What government does
We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier
And: The nation that built the Empire State Building in 410 days during the Depression and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime recently took nine years just for the permitting of a San Diego desalination plant.
June 13th, 2017 at 3:09 pm
That article contains a LOT of fog – and technical ignorance. You have no idea how much “really neat new stuff” there is out there “if we only allocated a big bunch of spectrum to it” — but there is only so much spectrum to go around. Yes, the TV industry was hogging vast blocks of un- and under-used spectrum – but they had/have a lot of political clout to protect that valuable property. Don’t blame the bureaucrats for that one.
The other thing that slowed the introduction of cellular was the insistence that the system have open standards – and every manufacturer wanted the system to use THEIR proprietary methods and standards. Only when Motorola figured out it would never happen unless they opened up their standard did the cell systems come to be. The result, of course, is a system that works EVERYWHERE – not just places where YOUR manufacturer installed their system.