WiWavelength

Tree Fiddy?! AJ

Is that a "Nessy" sighting? AJ

I use my microwave for popcorn. AJ

Rickie, if you do jump off the bridge, please take Roger Entner with you. AJ

Yes, that is partly correct. In fact, just a few weeks ago, Robert and I were discussing Swiftel's canceled buyout. The buyer was Crossroads Wireless, which was a Sprint Rural Alliance partner. For the Swiftel buyout applications, start with the 6/30/2008 Assignment of Authorization. Click on each application link, then click on the Admin tab within that application. Toward the middle of each application Admin page, you will find the attached document(s). Start here: http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/allApplications.jsp?licKey=193016 Crossroads was to be focused on rural highway coverage (hence, the name), so Swiftel and its I-29 centered footprint would have been a natural fit for Crossroads. Sprint partitioned and disaggregated some 10 MHz blocks of PCS spectrum to Crossroads for the rural highway buildout. For the partitioned and disaggregated spectrum, see Attachment 1 from this application: http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/ApplicationSearch/applAdmin.jsp?applID=4627816 However, Crossroads ran into severe financial difficulties and filed for bankruptcy protection. So, the Swiftel acquisition was aborted and the rural highway buildout never happened. To add insult to injury, Crossroads, as Debtor-in-Possession, even liquidated the spectrum that Sprint had partitioned and disaggregated to it, and sold that spectrum to VZW, AT&T, et al. See Restated Order Approving Spectrum Sales here: http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/ApplicationSearch/applAdmin.jsp?applID=5087986 AJ

That is a big part of your problem. Mobile wireless broadband is not a replacement for wired (or fixed wireless) broadband. And, honestly, I look askance at people who try to cut costs by living on their mobile wireless broadband connections at home because those people just exacerbate the slow data speed problems that you are complaining about. Femtocells and Wi-Fi offloading are becoming a fact of life in the wireless industry. On purely macro cellular networks, we simply do not have enough available spectrum, nor can we ever clear enough spectrum to keep up with the public's newfound (read: iPhone inspired) insatiable appetite for data. So, we (both wireless carriers and individual subs) are going to have to mix in smaller cells and Wi-Fi offloading among the macrocells in so called heterogeneous networks or "het nets" in order to keep up with demand. My advice is to get your home broadband connection back, and embrace femtocells and Wi-Fi offloading. That is a big part of the solution. And, as the old saying goes, if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. AJ

I was in the gifted class. AJ

Your dorm had an actual T1 (DS1) line? Or your dorm had 10BASE-T Ethernet? AJ

Also, keep in mind that Brookings Municipal Utilities d/b/a Swiftel became a Sprint affiliate in 1998-1999. At that time, the Cellular 850 MHz competitors in South Dakota were WWC (Western Wireless) and AirTouch. And both may have been AMPS only. So, Swiftel may have seen that as prime opportunity to bring Sprint's CDMA based PCS 1900 MHz service to South Dakota. VZW did not even exist yet, as the VZW merger did not occur until 1999-2000, so nobody knew that there would be a VZW nor an AT&T that would go on to become such anti competitive asshats and try to buy up or drive out of business all other wireless carriers. AJ

Like it or not, South Dakota is such small potatoes, VZW has taken such a lion's share of the minimal market, and Sprint has such bigger fish to fry elsewhere that Swiftel is barely a blip on Sprint's radar screen right now. Now, I apologize for speaking in so many metaphors. AJ

Spectrum transactions happen all the time, Josh. But unless you really follow the wireless industry closely, you hear about only the most significant deals. AJ

Highly doubtful. Microwave backhaul links are the information superhighways of the sky. There are tens of thousands of them nationwide, as they are licensed point to point, and frequencies are reused enormously. So, mapping microwave links would be a ridiculously large and fruitless task. AJ

Carriers already hold much larger bandwidth point to point microwave licenses for wireless backhaul. AJ

Why is it so "surprising"? AJ

I have already broken down the Leap-T-Mobile spectrum transaction into its component pieces. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArY31Mr219-ydFNIN3kxNDktMG5TV1haeUVFWi1IblE https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArY31Mr219-ydDdwQmtjS2hUbVJWSy1uSS1SekhQRFE AJ

Eric, I give the creator of that spectrum mapping site tons of credit for as much as he has accomplished. However, the site is really only good for a "broad brush," big picture look at wireless spectrum holdings. Unfortunately, the site does not accurately reflect partitions and disaggregations. In other words, if a license has been subdivided -- geographically, electromagnetically, or both -- the site ascribes that license to both/all licensed carriers. Thus, many of the spectrum maps that the site generates are not particularly accurate. AJ

Certainly, there are iDEN only coverage areas, but I think that it could be a stretch to say that there are iDEN only "markets." AJ

Robert, would you be willing/able to provide an update to the member stats? A quick count from the member directory would seem to indicate that S4GRU has more than doubled the number of sponsor members in roughly the past week. AJ

Nextel iDEN does not use COWs. It uses antelope. AJ

A lot less than 100 kbps. Most current cellular voice codecs are variable rate, based on a circuit switched max of 9.6 kbps or 14.4 kbps, but the variable rate nature tends to average actual voice data throughput to ~5 kbps. AJ

To quote German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "When you look at the COW, the COW looks back at you." AJ

Indeed, the spectrum analyzer was just lying around -- just lying around at my doorstep on Thursday evening when the unit that I ordered from Germany last week was delivered. http://www.aaronia.c...ctrum-Analyzer/ AJ

...of the flux capacitor? That would require 1.21 gigawatts. AJ

A 5 MHz LTE downlink contains 25 resource blocks for a total of 300 subcarriers. If all subcarriers are operating at 64-QAM, then peak, raw data rate in total is 25.75 Mbps. For typical 2x2 MIMO on the downlink, two spatial channels doubles that to 51.5 Mbps. But that is including coding and overhead. Peak, actual data throughput will be considerably lower, likely ~35 Mbps. AJ

How could we conduct a speed test if Sprint has announced several LTE handsets but has not yet released any of them? AJ