Easy calculated move; try explaining that shrinking of freedom to today's layperson. There are shades of this in understanding when and why to use VPNs and distributed filesharing (e.g. torrents as part of long-term archival efforts), versus easy smear campaign by those wishing to suppress it.

I'll take a crack:

Today's WiFi, that you all know and love, started out on unlicensed RF (radio frequency) bands. We need to continue to expand the ability to talk on RF to allow innovation, like what happened with WiFi.

There is a standard for it, 802.11ah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah). But I don’t know how many devices are shipping.

Some of the very first WiFi was 915mhz. Slow, but reached everywhere!

Reaching everywhere is arguably a bug with WiFi: The more transmitters you can hear and vice versa (besides the ones you're communicating with), the more congestion.

not necessarily always. for some use cases, it is better to have slow coverage than no coverage. Not for phones but temperature sensors or water leakage detectors are just two examples of what we could use this for today. However, bigger innovation will happen once we make unlicensed spectrum available.

Personally, I don't like there being more licensed spectrum. I think more spectrum should be unlicensed and therefore free for all who play by the rules.

> Not for phones but temperature sensors or water leakage detectors are just two examples of what we could use this for today.

You got Zigbee and LoRaWAN for that already. IKEA has water leakage detectors (which I highly recommend, they saved my ass already), and temp/hum sensors, go for Sonoff's lineup.

There's definitely use cases for long-range unlicensed communications, and I'm personally very excited about the technology. (Why on earth can two mobile phones still not exchange text messages directly over a couple hundred meters, for example?)

But in the case of Wi-Fi specifically, part of the success story of 5 GHz (besides having much more spectrum available than 2.4 GHz and having less noisy legacy applications cluttering it) is the lower maximum EIRP in most parts of it.

This forces everybody to have smaller (and if required more) cells – which is a big win in densely populated areas such as apartment buildings, for example.

> Why on earth can two mobile phones still not exchange text messages directly over a couple hundred meters, for example?

Because the cell network is designed around the towers managing resource allocation, instead of phones trying and hoping nobody else was trying at the same time. Doing it this way increases the total capacity of the network by a lot.

So to create a phone mesh network, you would effectively need to create an entire new protocol stack, probably some enhancements to the frontend/PHY for the initial connection establishment (two phones realizing they're in range of each other) and congestion handling. And depending on how you implemented it, it would be a power hog too, since listening for a tower broadcast requires much less juice than announcing your presence to the world and hoping someone is in range.

(I do actually think there is phone-to-phone communications buried somewhere in the standards, but it still requires the tower for coordination)

Phone-to-phone is probably better handled over WiFi and its variants. Simpler, easier to integrate, much less regulatory oversight.

Apple’s AWDL is hacky and ugly in lots of ways, but has been in market for a decade or more and enables phone to phone. If WiFi forum ever gets WiFi direct 2 off the ground it could be amazing.

But phone to phone is chicken and egg; users aren’t demanding it because there aren’t any killer apps, and there aren’t any killer apps because problems like identity, privacy, resiliency haven’t been solved, and those problems haven’t been solved because users aren’t demanding these apps.

Fully agreed. This seems like the exact type of thing that Apple should be able to break out of, like they did with AirDrop (yeah, there was Bluetooth OBEX before, but it was too slow/clunky to be very useful on most phones) and AirPlay (same story vs. Miracast over WiFi Direct).

Yet the only recent movement in that area was them cutting down on AirPlay to unknown contacts, reportedly due to governmental pressure.

So unfortunately I believe that there is just no interest of Apple to make any move there, despite being in an excellent position: iMessage would solve most problems of spam, discoverability etc. (they could make it so that you can only message preexisting contacts when offline).

AWDL was replaced by the WiFi NAN/Aware standard.

> Why on earth can two mobile phones still not exchange text messages directly over a couple hundred meters, for example?

You ever try and have a conversation over APRS text messages without even digipeaters in a crowded urban area? Good luck getting through.

