back to article Carter's right-hand man lays out spectrum plan

Kip Meek, right-hand man of communications minister Lord Carter, has taken a few steps back to see the bigger picture of spectrum use in the UK, after his master failed to get much support for the spectrum reallocation proposed in his Digital Britain draft. Kip Meek's proposal (pdf) reckons that we could have 4Mb/sec wireless …

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  1. Tom

    Wont be long

    before someone invents some way of making that bandwidth useless by - oh I dont know making huge pdf's of small documents, or making 200Meg flash movies that say 'hello', or 20 meg images shrunk into thumbnails spacially.......

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Spectrum auctions

    Like the one that worked so spectacularly well for the regional "fixed wireless access" broadband?

    That was the one where PCCW ended up buying all the licences from the actual auction winners afterwards, and despite three or four rebrandings in the intervening years (Now, Netvigator, etc) don't actually seem to have deployed an offering outside a tiny insignificant part of the country (the otherwise ill-provided M4 corridor).

    Then following closely in their footsteps for both rebranding and invisibility is Pipex Wireless's alleged WiMax network in Milton Keynes (and Warwick and Manchester and...). But as it's half funded by Intel whose consumer WiMax chipset stuff has also signally failed to appear within a few years of the advertised schedule, should we be surprised...

    What's the point?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/25/pccw_broadband/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/06/pccw_broadband_netvigator/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/21/pipex_miltonkeynes_wimax_wireless/

    http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1026547/pipex-goes-wimax

  3. Dom

    What about the rest of Europe/the world?

    Surely this is all of little relevance if the operators can't get similar frequency chunks across the rest of Europe and/or the world?

    The UK is one of the biggest mobile consumers, but I find it hard to believe that it would be beneficial to anyone if the UK have completely different frequency spectrums than anywhere else.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    cunsumers: the biggest stakeholder

    "The switch off of analogue TV is continuing apace, and as a country we need to decide what we want to do with the newly-available spectrum."

    uts interesting that i nALL this so called " _we_ need to decide what we want to do with the newly-available spectrum"

    the biggest stakeholder , the public the ultimateley pay the bills that make the profits are NO WERE IN SIGHT in any of thes reports.

    incase its forgotten, WE the public own the airwaves of our country, so were exactly is our free cummunity allocation of WiMax low and high frequency allocations i nany of this.

    several digital LONG RANGE (a 1980's CB radio style) allocations (a bare minimum of 5 10-Mhz NON overlapping consecutive slots should you wish to Bond them together to increase the data throughput) expressly set aside for the free UK community's internet High data rate backbone we can then populate with anycurrent and upcoming long range Wimax/Docsis radio's as we see fit...

    if the goal is to really interconnect cummunitys, this cummunity could self finance to these small interlinked WiMax grade long reach backbones without the aid of any money grabbing ISP providing any new plan were to also allocate funds for local council owned mini Co-Location sites from any such buildings going currently unused getting fibred up, and our cummunitys filling these racks and roofs with any required PCs and wireless arials.

    co supported by local businnes cash intake and all the usual bases covered.

    the key being , a MANDATED allocated free cummunity spectrum from the analogue switch off/

    lots of small and large, cheap and new local fibre interconnected rings layed in current and new conduit.

    and the required re-purposing of many smaller, currently under used/disused council and housing trust owned buildings as new "Co-Location" high speed (10gigabit+) cooperatives sites in rundown low income area's, such as the south manchester airport locations for instance, all leading back into the existing main UK core fibre trunks etc...

    you can bet Lard carter etal with their long standing Virgin Media and US Owned connections wont like these free UK cummunity fibre+wireless WiMax radio allocation proposals FROM OUR cummunity stakeholders though.

    put simply, we NEED to get our fair share of our UK airwaves back for free cummunity lead initatives, and garantees that enough to be allocated to us from your massive sold off analogue frequences as a basic requirment as the largest stake holderss though...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just so I understand Anonymous coward

    While the Open specrum group sort of retired in frustration they did get 802.11(r) ratified and frequency is licence exempt which is short range! Could you name a long range frequency that would work for community use and building.

    The good thing or the optimist in me is seeing this desire to create a Universal Broadband Service (of sorts) is at least causing the rule book to be changed in the service of a public objective, rather than specifically being engineered for another auction heist.

    If there is a strong or credible enough case to get another part of the frequency with a credible plan to exploit it, now is the time to present a case.

    There are very open to sharing facilities in rural areas. Given the public goal, of Universal access what frequencies would you seek to make available for a community based service?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    the potential for community based services

    sorry AC, totally forgot aboout this thread and i dont really have time right now but id like to give you something to consider anyway incase your inclind to take it further...

    the key again is getting 3 seperate freqs in al the spare places, i dont want to give any real frequency map or get hung up on the details , just a general overview....

    as a start you could do werse than look at daily wireless over the last few years....

    im trying to clear off my open browser pages here you understand LOL, so just a list of urls to lok at and conside in the outline above OC (forgive the errors, bad typist and no edit function here and thats a shame Elreg)

    http://aycu24.webshots.com/image/12903/2000974489182801693_rs.jpg

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/12/meraki-announces-cloud-based-enterprise-controller/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/05/craig-settles-fighting-the-good-fight-with-partnerships/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/12/the-key-to-sustainable-municipal-broadband-a-good-foundation/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/19/20482/

    Craig Settles: The Digital Divide is Back

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/20/fiercewireless-top-15-list/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/05/20/branding-key-to-muni-broadband/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/03/24/bridgewave-1gbps-backhaul-on-80ghz/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/01/28/wavion-beamforming-at-5824-ghz/

    http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/01/12/wimax-nations-taiwan-italy-uk/

    http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/ec-to-regulate-state-aid-for-next-gen-broadband-961

    http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-06/ts_burningquestion

    and countless others OC ;)

    the point is theres lots of hardware options for the community venture to use off the shelf, and thats not even considering the masses of bandwidth that can be created when you combine several freqs into a bonded end to end turnkey unit etc....

    as already stated we NEED a good proportion of the airwaves in several of the the LONG RANGE freqs to be given over to the prospect of free community units co-operatives etc all across the UK, with a special eye on generic bonding these together , gradually, and openly for community use LONG RANGE, long term.

    do you have any potential freqs with an eye on the outline above ?, sorry for turning it around on you, but no time any time soon,but it would be good to see it expanded on were people can, so what frequencies would you seek to make available for a community based service?

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