. Weinberger. May be copied, reproduced and
distributed without permission in whole or in part, with two
restrictions: You must include attribution and this
copyright notice, and it cannot be part of a commercial
project., If in doubt, ask me.

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