LTE – Excited Pixels

So, the takeaway from this post is that Industry Canada’s proposed modifications significantly expand the volume and types of communications that ISPs must be able to intercept and preserve. Further, the Department is considering expanding interception requirements across all wireless spectrum holders; it needn’t just affect the LTE spectrum. We also know that Public Safety is modifying how ISPs have to preserve information related to geolocational, communications content, or transmission data. Together, these Departments’ actions are expanding government surveillance capacities in the absence of the lawful access legislation.

Industry Canada’s and Public Safety’s changes to how communications are intercepted should be put on hold until the government can convince Canadians about the need for these powers, and pass legislation authorizing the expansion of government surveillance. Decisions that are made surrounding interception capabilities are not easily reversed because once the technology is in place it is challenging to remove; as such, the government’s proposed modifications to intercept capabilities should be democratically legitimated before they are instantiated in practice.

From DSL Reports,

As usual though, actually bothering to listen to and look at the data tells a different story. Nobody argues that spectrum is infinite, but buried below industry histrionics is data noting that there really isn’t a spectrum crisis as much as a bunch of lazy and gigantic spectrum squatters, hoarding public-owned assets to limit competition, while skimping on network investment to appease short-sighted investors. Insiders at the FCC quietly lamented that the very idea of a spectrum crisis was manufactured for the convenience of government and industry.

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Burstein correctly reminds us that there’s nothing to fear, and with modern technology like LTE Advanced and more-than adequate resources, any wireless company struggling to keep pace with demand is either incompetent or cutting corners (or both). The idea that our modern networks face rotating oblivion scenarios lest we not rush to do “X” is the fear mongering of lobbyists, politicians, and salesmen. All of them use fear by trade, but the key failure point when it comes to capacity hysteria seems to continually be the press, which likes to unskeptically repeatwhatever hysterical scenario gets shoveled their direction each month.

I think that this really strikes to the heart of things: while all parties recognize the (literally) physical differences between different physical layers that are used to deliver broadband services, hysterics (on both sides) have stifled rational discussion. We really need to have the engineers come forward to talk about things in a manner that lets them evade corporate ‘loyalties’. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that spectral bandwidth is one component of data transmission, not the entirety of it. New codecs, new compression algorithms, and new efficiency protocols can all enable much higher bandwidth volumes and throughput while using identical amounts of spectrum as older, less effective, means of using spectral resources. We need to holistically look at these resources, and get away from as much FUD as we can.