Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 09:27:30 -0700
Reply-To: Ben McCafferty <ben@VOLKSCAFE.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Ben McCafferty <ben@VOLKSCAFE.COM>
Subject: NVC Wireless,
was: Re: Fast German will fix the broken rebuild / Fix?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.1030117105856.22145A-100000@grex.cyberspace.org>
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Recently read an interesting article on the use of wireless bandwidth in the
US, and it's pretty crazy. For interested parties, it was in Forbes
(http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/1125/138.html and you need to register to
access the article). Basically, the FCC has a stranglehold on frequencies,
and are still letting archaic technologies have the airwaves here. For
example, one of the largest usable segments is consumed for broadcast TV (11
million users), though 88% of the country's viewers use cable or satellite.
Meanwhile, tremendous cell traffic (137 million users) is being forced into
a segment of frequencies half as large as broadcast TV enjoys, which is
really the reason we have such poor cell service in the US. Very
interesting article re: fat cat-ism, etc.
bmc :)
Ben McCafferty
ben@volkscafe.com
Volks Cafe
1823 Soquel Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95062
831-426-1244
http://www.volkscafe.com
> From: David Brodbeck <gull@CYBERSPACE.ORG>
> Reply-To: David Brodbeck <gull@CYBERSPACE.ORG>
> Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 11:00:58 -0500
> To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
> Subject: Re: Fast German will fix the broken rebuild / Fix?
>
> On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, David Beierl wrote:
>
>> At 02:37 AM 1/17/2003, zampano wrote:
>>> How come cell phones still are horribly
>>> unreliable all over the U.S?? When I could use them in Italy,
>>> Switzerland and Germany 8 years ago on mountain peaks, valleys, subway
>>> stations, anywhere except tunnels???
>>
>> Have you compared the sizes? Germany for example, has a helicopter/trauma
>> center setup that can get people to a trauma center from anywhere in the
>> country in fifteen minutes. This is great, but they have only about
>> one-eighth the land mass per inhabitant (230/km^2 vs 27/km^2 ten or fifteen
>> years ago)
>
> That's part of it, but another major difference is that Europe
> standardized on one digital cell phone standard. In the U.S., there
> wasn't the political will to do this, so we have three completely
> incompatible phone networks. For everyone to get reliable service the
> whole country has to be covered in triplicate! This is one case where a
> little more government intervention would have benefited everyone.
>
> _ _
> __ _ _ _| | | | David M. Brodbeck (N8SRE) Ypsilanti, MI
> / _` | | | | | | +-----------------------------------------------------
> | (_| | |_| | | | @ cyberspace.org
> \__, |\__,_|_|_| "To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the
> |___/ pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer,
> the glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
|