But that's the thing: The primary use cases for something like this are the opposite of crowded urban areas, where infrastructure-based networking makes a lot more sense.

I'm not trying to save on data fees; I'd just love to do low-bandwidth peer to peer messaging with people nearby without any network around.

What if, for example, low-frequency 5G bands were available to such P2P applications as a secondary user, similarly to 5G WiFi and weather radars? If there's a network there, use that; if there isn't, do P2P!

Whatever happened to the 60Ghz WiFi? you would need a AP in every room but the bandwidth would be huge.

The ability to push it through the air isn't there. You end up dumping a lot of power into the transmitter which then just heats the air around it rather than go anywhere because the oxygen is absorbing it.

It is however great for a non-contact point to point where you connect the xmitter and receiver by attaching adjoining faces together. Imagine a PCIe card where the edge connector had no electrical contacts it just sits in the slot and the connection is a 60GHz link between the card and the base board. With inductive power transfer you don't need any conductive contacts at all.

Its very cool and sciencey but the tranceivers are stupid expensive and the use case is really pretty limited.

No demand. Wifi 6 can do nearly 10Gbps in theory (with 8 spatial streams), more common home routers should easily do 1Gbps.

Also over here hoping for LiFi, the future where my lightbulb can double as an access point.

Yep, the old WaveLAN stuff. I had a parallel port adapter version of that back in 1997 for an old Compaq Pentium laptop that I used for portable web browsing and telnet sessions.

One of the few groups that gets it are truckers who still use CB (27MHz) but even they are becoming fewer.

Long ranges mean lots of devices you could inadvertantly step on. Licensing is part of how they stop this.

Unless the public devises ways to use sub-ghz frequencies without getting caught.

It's pretty damn tough to hide RF, and if it's illegal then it will ask require home brewed circuitry which pretty effectively eliminates the capability from the public

It's not especially hard to modulate a signal on frequencies you shouldn't be. You don't even need to be doing it intentionally thanks to the lovely phenomenon of harmonics amongst other factors.

Software defined transceivers exist. Adjustable antennas exist. Poorly shielded electronics that can cause further noise propagation to broadcast out of the transmit side also exist.

You can also change the intended broadcast frequency of some cheap handheld radios using a USB cable and an off-the-shelf antenna.

There is very little in the way of the general public to do something illegal, wittingly or otherwise, in RF.

I'd argue that 'capability' is a naive limiter here as they'd be more likely to do this by accident than on purpose (or ignorance vs malice).

There are tons of illegal/unpermitted/unlicensed broadcasts happening all of the time. They only become an issue when regulators need to enforce rules, usually due to noticed interference.

Bad bonding/grounding is probably the most common cause. RF exists other places too. RF that was meant to be contained in a wire can use these same allocated OTA frequencies because they were never meant to escape that closed system... But do, mostly through poor bonding/grounding.

As you can probably see by now, there is little actually stopping anyone from broadcasting on any particular frequency. Regulators will catch them if they're causing destructive interference, eventually.

But you could potentially use 'illegal' RF for years and never be noticed. Your transmit power/range and your local environment (who else is using the spectrum locally) will dictate that for you more than any allocation rules alone.

The amateur radio scene is a special thing. They share knowledge, experience and more than anything, a culture of informed operation of RF.

I'd encourage anyone interested in operating any RF systems to acquire or at least study enough to acquire an amateur Technician license (US).

> Your transmit power/range and your local environment (who else is using the spectrum locally) will dictate that for you more than any allocation rules alone.

I agree, but I think it's important to note that "long range" is the context we're talking about. If you just want to get a quick message out then I fully agree, there's not a ton stopping you, but if you want it be a reliable and/or medium to long-term solution, then the barriers are quite non-trivial. There's also the risk of prosecution, which the regulators are not above if they smell intentionality. If they think you're innocently transmitting they'll just ask you to stop, but if they think you're intentionally and/or openly violating the rules, they can bring some serious legal pain down.