> The issue is that spectrum auctions are probably the least efficient and equitable way of distributing allocations available. There isn't a standard unit conversion between utility in dollars and bandwidth in Hz. There are individuals with enough money that they could buy their own national spectrum allocations just for their personal use alone.
That's actually fairly efficient.
Pure bureaucratic allocation is much, much less efficient than auctions.
I agree that the auctions as implemented in practice can be improved. Eg you don't need to auction off all the spectrum nationwide. And you don't need to have so many restrictions on what people can do with the bands they won bids on. Eg we can let some hardware consortium bid on space to be used for wifi, even if it was previously allocated to TV.
The issue is that spectrum auctions are probably the least efficient and equitable way of distributing allocations available. There isn't a standard unit conversion between utility in dollars and bandwidth in Hz. There are individuals with enough money that they could buy their own national spectrum allocations just for their personal use alone.
That said, there are ways to maintain efficiency. TDMA can still be implemented in a distributed fashion using GPS or device collaboration, we just didn't do it with wifi because it would have been cost prohibitive 20 years ago.
For the sake of argument, a naive approach would be to generate a UTM grid square based on a fraction of some maximum reasonable wifi footprint, then the system in that grid would get a frequency allocation, and everything within that grid would time sync and TDMA on that frequency. Neighboring cells would get a different frequency and devices 2-3 cells over could start reusing frequencies. Obviously this doesn't work in an apartment high-rise but that's fixable.