The good news is that an application like this might bring some sense to people about the benefits of close proximity to cell towers.  People might realize that the closer they are to a cell tower, the weaker their cell phone transmits at.  And because cell phones are around a million times stronger to the person using it than a cell tower, anyone who wants to ignore the overwhelming scientific data that there are no measurable risk to cell phones usage and wants lower radio exposer will need to live near a cell tower.

So does this mean that living far from a cell tower or living in a shielded building is harmful because the cell phone must operate at peak transmit levels?  No, because peak transmit levels are already restricted by the FCC to safe levels.  That means the worst case reading from the Tawkon app simply means the phone is operating at the peak allowable SAR levels.  If it really scares a person that much, they should use a wired or Bluetooth headset.

There’s been much media criticism of the wireless industry for alleged spectrum hoarding, but the problem isn’t that simple.  Former FCC chief economist Thomas Hazlett who has studied the spectrum market for years stated the following when asked about spectrum hoarding by the wireless industry.

Thomas Hazlett -

The 534 MHz (auctioned to the wireless industry) is way over-stated.

First, through 2009, only about 200 MHz was being used by mobile carriers. That includes 50 Cellular, 120 PCS, and about 20 for SMR (the former dispatch licenses turned into mobile phone spectrum by Nextel).

Second, there were (finally) big auctions in 2006 (AWS) and 2008 (700 MHz). These yielded 90 MHz of licensed spectrum (AWS) and 70 MHz (700 MHz – counting previous auctions in 2002/03). This bandwidth was encumbered. The 700 MHz licenses had TV stations broadcasting on many of them until to June 2009, and still have wireless microphones and (maybe) low power TV broadcasts. It’s not a big issue because most of the bandwidth, owned by AT&T and VZ, is being used for LTE — and this is not yet rolling out. The AWS spectrum is encumbered by government users, and it’s a problem for T Mobile and other carriers who paid the $13.9 billion in 2006. They’re still clearing the band.

Third, there are the 2.5 GHz licenses that Clearwire and some smaller players are aggregating to provide WiMax services. There is up to 190 MHz available here. But it is fragmented insanely, and the companies have to piece together most of the bandwidth via long-term contracts with non-profit educational institutions — Catholic churches, community colleges, etc. How much can be effectively deployed is not publicly known. Clearwire claims that it has something like 90 MHz covering about 120 million pops. And they’re the biggest play, by far, here. Given the licensing problems and the technology problems (WiMax not scaling, not blowing away 3G let alone LTE), and the inherent cost disadvantage in building new networks from scratch (against carriers upgrading 3G to 4G), this spectrum is not yet effectively competitive in the wireless space.

So, when you get down to it, we now have something like this:

190 — deployed by cellular carriers
190 — 2.5 GHz potentially deployable for wireless broadband
160 — likely to be soon deployed by carriers (AWS, 700 MHz)
—–
540

Tossing in the 190 for the 2.5 GHz licenses is dubious, and the fact that the FCC waited so long to auction the AWS and 700 MHz licenses makes this spectrum a future play rather than currently deployed bandwidth. The additional 50 MHz is from AWS-2, and I don’t know how fast the FCC is going to move on that. Could be years. It’s already been four years since the AWS-1 was auctioned.

This isn’t to excuse the comments by Dish Network executives, but Hazlett highlights the fact that the problem of spectrum hoarding is complicated and that it is often overstated.  Bad behavior isn’t the norm in the wireless industry and the major wireless carriers use their spectrum very efficiently and they are in the process of deploying newly auctioned spectrum.  We should address spectrum hoarding and speculation in future auctions but it should not be a reason to halt spectrum waste reclamation in TV broadcasting.

Professor Hazlett offered a detailed proposal for reclaiming that wasted spectrum by eliminating broadcast TV and paying the private sector serve the roughly 10% of our population who don’t have subscription TV from one of the existing MVPD providers.  I offered a slightly different proposal that would leave 40 MHz intact and reclaim 254 MHz of spectrum which gets most of the spectrum back but eliminates the need to create an alternative to broadcast TV which carries the risk of a permanent TV service entitlement.  I like Hazlett’s proposal but I am biased towards my own, but both proposals are vastly superior to the status quo.

Here are some of the more interesting facts from the 2010 report

• There are now 302.9 million wireless subscribers, up 6% from 2009.
• Wireless penetration is at 96%.
• Minutes of voice usage is slightly down in 2010 compared to 2009, from 2.275 trillion to 2.241.  That would indicate an average of 616 minutes per wireless subscriber.
• MMS is up 64% to 56.6 billion messages, which seems to explain a slight decline in voice usage.
• Data traffic is up 110%, and now at 226.5 billion megabytes.
• 78.2 million active smartphones, up 57% from 2009.
• 270 million data capable devices, up 5.3% from 2009.
• 242 million web capable devices, up 1.5% from 2009.
• Wireless enabled tablets, laptops, and modems (not Wi-Fi) is up 14.2% at 13.6 million devices.
• Average data+voice monthly fee is down 2% to $47.21 despite increased data adoption.
• Wireless industry capital expenditures rose 22% from 2009 to $24.9 billion.

