Say you had a blank slate to rejigger how bandwidth is allocated. What would it look like? Could we move things around and end up with more bandwidth than anyone knows what to do with? What's the ratio of "bad legacy we should cut" to "useful legacy band but it's only around because of legacy, we definitely wouldn't carve a band out for it today if it didn't have one" to "we have to keep this around".
Is it like "well, if you want airplanes not to crash, you need to give up this band to RADAR, and that means there's a fundamental limit on how good wireless communication can possibly be for today's humans?".
In reality it would cost billions, because the only way to do it without disrupting the world would probably be the way they did digital TV, just giving people free digital replacement radios, and it would likely be unpopular with those who don't trust computers.
All in all, looking at this chart, we could probably save about 30MHz to 100MHz, if I had to guess and there were no political or financial issues.
Some of FM radio and most of the 2-way stuff could go without disrupting anything, as long as we were willing to pay for high quality digital replacements. but everything that's already digital is generally pretty good.
The only change I'd really want to make is we would replace land mobile radio and similar services with a national standard digital system, that would have cell phone level quality, provisions for tiny amounts of digital data, and a standard repeater and internet tunneling system.
All but the top public safety systems wouldn't have private frequencies anymore, you'd get assigned to a shared digital channel, and you'd have have a secondary redundant shorter range higher frequency link for things like construction sites, so that you'd always have at least local coverage even if the long range channel was clogged in a disaster.
Just really go all in and make sure there was no room for anyone to complain that analog was better, make it totally bulletproof and mass produce one high quality module by the millions.
Another possible savings is to ban any new commercially sold point to point devices that don't use transmit power control. If you know who you are sending to and have a 2-way link, it's easy to adjust to the minimum power, it just gets hard when you are broadcasting or meshing.
For some reason wifi has it as an extension, but it didn't come till later.
At the moment it seems like they do a pretty amazing job
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Say you had a blank slate to rejigger how bandwidth is allocated. What would it look like? Could we move things around and end up with more bandwidth than anyone knows what to do with? What's the ratio of "bad legacy we should cut" to "useful legacy band but it's only around because of legacy, we definitely wouldn't carve a band out for it today if it didn't have one" to "we have to keep this around".
Is it like "well, if you want airplanes not to crash, you need to give up this band to RADAR, and that means there's a fundamental limit on how good wireless communication can possibly be for today's humans?".
In reality it would cost billions, because the only way to do it without disrupting the world would probably be the way they did digital TV, just giving people free digital replacement radios, and it would likely be unpopular with those who don't trust computers.
All in all, looking at this chart, we could probably save about 30MHz to 100MHz, if I had to guess and there were no political or financial issues.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Un...
Some of FM radio and most of the 2-way stuff could go without disrupting anything, as long as we were willing to pay for high quality digital replacements. but everything that's already digital is generally pretty good.
The only change I'd really want to make is we would replace land mobile radio and similar services with a national standard digital system, that would have cell phone level quality, provisions for tiny amounts of digital data, and a standard repeater and internet tunneling system.
All but the top public safety systems wouldn't have private frequencies anymore, you'd get assigned to a shared digital channel, and you'd have have a secondary redundant shorter range higher frequency link for things like construction sites, so that you'd always have at least local coverage even if the long range channel was clogged in a disaster.
Just really go all in and make sure there was no room for anyone to complain that analog was better, make it totally bulletproof and mass produce one high quality module by the millions.
Another possible savings is to ban any new commercially sold point to point devices that don't use transmit power control. If you know who you are sending to and have a 2-way link, it's easy to adjust to the minimum power, it just gets hard when you are broadcasting or meshing.
For some reason wifi has it as an extension, but it didn't come till later.
At the moment it seems like they do a pretty amazing job