How much more “bandwidth” would Open Spectrum provide?
This question makes an unwarranted assumption. It thinks that spectrum is like a natural resource: there’s just so much, so it needs to be apportioned wisely and fairly. In fact, neither spectrum nor information are things with fixed sizes. For example, as compression algorithms get better, more information fits into fewer bits. And as more people join a wireless network, there can be a cooperative gain effect whereby the network actually increases its capacity. To take just one example, a recent New York Times article reported on a new technology, called BLAST by its inventors at Bell Labs, that uses “the reflections that plague current wireless systems” to expand the capacity “‘far, far in excess of what people were thinking of.
