The Myth of Interference

Salon (ugghhhh, but it is a good article) ^ | David Weinberger

[eno_]

There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

[eno_]

David P. Reed is a genuine genius. If he says spectrum allocation is screwed up, listen up!

[Drammach]

Note:
Linux system only; hardware - software project.

[Paradox]

Excellent article. And we owe a bit of thanks to the woman below, who helped develop this technology as referenced here:

One of the simplest examples of an architecture that works was invented during World War II. We were worried that the Germans might jam the signals our submarines used to control their radio-controlled torpedoes. This inspired the first "frequency-hopping" technology:

Hedi Lamar.

[Question_Assumptions]

I'm not sure I buy all of his arguments. If I open a pinhole in a dark room, I'll get an image on the other side. True. But if I also fire a laser, an arc lamp, and a strobe light through that hole, am I going to be able to see anything? I'm willing to believe that more can be sqeezed across the bandwidth than is currently being sent but I find it difficult to believe that if this were so simple, the telcoms wouldn't be using it to, say, increase the bandwidth of fiber optic transimissions under the ocean.

[gcruse]

My favorite analogy is the difference between AM and FM radio.
If we could see the AM signal coming off of a broadcasting tower, it would look like a flickering light, since amplitude modulation means varying strength of the output. In the case of FM, frequency modulation, the frequency is being changed instead of the strength, so that the output coming off the tower would look like an everchanging rainbow, or maybe a kaleidoscope.

[eno_]

It isn't "simple." Software-defined radios are not simple. But they are now cheap. Such radios, and mesh networks, and other innovations should break the FCC/LamstreamBroadcast/CellularTelco spectrum monopolies. And that would be a very good thing.