Shouldn't be any more questions, class.
Posted on 06/02/2008 1:43:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As the FCC auctions off an unused spectrum of airwaves, the winner may be forced to provide free wireless internet for most of the country. No date or terms for the auction have been set, but the government's deal requires that free service on the 25 MHz spectrum reaches at least half the in five years and 95 percent within ten years. The agreement, proposed by FCC chairman Kevin Martin, also stipulates that the bidder must filter out obscene content for allowing the winner to use the remaining portion of the spectrum for commercial purposes.
"We're hoping there will be increased interest in the proposal; and because this will provide wireless broadband services to more Americans, it is certainly something we want to see," said FCC spokesman Rob Kenny.
CTIA, the principal trade group for wireless companies, is unenthusiastic about the proposal, taking issue with the provision that the service must be free. Prior to this proposal, there has been little interest in this portion of the spectrum, as wireless carriers preferred the 700MHz airwaves auctioned a few months ago.
A startup company called M2Z previously asked to use the airwaves for free, providing free wireless with a content filter and garnering revenue from advertising that would be shared with the government. The FCC turned M2Z down, saying the company needed to bid against other carriers, but Martin's proposal is very similar. The next step is a June 12th meeting where more details are expected to be hammered out. [Source: AP Business and Yahoo! News]
Yes, the FCC can auction off the bandwidth, it’s what they do.
I suspect what we’re talking about free here, is similar to free TV or radio, we’d have to put up with commercials. I suspect that there is a business model that works, where every third page is a Campbell’s Soup commercial or a Personal Injury Lawyer commercial, yadda yadda yadda. Folks put up with this for over the air TV.
Who will pay for this “free” wi-fi? Undoubtedly with massive new taxes on Internet access or perhaps computers. Look at the taxes and fees tacked on to your phone bill for a sample of what is to come.
What?
More than one word?
Must be the heat ... gorebull warming, doncha'know.
Ask our ER Mod's they seem to keep a handle on things. Now a DU Mod would have everyone learning about gay porn.
Anchorage was going to wi-fi but the vendor pulled out. When they say most of the USA they usually mean except Alaska.
Ads, just like "free" network TV. You'll probably be routed through a proxy that "helpfully" places the ads in a div on the top or the right-hand side of every webpage you look at. Probably sneakily in a way that is extremely difficult to filter out.
They might partner up with Google for the ads, and you'll get yet another Google Adsense box on every page, including your online credit card bill, with each and every pageview cataloged and stored in Google's database. And Google will know everything about you.
Well, the 2.2 - 2.3 ghz frequency is so close to the 2.4 ghz that we use in our ISP that to cover even 10% of the country with usable signal will require a HUGE investment in technology and towers. Our is the latest beam forming antenna system with the customer equipment being non-line of sight - meaning it can sit inside a structure and still work. The effective range on this system is about 3 miles from the antenna. It is subject to interference from trees with leaves, building surfaces, and so on where the signal tends to bounce around.
Advertising support would require a scenario like Netzero used and ultimately did not work. The provider still has to pay for maintenance of the system and with all those towers and transmitters and antennas and customer premise equipment, not to mention technical support I can’t imagine there are enough advertisers in the US to keep it afloat.
Our system requires weekly calibration, hand holding of the customers and of course technical support when Martha’s email doesn’t work - unless of course the free service opened up the door for PAY technical support!
Somebody with WAAAAY lots of money to lose will have to bid on the spectrum - they would be better off losing their money in Vegas!
We do. And we are getting ready to do it again.
“...the bidder must filter out obscene content...”
Like Christian content!
5GHz works even better.
But you better understand line of site, and refraction, and grating. Really, really.
/johnny
Through near-sea-level atmosphere.... just to clarify.
(Scratching head ?)
Who do you think the airwaves belong to ?
I'm trying to remember who built them .. wait was it the Tyrell Corporation or Cyberdyne Systems
Filtering content at the ISP level is complete fantasy. As soon as you try opening the content of an IP stream to spot what is a T&A jpeg vs. a Ansel Adams picture, there’s no way in Hades you can maintain any sort of bandwidth. Zippo, nada, zilch.
The speed of packet switching in the modern IP network rests on the premise that we don’t need to dig too deeply into the content of each packet. Right now, things like routers and switches are looking only as deep as the TCP header, and that’s pretty rare. Most of the time they’re doing nothing more than the IP header. The content that these idiots want to filter is deep within the TCP payload - and the TCP payload could be split across multiple IP frames, which would require that routers (either the WiFi routers, which are usually really anemic in CPU and memory) or the access routers that are feeding the WiFi routers, re-assemble TCP packets to re-form the payload so it could be inspected.
I’ve worked on devices that have done this for security applications - things like stateful intrusion detection boxes. They can handle perhaps a 100Mbps ethernet worth of bandwidth, but they’re looking for a series of “attack signatures” that requires they look at only a few bytes here or there.