From these numbers, it would indicate a healthy segment of the U.S. economy.

Mobile, perhaps not coincidentally, has also been historically a quite lightly regulated industry. But emerging is a sort of slow boil of small but many rules, or proposed rules, that could threaten the sector’s success. I’m thinking of the “bill shock” proceeding, in which the FCC is looking at billing practices and various “remedies.” And the failure to settle the D block public safety spectrum issue in a timely manner. And now we have a group of rural mobile providers who want the FCC to set prices in the data roaming market.

You remember that “roaming” is when service provider A pays provider B for access to B’s network so that A’s customers can get service when they are outside A’s service area, or where it has capacity constraints, or for redundancy. These roaming agreements are numerous and have always been privately negotiated. The system works fine.

But now a group of provider A’s, who may not want to build large amounts of new network capacity to meet rising demand for mobile data, like video, Facebook, Twitter, and app downloads, etc., want the FCC to mandate access to B’s networks at regulated prices. And in this case, the B’s have spent many tens of billions of dollars in spectrum and network equipment to provide fast data services, though even these investments can barely keep up with blazing demand.

The FCC has never regulated mobile phone rates, let alone data rates, let alone data roaming rates. And of course mobile voice and data rates have been dropping like rocks. These few rural providers are asking the FCC to step in where it hasn’t before. They are asking the FCC to impose old-time common carrier regulation in a modern competitive market – one in which the FCC has no authority to impose common carrier rules and prices.

In the chart above, we see U.S. info-tech investment in 2010 approached $500 billion. Communications equipment and structures (like cell phone towers) surpassed $105 billion. The fourth generation of mobile networks is just in its infancy. We will need to invest many tens of billions of dollars each year for the foreseeable future both to drive and accommodate Internet innovation, which spreads productivity enhancements and wealth across every sector in the economy.

It is perhaps not surprising that a small number of service providers who don’t invest as much in high-capacity networks might wish to gain artificially cheap access to the networks of the companies who invest tens of billions of dollars per year in their mobile networks alone. Who doesn’t like lower input prices? Who doesn’t like his competitors to do the heavy lifting and surf in his wake? But the also not surprising result of such a policy could be to reduce the amount that everyone invests in new networks. And this is simply an outcome the technology industry, and the entire country, cannot afford. The FCC itself has said that “broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.”

Economist Michael Mandel has offered a useful analogy:

new regulations [are] like tossing small pebbles into a stream. Each pebble by itself would have very little effect on the flow of the stream. But throw in enough small pebbles and you can make a very effective dam.

Why does this happen? The answer is that each pebble by itself is harmless. But each pebble, by diverting the water into an ever-smaller area, creates a ‘negative externality’ that creates more turbulence and slows the water flow.

Similarly, apparently harmless regulations can create negative externalities that add up over time, by forcing companies to spending time and energy meeting the new requirements. That reduces business flexibility and hurts innovation and growth.

It may be true that none of the proposed new rules for wireless could alone bring down the sector. But keep piling them up, and you can dangerously slow an important economic juggernaut. Price controls for data roaming are a terrible idea.

Half of that spectrum in broadcast TV is wasted on older MPEG-2 video compression technology, and the former head of the National Broadband Plan Blair Levin has advocated a migration to MPEG-4 AVC (AKA H.264) so that broadcasters can send the same amount of video with the same perceptible quality using half the radio spectrum.

In addition to the compression optimizations, we can again double our spectral efficiency if we got rid of the whitespace waste stemming from an inefficient radio architecture.  Whitespaces can be eliminated if we switched to a single frequency network where all the broadcast towers use the same frequency, but the current ATSC standard used by American broadcast TV uses 8VSB modulation which is not optimized for single frequency networks (SFN).  We would need to switch to OFDM radio modulation (like the international DVB-T standard) to use SFN architecture.  That would require changing out transmitter and receiver equipment, but we can do this when we upgrade to MPEG-4 AVC so that we only need a single transition.

We can go further and eliminate guard band waste if we consolidated the broadcast stations to a single 40 MHz channel.  Consolidating the transmit towers and other equipment can save on upgrade and facilities costs which can be paid for through spectrum auctions.  40 MHz of spectrum without even using aggressive encoding techniques can yield 120 Mbps of usable payload capacity, and more aggressive encoding along with multi-radio solutions that use MIMO could double or quadruple usable bandwidth.  But even with “only” 120 Mbps of capacity, that would allow for 12 HD 1080P channels each consuming 5 Mbps, and another 60 standard definition 480P channels each consuming 1 Mbps.

