[BeefySwain]

Chart of all US frequency allocations (as of 2016, but there doesn't appear to be a more up to date one?): https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/januar...

[drmpeg]

The most current document is here, but it's text.

https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/fcctable.pdf

[ur-whale]

> The most current document is here, but it's text.

"but" ???

[echelon]

AM radio, FM radio, amateur radio, and television broadcast have quite a lot of spectrum real estate. Are they being used enough to justify this allocation?

[tomxor]

Is the gain in bandwidth for your wifi really worth the reallocation?

This change opens up 1200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz.

> quite a lot of spectrum real estate

Amateur radio is scattered all over the place, but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz... ignoring the fact that they are tiny slices, the upper limit of bandwidth you can hope to gain under that frequency is 300 MHz (for all of it), and considering that most of that is not amateur radio, you are going to be gaining a negligible amount of bandwidth that cannot be practically used for a single application because it is not contiguous.

The higher the frequency the more bandwidth is available. For high throughput applications reclaiming these relatively low frequency bands is not useful.

[lxgr]

AM radio really doesn't occupy a lot of bandwidth, nor does FM.

The chart is logarithmically stacked, i.e. each row would fit into the one below 10 times, 100 times two rows down etc.

[ridgeguy]

Speaking only to spectrum allocation for amateur radio, that service is a critical resource in emergencies, like Hurricane Helene.

The small amateur radio spectrum allocations cover long-wave emissions that can communicate around the planet and short-wave emissions that engage local repeater networks.

Think of it as an insurance policy - communications backup when comm is a life & death matter. Doesn't happen often, but really important when it's needed.

[jvanderbot]

Some of that is because those frequencies have special characteristics, e.g., extreme long range propagation. Would you like to have a wifi router that gets interference from 300 km away or requires a certain geomagnetic storm to connect to your ISP?

[AnarchismIsCool]

Spectrum is shown as a log scale for convenience but in reality it's linear so all those combined are less than the the 6ghz band

[daflip]

Actually they don't consume a very large portion of the overall spectrum at all. Nearly all the bands you mention are in the Mhz range or less rather than Ghz and as a result they're not really even suited for WiFi use. The lower frequencies are less optimal for high speed data transfer and also broadcast to a longer range, as well as penetrate buildings more easily than their higher frequency counterparts.

As well as that those bands are already heavily used already - it would make no sense to open these bands up to WiFi.

[spiznnx]

Each level on the chart has 10x the bandwidth of the level above it. It's not really that much spectrum.

[lr1970]

No, AM radio are low RF frequency and have little spectrum for data transmission. also due to long range it will be severely interference limited.

[ddingus]

I am not sure what we would do with the AM band. If it were me, I would very strongly convince half the stations to go dark. Allow the remaining ones to broadcast 10khz, which for some radios and their lucky owners would be a nice, attractive, more compelling signal. Loosen up regulations a bit and see what happens.

Disasters warrant keeping the band for basic news and reporting if nothing else.

FM already has improved audio. Perhaps the same looser regs would bring more people in.

[christiangenco]

Television in particular seems ripe to be reallocated. Didn't we go through a whole analog-to-digital conversion over a decade ago that led to TV going through wires instead of through the air?

[UltraSane]

I feel a lot of the bandwidth for broadcast television is wasted on channels no one is watching.