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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JGoren who wrote (82832)	1/27/2009 5:19:08 PM
From: engineer	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196851

John, Was going to post the same thing just now. There is alot of issues wiht all these spectrum rollouts. Andy has a good set of issues with them. Some might be overcome in the future, some may be not. I think an overiding point here is that Spectrum does not equal profit. there is a ginat gap inbetween. But there are just too many people out there pushing to get alot more braodband thruput for a lower price in the world. When one is faced with this "problem", somebody will find an answer. Perhaps not this year or next but a few years from now. The letter went to the "acting" FCC chairman. There will be many heads rolling at the FCC over hte next year or two. They have been way to influenced by lobbiests and politics and not by the underlying technology and sound business practices that need to be developed. The FCC we have today may not be anything like the FCC we have in 4 years. One mor thing to relize is that the enforcement side of the FCC has long been totally lacking. They make you license your devices in certain ways, but then do not limit you from using them in other ways. Unlicensed wireless mics are a good example. Developed by the broadcasters, they allowed them to use the unused TV white space. Now they have squatters rights. XM and Sirius licensed a small band at 2.3 GHZ and then build their recievers with no front end filters, as nobody ever thought that they might have adjacent channels. When Nextwave bough the specturm licenses, they determined that IF they simply radiated to the letter of the license law, they would take both XM and Sirius off the air. So since XM.SRI had 100k radios out there, the specs were changed to make the adjacent channels avoid the unfilteres spaces around them. Along wiht that are legacy systems which are hardly used. The Military has chanels they do not even use, but they reserve sionce they had radios in 1944 which used this. Not to mention that the modem for this band is about 6 feet long by 2 feet thick, but 5 feet deep. (I know I worked on these when I was working for the Navy). So they keep a 1 MHz wide band for that radio. We have long passed up the abilities of most of hte popular radios in the world, but the cost to replace them is what stops us. FM radio could be 1000 channels wide if it were changed to digital. but the car radios and house radios can't be changed, just like the TVs. If the TVs had good filters on them, you could put DTV channels adjacent to each other. This would mean that you could compress them all down into the botom 20 channels on your TV and leave the rest wide open ofr a national BB network. You would not care what channel you got your CNN and local news on, just as long as they tuned in. There is alot mroe that can be done over time. The legacy is what is stopping us mostly.