Filtering out video/picture/audio content on a TCP session.... no way. This ain’t like TV or radio, where it is a one-way stream.
Can it be done? Yes, if you give me an nearly infinite budget for R&D, bleeding edge hardware, rack upon rack of CPU, etc. If I’m giving away the service and charging for only the advertisement(s), there’s no hope for ever recovering this level of investment. Ad-based revenue works well when you have something like Yahoo or Google, and you have very little incremental cost per user. When you’re inspecting everyone’s TCP stream for throbbing naughty bits, you have a substantial increase in hardware requirements for every single user. There’s no way that you’re going to get enough out of each incremental user from ad revenue to offset the infrastructure costs.
Now, even if we could do it, do you want it done? Absolutely not. Once the technology for inspecting every TCP payload exists, the Feds could be monitoring everything everyone does on line in real time, every day, all day.
The best way to keep kiddies from viewing porn on the ‘net is for their parents to re-discover a razor strop and learn how to use it on Little Johnnie.
The other problem in ad-based revenue is how many people filter out ads. The current ad model in commercial/cable TV is rapidly crumbling under the most lucrative customers (upper middle class and higher incomes) using PVR’s like Tivo and DishTV’s PVR. The network execs hate PVR’s with a flaming passion.
Ad blocking plug-ins for browsers are even more effective than PVR’s at removing ad content.
Looking at the Eshoo legislation, all I can see is a smoking hole in the ground into which a business could throw billions of dollars in investment and then millions in burn rate to receive a pittance of revenue in return.
Shouldn't be any more questions, class.
You're forgetting that IP isn't everything. The DNS lookup starts everything, so why aren't DNS servers bogged down? OpenDNS will filter adult content at the DNS level already.
I’ve worked on devices that have done this for security applications - things like stateful intrusion detection boxes.
I'm sorry, but adult content blocking is a lot easier than intrusion detection. It doesn't even require any more than one state. Even if you're imagining some sort of complex computer vision AI that would detect porn, it wouldn't need to be doing it in real-time. You seem to be imagining a serverless internet without common content. For the most part, a user will enter a url that must be resolved by DNS, that displays roughly the same content as it did months ago.
DNS-based filtering is easily circumvented. It already is being circumvented - today.
One of the dirty little secrets of the computing and networking industries I’m here to tell you is just how well-funded and how high-tech the porn industry is. Porn outfits are the bleeding-edge customers we in the computing/networking industry don’t like to talk about. But boy oh boy, do they buy equipment by the truckload.
If the government were to put up a free WiFi network, where you could be surfing porn anonymously anywhere, the porn industry would give their eyeteeth to make sure they capitalize on that access. They already use HTTP tunneling and proxy servers to circumvent DNS and HTTP filters/loggers that companies use to keep employees from surfing porn at work on a company’s network.
That’s what makes me so certain that your method won’t work: because the porn vendors are already circumventing exactly the approach you’re talking about and there already is a cat-and-mouse game going on between companies installing DNS logger/filters and HTTP filters and the porn vendors responding by burying their porn every deeper under tunnels, redirects, proxy servers, etc.
We're not talking about a perfect filter. Just one hard enough where the vast majority of users won't be able to get to it. So what if someone with ingenuity and some external software can go to a porn site. So what if they can call their friend on a web-chat and send pictures to each other?
Furthermore, if you're really wanting a neat trick, just have a whitelist that includes port-numbers to restrict access. Sure you couldn't even send an instant message over it, but it would be free and safe.
Who are the most technologically adept users at circumventing whitelists/blacklists, port blocking, etc?
Kids. The very demographic the legislation is attempting to claim should be protected from porn.
Just look at the whole file-sharing fiasco. Trying to block ports of various file-sharing networks has been utterly fruitless, because kids are far more adaptable and responsive to technical barriers than the people putting up the barriers. This is why the MPAA/RIAA have been resorting to the seemingly outlandish tactics of legal intimidation and tort law.
That’s why the legislation is simply unrealistic. This would be an ISP with the same problems and issues of futility in dealing with porn, file-sharing, spam and so on as any other... but without any legal recourse.
Lawyers can spout “intent” until their gums bleed, but the technical facts can’t be avoided here, namely that this idea of a “free network” removes the ONE tool that ISP’s currently have to block offensive content, behavior, etc — the end user agreement.
From the legislation:
“`(ii) offer a data service that is faster than 200 kilobits per second one way (subject to subparagraph (G)) for free to consumers and authorized public safety users without subscription, airtime, usage, or other charges;”
If you’re sharing files, hacking on other people’s machines, introducing virus payload, etc - a subscription ISP can kick your butt off their network.
Here, there’s nothing but the wild, wild west of easy access for all manner of clandestine activity - most of it far worse than porn, and also blocked only by inspection.
It might be free, but there will be no safety, for any reasonable value of the word ‘safe’.
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