FCC to sell c band spectrum

The FCC dramatically slashed Universal Service Fund dollars some time back, and repackaged it as the Connect America Fund. They provide funds, if the LEC's can meet their target download speeds to qualify for the money. So it still comes down to costs, if the LEC can't make it work on paper in rural area to make it worthwhile, the upgrades may not happen.

Some of the providers took the money and didn't do anything with it.
 
the cable companies tried Ku and because of cloud blockage etc went back to C band. I was told in Modesto etc Ca that 5g phone repeaters were installed on light poles and did not have permission and had to remove them. 5G providers are looking for spectrum space even in unused OTA UHF tv channels.
I see a saturation of rf transmissions and that can have health concerns.
Not getting rid of my 8ft bud.
 
Spectrum bandwidth is the gift that keeps on giving... In the near future the FCC will make a lot of $$ out of... nothing. And in 10 years when 5G is gone the way of MySpace and AOL, they can sell it again for $$$ and in 20 years again for $$$$, etc. And it's not like it requires repairs and maintenance... In other word it's pretty much free money for the budget. Very tempting, don't you think?

Now on a more technical topic... We all know that Ku is more subject to rain fade than C-Band, we all see it. Yet many parts of the world don't use C-Band at all for their program distribution. I remember when in the 80's, many European countries started adding private TV channels (such as Sat1, 3Sat in Germany, La 5 and M6 in France, etc. ), the distribution to cable headends and to OTA transmitters was done via satellite in Ku band, and I don't remember seeing outages due to rain fade ever. Ok an analog signal was probably a lot more resilient than an 8psk signal, and the rains in France and Germany are not as crazy as in tropical areas, but still, I think Ku band can be used in better ways that it currently is. Signal resilience is possible but it has a cost... You might notice that it doesn't take much rain to lose PBS on 125W but you still get a good reception of KBS on 123W or CGTN on 95W. Modulation and FEC are everything. But the cost is the bandwidth, which bring me to the next topic...

For starter, most of the world has 2 GHz of Ku bandwidth. Here we use 500 MHz for BSS ("Standard" 11.7-12.2 GHz)and reserve 500 MHz for DBS services. Take a spectrum analyzer and scan the skies with an old Dish LNBF and you'll find mostly radio silence. An entire 500 MHz is wasted for 2 companies that operate about 10 orbital slots. Why can't we use the other slots as an extension of the BSS spectrum?

Also, what are we doing with the lower band Ku spectrum? Maybe it's reserved for other services, but yet we receive a few satellites there, including in the Americas region (63W, 65W, 78W, 129W) and if i'm not mistaken we even have a North-American satellite blasting a strong signal there (Anik G1@ 107W). If it's ok for Anik G1 to use that band, why not make it available to other operators in other orbital slots?
 
the cable companies tried Ku and because of cloud blockage etc went back to C band. I was told in Modesto etc Ca that 5g phone repeaters were installed on light poles and did not have permission and had to remove them. 5G providers are looking for spectrum space even in unused OTA UHF tv channels.
I see a saturation of rf transmissions and that can have health concerns.
Not getting rid of my 8ft bud.
[/QUOTE

Are you referring to Sprint who shut down one cell site in Ripon, near Modesto? An irrational case of residents who thought a handful of cancer cases were from cell service.
the cable companies tried Ku and because of cloud blockage etc went back to C band. I was told in Modesto etc Ca that 5g phone repeaters were installed on light poles and did not have permission and had to remove them. 5G providers are looking for spectrum space even in unused OTA UHF tv channels.
I see a saturation of rf transmissions and that can have health concerns.
Not getting rid of my 8ft bud.

Removing 5G sites in Modesto from second hand info seems dubious, can't find anything like that online. As for a saturation of RF sources and health concerns, I think Megawatt TV transmitters or airport radars would be of more concern than 10 watt 5G transmitters.
 
Some of us in rural areas have paid for that speed, and for some of us it has come (I'm at 50/10 DSL now) but in other areas the promise of broadband that came with tax grants for companies to build-out never came.
I live in a small city in wv where broadband speeds are slow everywhere. Frontier communications got grants to build out ADSL . It's a joke. You will not watch videos on it.

Sent from my SM-G955U using the SatelliteGuys app!
 
Spectrum bandwidth is the gift that keeps on giving... In the near future the FCC will make a lot of $$ out of... nothing. And in 10 years when 5G is gone the way of MySpace and AOL, they can sell it again for $$$ and in 20 years again for $$$$, etc. And it's not like it requires repairs and maintenance... In other word it's pretty much free money for the budget. Very tempting, don't you think?

Now on a more technical topic... We all know that Ku is more subject to rain fade than C-Band, we all see it. Yet many parts of the world don't use C-Band at all for their program distribution. I remember when in the 80's, many European countries started adding private TV channels (such as Sat1, 3Sat in Germany, La 5 and M6 in France, etc. ), the distribution to cable headends and to OTA transmitters was done via satellite in Ku band, and I don't remember seeing outages due to rain fade ever. Ok an analog signal was probably a lot more resilient than an 8psk signal, and the rains in France and Germany are not as crazy as in tropical areas, but still, I think Ku band can be used in better ways that it currently is. Signal resilience is possible but it has a cost... You might notice that it doesn't take much rain to lose PBS on 125W but you still get a good reception of KBS on 123W or CGTN on 95W. Modulation and FEC are everything. But the cost is the bandwidth, which bring me to the next topic...

