> The upper 6 GHz band is "not the most promising band for getting signals into or out of buildings,"

So how do they deal with buildings being in the way? Or they going to put an aerial on every street?

"So how do they deal with buildings being in the way? Or they going to put an aerial on every street?"

If you're outdoor in a built up area, then quite often the phone connects via signals reflected from buildings or diffracted at corners rather than passing through masonry. With the range and penetrating power of signals decreasing as frequency increases, 6GHz mobile will struggle to give decent strength in many buildings or if you're in the radio-shadow of a building, even though it could be perfectly useable outside. But you're correct in the idea that higher frequencies require more masts - this was true for the higher frequencies used by mobile 5G signals that use 3.6 to 3.8 GHz, and would be more so for 6GHz.

That's amongst the reasons that some regulators have decided that 6GHz is best used purely for wifi.

Is that a bug or a feature?

My (possibly, even probably naive) assumption was that more, smaller cells would improve capacity in busy urban areas and that the shorter range and reduced penetration of higher frequency signals would help facilitate that.

It's a feature, down to the physics of radio waves. You're right that more smaller cells done properly can improve capacity, but that has the downside that smaller masts have far worse capital cost pro-rata to normal large masts, especially for the backhaul and design elements, and those are new costs for telcos but generally don't generate much extra income. Throw in the complexities of planning, the practical difficulty in applying nominally simple ideas like using lamp posts as nG masts, and it all starts to become very challenging to build an investment case for higher frequency mobile.

In my city house I have seen my signal get worse as more buildings go up, but no new aerials. 3G gets shut off and I struggle to get a 4G signal. Not only due to those extra buildings but also the many many more people who live in those buildings also now taking a share of that old signal.

"The indoor/outdoor split method simply recognizes that Wi-Fi traffic is almost exclusively indoors, while mobile masts are located outdoors"

That would be fun at the last school I worked. Their cricket pitch is overlooked by the area's mobile phone mast, not a problem you might say, except the cricket pitch is smothered with WiFi for when Lancashire play a couple of matches each summer. Sky and local radio use the WiFi for their equipment.

Only good for in-room hotspots, stadiums, racecourses etc.

Mobile should get zero extra spectrum and instead have smaller / more cells. Existing spectrum they have is managed by bean counters, not engineering based regulation for the customer.

So Ofcom is wrong. It should be all WiFi.

Completely agree - but OFCOM will want some money, and they're not going to get that from using the spectrum for wifi :(

Agreed, 6GHz should be for unlicensed applications.

The spectrum used by TV is far better for mobiles anyway, you can easily get 20km+ out of a single tower at 500Mhz, low bandwidth so not good for streaming but perfectly adequate for calls, texts and light internet.

We should have never rolled out DVB-T, DVB-T2 (HD) was nearly complete at the time and the BBC even told the government that rolling out DVB-T was a bad idea. Now we have to operate both DVB-T and DVB-T2 which means using more of the spectrum.

We are in the process of running fiber straight into ever home, ISPs should be required to provide broadcast TV over fiber. And no I don't mean streaming, cable tv over fiber is possible and as it is broadcast it is low bandwidth.

Satellite TV (via freesat) is available everywhere in the country, SAT>IP means you no longer need to run cables from the LNB to every TV in your house, and the price of satellites has plummeted in recent years. I wouldn't be surprised if the running costs for Freesat were cheaper than Freeview.

We need a spectrum policy that takes multiple industries into account and understands how the public and businesses use services and not just blindly believing what the service providers say.

No, TV spectrum makes for poorly defined too big cells. They already got spectrum below 870MHz and should not have got it. It just saved them some rural masts.

I used to work in the industry and the only reasons for more mobile spectrum outside 870 MHz to 2.1 GHz are:

1) More money for regulators/government

2) Less new masts needed.

Most regulators are captured because they get more income from Mobile than anything, apart from spectrum auctions.

Also splitting spectrum between operators is wasteful. The best way to use spectrum is a single RAN for all bands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_access_network

This can be jointly owned and managed by operators, or be a single operator per geographic area, or a separately regulated state agency.

The current model of Regulation for most things in most countries has failed. See UK Water/sewerage, rail, finance (2008 was some regulators ignoring their duty), advertising (self regulated in UK & Ireland!).

My new router (for fibre) supports WiFi 6E (which Google tells me is the entire 6 GHz band (5.925 to 7.125 GHz)), so hardware is already out there in Europe (not just the US) that uses the whole band for WiFi. Given that 5G over here uses under 6 GHz or something over 24 GHz, is the UK market big enough to go and "do something different"?

The hardware can already use those frequencies, but it just has to turn off some of the bands. WiFi equipment has been doing this to deal with country requirements since the beginning. The original 2.4 GHz band had 14 channels, but only 11 were allowed in North America, and only 13 in most of the world. Almost all hardware requires, at some level, a country code which is used to select the allowed bands before it switches on. I don't know what will realistically happen if you use that to transmit on frequencies you're not supposed to.

This seems unenforceable imo given that WiFi 6E kit is freely available and will just be set to the US locale by techies looking for extra performance because nobody really cares if their WiFi is technically in violation of something that will be so common ofcom won't be able to police it.

Phone network providers should stick to the lower end of the spectrum, I don't care about high speed Internet standing in the middle of the street, you'd get your phone nicked in most places if you even tried to use it, I'd be more than happy with consistent mediocre speed (1 MBPS) inside shops and on trains.

I'd like to think that said kit will have a red triangle printed on it, while approved kit will have a green circle.

The ones with the red triangle will, as is usual, be so much better and faster...

> The ones with the red triangle will, as is usual, be so much better and faster...

A bit like when Channel 4 used a Red Triangle on late night shows to let you know if it was worth watching...

Yes I am old.

Bass got there first with a red triangle. UK registered trademark nº 1.

Devices will need approval to be sold legally in any particular jurisdiction. I'm already limited in 5 GHz because of the proximity of the local airport where the radar tower regularly sends a signal telling routers to dump traffic on most channels. And, if there is any kind of spectrum auction for new frequencies, bidders could reasonably expect similar provisions. Anyone who violates could be identified quickly and possibly even sanctioned.

However, this is one of the main reasons why spectrum bands tend to be either opened or close and occaisonally repurposed. Given the potential for contention I'd be surprised to see anyone wanting to bid for spectrum without appropriate safeguards. Then, as others have pointed out, there are the problems of the much shorter range at such frequencies, driving up costs to provide services.

But I'm also not particularly keen on yet more unlicensed spectrum for wifi.

Wi-Fi and Mobile should eventually become the same protocol. Or at least interop.

When I’m at home my phone should connect to my Wifi router. Ditto anywhere I can get open Wifi.

Telephone calls should give up and just go over IP.