U.S. communications regulators are considering auctioning a piece of the airwaves to buyers willing to provide free broadband Internet service without pornography.

Although I personally think this will never fly as proposed (see below), the lack of interest in the 25 MHz. band could end up being useful. For those that don't recall, this area is just below the citizens band (26.965 - 27.405 MHz.) and just above the recently added 24 MHz. amateur band. Propagation at this frequency is medium range with low power, and a lot less dangerous at higher power than microwaves. You can cover a lot of area from one transmitter location, that is to say. Depending on how they would lay out channels and power limits would determine how efficient a regional grid might be.

No porn. Sounds like a good idea, but the adult entertainment industry is a big lobby and has a solid case for discriminating against them with mandatory filtering. This would not be like public airwaves broadcasting because they are carrying the internet, not network broadcast programming so in essence they are taking the responsibility away from parents and making it a demand on the carrier. I don't see a difference between that and e.g. telling any major wireless internet carrier to filter content. Because of this reason alone, I think this idea will not go anywhere.

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Why would we want an internet without porn?

I don't think it's possible.

Major bummer on shifting the filtering burden to the carriers. IMHO, that's a sure fire loser. As soon as that expectation is set to be "safe for the kiddies", the functionality won't be worth a damn, and nobody will be happy.

Parents do this, not ISP's.

Sad. The propagation characteristics of this band would make for some very interesting options.

Why would we want an internet without porn?

You wouldn't have anything to do then would you D???

This may sound like a stupid question until it is analyzed closely: How are they defining pornography? Do all forms of erotica fall under the umbrella? This can get complicated because some people are aroused by things that the general population might not consider sexual. For instance, some are turned on by feet and/or shoes; some think that it is sexy to watch a woman get hit in the face with a pie; some are turned on by seeing features of a woman's eyes, hair, ears, or mouth.

Perhaps the key is that at 25 MHz, the bandwidth is going to be narrow, meaning that connection speeds will be slow. This would make such a service OK for text but not for multimedia content. This limitation might inherently solve the porn problem.

Another problem is that very strong ionospheric skip can occur at 25 MHz during some parts of the sunspot cycle. This could mean interference from distant access points or other types of communications services outside the US using these frequencies.

"You wouldn't have anything to do then would you D???"

No, I'm not in the porn business. Sounds profitable, however, and something a good Republican should be making money with.

>>No porn.

The history of the FCC has been that they can regulate adult material "local over the air" but can't/won't over cable/satellite which does not make a whole lot of sense. Any regs guy to pipe in?

I'm not a lawyer, but upon looking at the story more closely, I saw that the catch to winning this auction is that the winner has to meet a timetable for being able to provide access to 50% and 90% of all households nationwide!!! In my opinion, anybody who gets into this auction is suicidal! From that standpoint, I can sort-of see why the FCC is trying to treat this like a broadcast service. Coincidentally, how do you guys feel about any single company getting exclusive nationwide rights to a portion of the spectrum?

I'm curious about a lot of technical details of this system--for instance:

1) How wide an area will each of the access points serve?

2) What kinds of connection speeds will users get? The greater an area each access point serves (and thus the more simultaneous users), the slower the connection speeds will be.

3) What would a typical user installation look like? The wavelengths being used here are slightly longer than those of CB radio, so this isn't something that could easily be tucked into a laptop computer. Most likely, an outdoor antenna would be required.

I think you'd probably have to use the 25 MHz for wide area distribution, maybe to a home based wireless router then go 802.11x from the router to the PC.

Also, depending on channel spacing, I can't see where they'd be able to get much speed.

25 MHz signals don't penetrate buildings very well. The wave length is too long (about 39.5').

We had the same issue with the old 43 MHz. paging frequencies.

It might be a good solution to give basic internet coverage out in the boonies where users are spaced pretty far apart, but I don't see it being a good alternative in an urban environment.

"What kinds of connection speeds will users get?"

Depends on how much analog bandwidth per channel, and how many channels in the band and the management technology to determine how many channels can be used for one transmission simultaneously.

See Nyquist rate and Shannon-Hartley Theorem for a more technical explanation of how much digital throughput can fit in a specified analog bandwidth..

There are companies already doing this at the higher frequencies. Coho.net does it with towers, similar to cell phone towers, and bandwidth varies somewhere around 1Mbit / sec to just over dialup.

Personally, I think that spectrum should be opened up for non-profit / academic use. Let the grads and post-grads build this out with creative engineering.

I found another story that says that the auction was for a 25 MHz segment spanning from 2155 to 2180 MHz.

http://hosted-communications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-comm/articles/29033-fcc -may-auction-25-mhz-wireless-spectrum.htm

This makes a bit more sense. This sounds similar to the coho system described above. According to coho's website, they operate in the 2.4 and 5.7 GHz bands, using 802.11 (WiFi).

OK, I guess that this thread self-destructed. Some time ago, I wondered whether one day, there might be the remote possibility that Internet traffic would be carried, at a very low bandwidth over the HF bands. Due to the severe speed limitations of such a system, the only places where it would be of use would be in remote areas where absolutely no other types of Internet connectivity, including satellite, exists. I don't know if such places exist anymore.

I think the problem is that there just isn't enough bandwidth at lower freqs,which means lower speed.

If you want text based stuff,get come CW software and a keyer on your PC,or RTTY,or... There are already a bunch of ways to do it.

I wondered this too.

For some perspective, uunet and USENET used to run at 9600. I could see some level of interaction happening, but only on a hobby activist level.

This is sort of what I pictured. It would be a system where text-only messages would be transmitted after they were written, but due to the low bandwidth, casual web browsing--even text only--might not be feasible. I should probably withdraw my question because I now remember reading, years ago, about HAMs building an experimental network to relay text e-mails to ships and other remote locations. As I remember, they ran into a number of regulatory hurdles that made it impractical to allow anybody but (good) HAMs to send e-mails over the system. Namely, (1) the "no secret codes and cyphers" rule would forbid anyone from sending encrypted e-mails and (2) There would be issues with indecent and obscene language, which people generally don't think twice about using online. Fortunately, both of those hurdles could be overcome with software that filters cuss words or that rejects messages that contain very few or no dictionary words (i.e. ones that have been encrypted).

On the secret codes and cyphers rule, what if that cypher is published? Is it the content that cannot be secret, or the means and methods used to encode it?

Agreed that a profanity filter + some simple mail filter rules would go a long way toward making that system work.

Another thought too: The task of gate keeping could be distributed much like the Morse Code nets are. Everybody does a little message duty, and the net then runs nicely, if with some serious latency!

One more thought too. Make the data exchange only 6 bit clear. That would force plain text, and make the most of the bandwidth.

I've never seen the "secret codes and cyphers" rule expounded upon. It just seems to show up in study guides and the license exams listed among things that can't be transmitted; the others, of course, include advertisements, profanity, music, and mock distress signals.