For starter, most of the world has 2 GHz of Ku bandwidth. Here we use 500 MHz for BSS ("Standard" 11.7-12.2 GHz)and reserve 500 MHz for DBS services. Take a spectrum analyzer and scan the skies with an old Dish LNBF and you'll find mostly radio silence. An entire 500 MHz is wasted for 2 companies that operate about 10 orbital slots. Why can't we use the other slots as an extension of the BSS spectrum?

Also, what are we doing with the lower band Ku spectrum? Maybe it's reserved for other services, but yet we receive a few satellites there, including in the Americas region (63W, 65W, 78W, 129W) and if i'm not mistaken we even have a North-American satellite blasting a strong signal there (Anik G1@ 107W). If it's ok for Anik G1 to use that band, why not make it available to other operators in other orbital slots?
I'm new to FTA, but why not use a Ku dish as big as the C band dish to limit rain fade?? Seems most people only use 3-4ft Ku dishes and wonder why they fade worse than their 8-12ft BUDs... I know the much lower C-band frequencies don't fade as quickly, but still. Wouldn't a larger dish help?
 
I'm new to FTA, but why not use a Ku dish as big as the C band dish to limit rain fade?? Seems most people only use 3-4ft Ku dishes and wonder why they fade worse than their 8-12ft BUDs... I know the much lower C-band frequencies don't fade as quickly, but still. Wouldn't a larger dish help?

They do help but in very heavy rain even an 8 ft+ solid dish can be affected by rain fade.
 
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Nobody has mentioned Ka band, yes it is commonly used for telecommunications and rain fade is not a major problem that is with 30 Ghz uplink. The gain is so high on the dishes, large fade margins are no problem to achieve. 50db for a 1.2M.
 
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I'm new to FTA, but why not use a Ku dish as big as the C band dish to limit rain fade?? Seems most people only use 3-4ft Ku dishes and wonder why they fade worse than their 8-12ft BUDs... I know the much lower C-band frequencies don't fade as quickly, but still. Wouldn't a larger dish help?

When I worked on the NBC Ku band project back in the early 80's, they used 6 meter dishes as the primary dish with a 3.5 meter backup (mostly for the sun outages). The only time they had a problem was when the deicing system failed. I would like to be able to use the smaller 1 meter Ku antennas for TVRO because they can be a one-man job to install and have a smaller footprint than my 12 foot C-band dishes and they are much cheaper. The 12 footers (approx 3.6 meters) should minimize rain fade but it defeats my desire to have smaller antennas. Occasionally, I have to sweep the snow out of the 12 footers, also.
 
Nobody has mentioned Ka band, yes it is commonly used for telecommunications and rain fade is not a major problem that is with 30 Ghz uplink. The gain is so high on the dishes, large fade margins are no problem to achieve. 50db for a 1.2M.
Plus the fact that KA band does not resonate with the size of rain drops and does not get absorbed like KU

Sent from our Pleadian star ship
 
I thought Ka was more susceptible to rain fade than Ku.

Here's one article that explains rain fade and methods to overcome it.


"A more sophisticated method to dealing with rain fade in satellite communications is adaptive coding and modulation (ACM). Using this technique, the modulation of a link between a satellite and antenna can be automatically lowered to compensate for interference caused by atmospheric interference. "

Looks like the osmio4k can handle ACM but I don't know how well that'll work or if any signals incorporate that function.

I'd like to know how well Ku distribution works in Europe since they have to deal with rain fade issues.
 
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Plus the fact that KA band does not resonate with the size of rain drops and does not get absorbed like KU

Sent from our Pleadian star ship

Actually rain fade is a bigger problem with Ka than Ku, however there are strategies for overcoming it. A large fade margin must be engineered into the link budget calculations, larger than C band that is. And for modulation, no changes from C band. But then we do not handle video at all.
 
I don't know if this has been posted already, but here is what i learned from 5g. It is not really there to benefit the consumers in terms of rural markets , but benefit the companies in the big cities. 5g has horrible distance reliability. the big plan is to have this be your final mile. Right now, in many cities, there is fiber to the neighborhoods, and then the last mile is through copper. They want to cut out the middle man that supplies the last mile. This way, at the fiber points, they can have 5g to supply the last mile via wireless. 5g is designed to handle the massive numbers. This way they don't have to maintain the copper lines, and/or pay the middle man who still owns the copper.
 
The only part of 5G that would benefit the rural areas would be the 5G Lite deployment that T-Mobile's doing after July of next year with the 600MHz band. It won't be getting gig speeds, but I'm sure it'll be slightly better than the current LTE standard in use.
 
I am betting 5G will never be optimized just like 4G. Everyone has been settled in on 4G so long, 5G will make all the 4G equipment (not just phones) obsolete.
Will require substantial investments in all the networks globally.
A real win for equipment manufacturers.

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I am betting 5G will never be optimized just like 4G. Everyone has been settled in on 4G so long, 5G will make all the 4G equipment (not just phones) obsolete.
Will require substantial investments in all the networks globally.
A real win for equipment manufacturers.

Sent from my SM-G955U using the SatelliteGuys app!
Yep, nothing like planned obsolescence and massive profit margins off of cheap eastern labor to really drive up profits...
 
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You get rid of the depreciation that way.
You reduce depreciation. About five years after release, most any smart phone has no resale value regardless of how freakin' awesome it was when new. If you're going to keep the phone for the duration, what you save waiting six months is perhaps equal to depreciation so you're not really gaining anything outside of not having to suffer the early growing pains.
 

Anyone on Oahu

Sun Outages-Late Feb.

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