Carriers vs cops: Australia's spectrum conundrum

Easy

Seems to me you've answered your own question. If they divvy it up between three carriers, they can't really auction it meaningfully. If they only allocate two 40Mhz slots, they get a bidding war.

Personally I say you don't want simple landrush allocation. Instead force the carriers to have to bid down service costs to the customer, and limit their access on a yearly basis so any failure to perform, and they lose access and thus money. Eg allocate via bandwidth and service - not up front bets.

If it was my choice

I'd invest in the emergency services and give them 40MHz.

The communications carriers can bid for the remaining 2 slots.

Lets see what it's really worth to them.

Emergency services give back to the community where as the carriers only take.

I don't get this

If you want to know the wavelength of a TV band signal, go look at a TV antenna.

Is this band really appropriate for pocket equipment?

Dedicated spectrum looks the way to go

The mobile phone networks didn't perform well at all in the floods. For a start they carried far too little fuel for their backup generators.

A deeper problem is simply that telco networking gear isn't designed for emergency services pre-emption. This makes it a risky thing to push the Big Red Button. When you press the Button you run the risk of dropping the civilian network and yet not having the emergency services network come up.

A better model would at first appear to be that emergency services handsets always preempt other calls upon congestion. But that takes us back to the problems experienced in the NSW Government Radio Network during the bushfires when water workers would use the GRN to make telephony calls on issues of no great important, but these calls would preempt those of the council workers whose bulldozers were building fire breaks.

The other advantage of a dedicated allocation of expensive spectrum is that all the emergency services would use it. So we'd finally get an agency interworking capability beyond a few VHF and UHF voice channels and that good old standby, UHF CB.

gouging

"carriers that price a mobile gigabtye at up to $80"

Up to $80? Virgin charges 0.2c/KB, or $2,097 per GB. Not too long ago the rate was 1.5c/KB.

Option 3?

If carriers want 3 x 40mhz up for auction and theres 126mhz available, then give public safety 6mhz. LTE has a 3mhz paired option (3mhz up, 3mhz downlink), this allows for 15.1mbps each way, per sector (at least here in the US, cell sites will almost always have either 3-way or 6-way sectorization, that is rather than the site broadcasting 360 degrees, it broadcasts 3 120 degree or 6 60 degree sectors.) Or, if politics prevent a single system, this could be split into 2 1.4mhz pairs each carrying 6.1mbps up and 6.1mbps down. This'd also leave 200khz up/200khz down left over for narrow band users.

That's as much voice as they could ever need, along with as much data as they could possibly use, and quite a bit of video as long as they use something reasonable like H.2.64.

20mhz seems VERY excessive.

That bandwidth would be beautiful, thanks.

As a volunteer bush fire fighter in Western Australia, I can attest to how terrible our current comms are... At a (relatively) recent bush fire in Roleystone (which is a nice hilly area), we had next to no working comms with anyone that we needed to talk to... Had no problem picking up other sectors of course, but hey, thats how it usually goes... =P

I say give the emergency services what they need, and let the carriers fight over whats left. I can't see any other way of this working, as emergency services need that bandwidth yesterday in most cases. There is not time to negotiate with Telstra, Optus and (shudder) Vodafone to get that bandwidth back.

Simple solution

Auction 2 x 40Mhz + 1 x 20MHz or 1 x 40MHz + 3 x 20MHz. Then the public can be offered either a lower speed (but probably faster than current broadband for most) or a higher speed more expensive option for those that really want/need it.

Or am I missing something?

No mention of free spectrum?

It's just more tax. Will the companies reduce their profits or pass the cost on to consumers/voters.

Why not ask the telcos to come up with a plan for using the spectrum if it were free and allocate it to the most deserviing?

Why auction it at all?

Since there are only 3 bidders, the best solution for the tax payers is to give 40 mhz to each of the 3 carriers for free so they don't have to recoup the cost of an inflated bidding war. Then some of the 3.5 ghz are should be used for public safety since the US had decided to go down that road and there is lots of equipment made that works in that band already.

Emergency Services are traditionally not pushy enough...

First - disclaimer - I am a volunteer fire service person. A CFS officer. So this is emergency services biased.

There is far too much high tech in the comms systems being both used, and proposed. In South Australia someone in government was sold on the idea that all-of-government comms could be implemented using a trunking radio network. So the fire service, police, ambulance, ... all use something called the GRN (a Motorola trunking radio network). This system operates in the UHF 400MHz area.

Now, we also have hills. My own area in the Adelaide hills is, well, *hilly*. Did anyone ever consider what happens to UHF carriers in hilly areas? Apparently not. Did anyone ever consider the propagation issues when you are surrounded by 15m+ high flames - again, apparently not.

This network is used for command and control functions. It is also woefully under-provisioned. One of our fine national carriers has the gong for running the inter-cell backhaul on the network. Apparently, more capacity can be got when needed. By some mechanism that probably involves the minister (I'm a volunteer - I don't deal with this crap). We had a fire a couple of years back where I needed to talk to what was essentially the forward command person, who was parked in a vehicle about 50m away. I could *not* get through via the GRN network - because it was over congested (computer said "no"!). I ended up leaving the appliance and walking the 50m (something of a fitness programme, no doubt part of the hidden "benefit" of using a trunking network...). The congestion arose because (amongst other things) all the busses (!!!) have GRN handsets and were calling back to HQ complaining that the road (the major freeway out of Adelaide through the hills) had just been closed by the fire service..

Because of the parlous state of this "communications" system, we also have VHF handsets for use on the fire ground. So you can at least call the appliance you can SEE!

Now, it would be lovely to have more channel capacity - because when it hits the fan, you need to talk RIGHT NOW. Reserving the channel capacity is basically the only feasible solution. If I need to call because my crew is in danger, I need it RIGHT BLOODY NOW. I also need it to work. When bad things happen, they happen fast and everyone wants to phone their loved ones simultaneously. Any kind of channel sharing thing will simply annoy people and cause the emergency services delay and angst. You set the capacity aside and it hardly gets used. Big deal. The lustful eyes of the telcos/TV/Radio/whatever people just need to be kept off the channel.

Emergency services should not have to go cap-in-hand to the agency responsible. They should not even have to lay money on the table. This is basic infrastructure that a civil society actually NEEDS to function. The money makers just need to accept that not everything should be sold off.

Anyway, sorry for the rant.