Since there are so many of us and the FCC has no way of controlling us
its unlikely that the band will be closed for many years. I don't know
why anyone would want the band anyway since we're only the secondary
users, we have to share it with pagers, assisted listening devices and
maybe other things I don't know of. (Assisted listening is moving to
430MHz and paging is historic, though.)
If we owned the 72MHz band we could move spread spectrum techniques to
it but I think we're restricted to our current low bandwidth channels --
operation is not just a matter of frequency but how you use its because
adding any kind of data to a carrier occupies spectrum (and the more you
add the more space you take up).
One interesting prospect is that we'll eventually have a much larger
spectrum space opened for generalized mobile applications. This has come
about because cramming everyone in this tiny slice of unusable spectrum
called the ISM band -- the 2.4GHz band -- has spurred the development of
low cost radio technology of a sophistication that was available to only
the deepest pockets just a decade ago. The same technology can be used
anywhere in the radio spectrum and its one of the arguments Google is
using in their quest for slices of spectrum that will be opened up as a
result of analog TV shutting down next year. (TV won't disappear from
the airwaves, it will go digital but digital transmissions allow a lot
more stations to be crammed into a given slice of bandwidth and it also
allows the power of the transmitters to be cut to a fraction of what is
needed for conventional analog transmissions.) Since we can now share
bandwidth with other services without thinking about it we could justly
claim to be just another mobile service, just another remote telemetry
and control application. This may not come to fruition since the way
spectrum is sold off tends to be a resource which is then used as a
cash-cow for its owner (which should be us since its our spectrum, the
FCC shouldn't have the right to sell off our property like that) but it
won't be because of the lack of technology.
Martin Usher
BTW -- Don't fall into the trap of assuming 2.4GHz is limitless. It just
feels that way.
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