By comparison, Hulu.com only allocates 0.5 Mbps for their 480P video streams.  If these bitrates are good enough for the Internet – a service people pay for – it is more than generous for free over-the-air broadcasts.  If we matched Hulu in quality, we could broadcast 120 standard definition channels using 60 Mbsps of capacity in addition to the 12 HD 1080P channels or we could do the following breakdown:

• 12 1080P channels – 5 Mbps
• 20 720P channels – 1.5 Mbps
• 60 480P channels – 0.5 Mbps

The programs that garner the highest ratings and most viewers should be allocated the most broadcasting capacity because it fairly allocates capacity in response to demand.  This is more than enough to divvy up between the TV broadcasters and the broadcasters will remain “broadcasters” so that they can sustain their “must carry” status which is their financial bread and butter.

All of this of course requires another transition similar to the DTV transition we just completed in 2009, but it must be done if we want the smooth deployment of the national broadband plan.  If we need to issue another 3 million coupons to low-income households to ease the transition, it’s a very small cost compared to the revenues raised by the spectrum auctions.  The solutions proposed here aren’t entirely painless, but we must avoid half-way solutions that don’t free up much spectrum and require more costly transitions soon after.  Real solutions call for some real changes.

Instead, Goodmon’s plan Wireless Internet Service Providers would use broadcasting technology within their networks.  Because video is the culprit of chewing up large amounts of bandwidth, the WISPs would design their networks to hand off any large simultaneous requests for video through the broadcasting technology and hand that traffic over to broadcasters who would then send it to mobile devices.

Additionally, it is being argued that this plan provides the FCC a better financial incentive.  Current rules allow ancillary use of public spectrum.  This means that any revenue made by broadcasters for providing this type of service to WISPs like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc would incur a 5% fee to the FCC.  The long term profitability of the plan for the FCC could exceed even the billions expected to by made by spectrum auctions.

A financially desperate Clearwire Internet deemed these terms to be unmarketable to the public and decided to play fast and loose with their advertising which is now getting them sued by their customers.  Clearwire previously proclaimed on their website:

“Usage is unlimited—believe it. You can upload, download, and surf as much as you want for one low price with any of the CLEAR Internet plans. We don’t slow down your connection—the way some Internet providers do—if we think you are using too much bandwidth,”

These claims were clearly proven to be unsupportable by the Clear WiMAX network and some users were getting as little as 256 Kbps which is clearly unacceptable in light of the advertising claims.  Had Clearwire been more upfront about the limitations of the service and consumers entered into the service knowing what they were buying, there would be little controversy though far fewer consumers would have signed on to the service.

There are some who would bemoan the limitations of wireless broadband services whenever usage caps are instituted, but a wireless provider can’t and shouldn’t sell what they can’t provide.  This lesson could not have been made clearer by the failures of Clearwire WiMAX Internet services.

Realistically speaking, truly mobile applications need to be between 500 MHz and 2500 MHz which is a 2000 MHz patch of spectrum with a practical total carrying capacity of 2 Gbps to 10 Gbps per cell if all 2000 MHz are converted to mobile Internet services.  That sounds like a lot of capacity until we consider the fact that each cell is potentially needed by thousands of users, and the fact that most of that mobile spectrum is allocated to something other than mobile Internet.  Within that 2000 MHz, it will be challenging to get 300 to 500 MHz freed up for mobile Internet services.  The picture below can be clicked and expanded to show what resides in this spectrum space.  The FCC also has a more detailed document on the 300 to 3000 MHz spectrum.

It is unclear who or what is going to get squeezed or bumped off of this spectrum map.  Some of the analog data and voice applications can certainly be compressed and shrunken (digital technology is effectively a system that shares spectrum far more efficiently than analog radio communications), but that would require changes in hardware which is expensive.  Spectrum is like land and once it’s occupied, it becomes very hard to evict the tenants.

The authors assess the costs and benefits of the possibilities of either assigning D Block spectrum to public safety or auctioning the spectrum for commercial use.  They suggest that analysis purports that the 10 MHz spectrum, if used for public safety, would provide somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.4 billion in “social benefits”.  Social benefits being any positive outcome for a community in the case of an emergency.

The cost in allocated this spectrum will be the loss of auction monies.  The authors believe their analysis shows that the loss of revenue will be “offset by the gain of higher auction revenues and lower public safety network deployment cost in the future.”

The authors believe that ultimately, moving public safety forces over to D Block will reduce budget expenses.  However, if public safety is forced to use other 700MHz spectrum it could result in resource scarcity and it is believed that the overall value of 700MHz spectrum could be reduced in value as high as 86%.

You can read the full paper here.