Radio Frequencies and Regulations

Summary

Radio Frequencies and Regulations

Video Transcript

- Hi, welcome to this talk on Radio Frequencies and Regulations. My name's Bob Baxley, and I'm the Chief Engineer at Bastille where I run the radio and data science teams. In this talk, I want to give you a feeling about the electromagnetic spectrum. So you can see in this plot here I have, we go from zero hertz all the way up to you know, exahertz, and in radio frequency circles, you often hear terms like, DC to daylight, so that's used to describe pretty much any electromagnetic frequency you might care about.

DC to daylight, DC means zero, daylight is, you know, 10 to the 14 hertz, but above daylight, you have X-rays and gamma-rays and, so it's a huge spectrum of possible frequencies. If you're an IT security person, though, what you really care about are communicators in your environment. You care about where in the spectrum wireless communications are happening.

So you, I'm sure you're familiar with all the devices that communicate at 2.4 gigahertz, but that's just one sliver where communicators operate, so, you know, this microphone is at 700 megahertz, and this key fob is at 300 megaherz, and this is at 400 megahertz. Your laptop is at 2.4 and 5.8 gigahertz, so if you put all that together, we're really talking about the range from 60 megahertz to 50 gigahertz.

That's where the vast majority of wireless communications happen, and that's where if you're an IT security person, you want situational awareness into what's going on in that spectrum. In the next decade or so, we'll see more signals in the next higher bands. So from 10 gigahertz to 100 gigahertz. That's where the proposals for 5G are in the 20 gigahertz range.

It's also where a lot of radars operate. But I wouldn't worry about that now. That's probably a decade off before any of those higher frequency communication systems are really widely deployed. So we have this huge spectrum. In the United States, the organization that licenses who gets to use which spectrum is called the FCC, and so a long time ago, the FCC set aside certain frequencies on licensed bands, and those are ones you're probably familiar with like 2.4 gigahertz.

So in that spectrum, you don't have to have a license to operate, and that's why Wi-Fi and any devices operate in those frequencies. On the other hand, there's these licensed bands. Almost all the other bands are licensed. And those bands you have to pay the SCC for the right to license that spectrum.

Once you have made that payment, you have the right to restrict any other users from using that spectrum. So for instance, when T-Mobile buys a sliver of spectrum, so that they can service cell phones, if they catch another emitter on that spectrum, they'll ask the FCC to investigate, and if the FCC finds out that you've done that, that can be, you know, 10 million dollar fine for operating in spectrum that isn't licensed to you.

The reason the fines are so steep is because it costs the T-Mobiles of the world a lot of money to license spectrum from the FCC. So we're talking about billions and billions of dollars to license spectrum. And spectrum is licensed in these units called megahertz population. So in Georgia, there's 10 million people.

If you were to license 10 megahertz of spectrum, for 100 million dollars, that would be one dollar per megahertz pop, and more recent auctions have gone as high as two dollars per megahertz pop. So in that case it would cost you 200 million dollars to buy 10 megahertz of spectrum for all the users in Georgia.

So again, I'm Bob Baxley with Bastille. Thanks for listening.