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posted by martyb on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the "wave"-goodbye dept.

The organization Citizens Against Government Waste reports that federal government agencies are setting up roadblocks that could prevent the US from winning the global race to 5G.

[...] The Departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, and Transportation have filed objections to various proposals by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) to repurpose federal spectrum for 5G, all of which will slow down progress and effectively give an advantage to other countries like China.

Not only have the four federal agencies lost sight of the importance of achieving 5G dominance, they are also choosing to ignore a 2012 law that authorized clearing certain portions of federal spectrum to allow the FCC to re-allocate and auction it for commercial use. Indeed, they are making some absurd claims about what will happen if they no longer have the use of some or all of their spectrum. The Department of Commerce has said that relinquishing spectrum used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric would cost lives because it would reduce the ability to forecast the weather; the Department of Defense is hiding behind national security and refusing to share anything; the Department of Education is claiming that children will lose access to educational spectrum while the current use of that spectrum is under the FCC's scrutiny for possible abuse; and the Department of Transportation (DOT) is also talking about how the use of spectrum under its control would save lives.

The DOT-held spectrum at 5.9 GHz was allocated to the department in 2009 to be used solely for dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), which has to date has been deployed in very few vehicles. Advocates for retaining the spectrum at DOT are now promoting a different technology that has yet to be adequately tested and may not be widely available for 8-10 years. At the same time, proven technology that increases passenger safety being used in vehicles today includes automatic emergency braking, backup cameras, blind-spot warning, electronic stability control, forward collision warning, lane departure warning and lane keeping systems, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), rear automatic braking, and rear cross-traffic alerts. These systems are radar or laser-based, meaning they have been developed without the need for the 5.9 GHz spectrum.

LINK: https://www.cagw.org/thewastewatcher/federal-spectrum-turf-war-could-hand-5g-victory-china


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:29AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:29AM (#884640)

    Seconded. 4G is 'good enough'. Why rush to market when the existing systems will tide us over?
    Do we have another Dialip - ISDN - DSL - Fibre situation?

  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:42PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:42PM (#884782) Journal

    It's the stupid social media mentality - gawd forbid you miss a millisecond of what some person you would not give the time of day to in real life is doing, so that you can like it so they can like you back and the mutual emotional masturbation circle jerk continues ...

    I've been doing some research (at least that's what I'm calling it) into access for people with visual limitations, and neither Facebook nor Twitter, nor many of blogging platforms, allows you to register using a text-only browser such as "links" or "lynx."

    This is deplatforming of the visually handicapped, and has both positive and negative consequences. One of the positives is "who the fsck needs their shit anyway?"

    On the negative side, just because you're limited in your abilities doesn't mean that you should be denied equal access to such things as networking for job opportunities, and finding others in the same boat. Ditto for lobbying for change. Activism can't be done in a vacuum.

    But here's an experiment - go to a site using a text-only browser, and one using a GUI. Notice how much faster text-only loads ("well, duh!" you say).

    But look at what you're not loading. Javascript includes for all sorts of tracking, images for all sorts of tracking, web bugs for all sorts of tracking ... I think you see the pattern. Bonus for no css style sheets, no images whatsoever, no videos (even with autoplay off a lot of them do pre-fetch), no worrying that you're hitting 100 or more different servers on every page load.

    One of the funny things I found was JavaScript attempting to load a visual captcha ("click on the pictures that show bridges") that failed because they loaded a graphic image to click on if you wanted to use an audio captcha. Nothing in the block rendered in text, so the registration failed with a "failed captcha test", and I'm scratching my head thinking "what, where, did they even test this shit?"

    THAT is privacy. And 4g supports that with no problems, since you're using 1% or less of the bandwidth Chrome, Firefox, or Safari use in the same circumstance.

    In terms of bandwidth usage, a picture "is worth" (consumes) far more than 1,000 words. Google, Facebook, and the rest of the usual suspects need 5g to further advance their business models - we don't.

    --
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