Electromagnetic Justice
“Want you to know I’m doing fine
If I don’t respond, keep that in mind”Youri Lentjes — Signal (Home I’ll Never Be)
The winning picture of the World Press Photo awards from 2014 was not only a big accomplishment for the photographer John Stanmeyer who displayed the contemporary issue of the refugee crisis from a fresh and original perspective, it was an acknowledgement to the achievements of the people operating in telecommunication engineering as well. While I have to admit I might have a possible bias towards my colleagues here, I do believe that this photo shows how wireless communication technologies can be of great value during humanitarian crises. Smartphones receive a lot of criticism for having turned us into ‘screen-zombies’, but it are moments like these that show their power of connecting people in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.
This same dependency on communication technologies was made visible in the aftermath of the floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands from last week. The Dutch news broadcasting foundation (NOS) reported that the affected regions in Germany experienced a lack of clean water, electricity, and especially of internet connections. ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ is probably an appropriate phrase here. Wireless connections stop being a luxury item when they allow you to let your loved ones know you’re safe, and more importantly when they allow your loved ones to let you know that they’re safe.
There are of course more situations imaginable in which our reliance on communication technologies is made painfully evident. Think about those moments when the person talking in a Zoom meeting starts stuttering due to their bad Wi-Fi connection, when you’re standing in front of the cashier with a fully loaded shopping cart but the PIN-pad lost its connection to the banking network, or when you have to meet a deadline for the paper you’re writing but the internet has suddenly become tediously slow.
Something strange is going on here, and if I didn’t know better I might have even called it sinister. For there is an almost invisible infrastructure behind these wireless technologies. This infrastructure is political, even though it receives almost no attention from politicians. It is an ethical infrastructure as well, but does not seem to draw the attention of ethicists. And it is a technological infrastructure, but engineers are not often aware of the political and ethical implications of such an infrastructure. This infrastructure bears the name ‘National Frequency Plan’, it is little more than a table in which all the useful radiofrequencies are assigned to certain communication services.
Get Maarten Appelman’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The first time I came in contact with a frequency plan was during a master course in telecommunication engineering at my university, and I vividly remember the shock that went through the classroom when it was shown. I’m pretty sure that most of us were aware of the fact that people are not allowed to send signals at just any frequency, and that you would either need to have a licence, or would have to use a license free frequency. We were aware of some of the most sophisticated and mathematically exhaustive modulation methods, but that the electromagnetic spectrum would be this crowded was news to us. And this was the exact reason our professor wanted to show it to us, we ‘needed’ to be aware of this large amount of telecommunication services. The frequency plan our professor showed us back then can be seen below. In order to read this chart, you need to know that the top left corner shows the lowest usable radiofrequency, while the bottom right shows the highest radio frequency. The most important takeaway message however is that each rectangle represents a specific communication service.
This is of course nothing but an anecdote, but it is an anecdote that nevertheless reveals another aspect of the invisibility of frequency plans. As engineers, we were now aware of these jam-packed charts, but no one told us of the ethical and political aspects behind its underlying practice of frequency distribution. These social aspects primarily emerge from two features of wireless communication. Firstly from the fact that not all frequencies are equal: at low frequencies we are able to communicate over larger distances, while high frequencies allow us to send more information within the same time period. Secondly it can be observed that the electromagnetic spectrum is limited, which is to say that we cannot allow an infinite amount of telecommunication services to operate at the same time. If two different transmitters would send signals at the same frequency (and in the same area), they would interfere with each other and it is likely that neither one would work anymore.
These elements of telecommunication might still sound completely technological, but now let’s imagine that the mobile communication network that the refugees were trying to connect to in Stanmeyer’s photograph would have been allocated to a lower frequency… They wouldn’t have had the struggles to contact their loved ones that is now depicted in the prize winning photograph.
But frequency distribution has cultural implications as well, which can for example be seen in the tradition of radio-piracy, where amateurs broadcast their radio shows at frequencies that are not licensed to them. It can be argued that their practice is not illegal because it causes interference to the commercial radio stations, but that they cause interference because they have not been allocated a frequency to transmit their music on. There are furthermore financial connotations that cannot be simply expressed in terms of market value. For when new licenses are auctioned, the devices previously operating at those frequencies will stop functioning. Forcing their users to buy new equipment, presumably without knowing why their old gear doesn’t work anymore.
The Dutch government provides its principles regarding frequency distribution in their ‘Nota on Frequency Policies’. In its most recent version, this nota argues that wireless communication services have transformed from a ‘nice to have’ into a ‘need to have’. This shift in emphasis is valuable, as it aligns with our shift in dependency on telecommunication. But it should simultaneously be noted that this nota does not provide any ethical reflection. Which is actually quite worrisome considering that this practice is so thoroughly embedded in moral consequences. With the risk of cutting corners, the government’s policies can here be summarized by the acknowledgement that communication services do not only serve financial-, but public interests as well, and that frequencies can best be divided by auctioning licenses for them.
Question is then what a good ethical framework for frequency distribution would be, and how it could help us to allocate frequencies in a justified method. In my latest paper, I suggested using John Rawls’ conception of the so-called ‘veil of ignorance’. To understand this concept we can think of dividing an uneven sliced pizza among friends. There are many different methods to divide this pizza, we could e.g. draw straws, divide it on the basis of age, auction it etc. Rawls argues that we would come up with the fairest method if we would have been put behind his veil of ignorance. In this idea, we are placed in a theoretical position where we are all equally unaware of our age, social status, financial wealth etc. From this position, we would have no incentive to (unconsciously) advantage ourselves, as we would not know how to do that.
Of course, allocating frequencies is far more difficult than dividing a pizza. To stay within this metaphor, we can regard the electromagnetic spectrum as a four-dimensional pizza. Where we have to account for the required bitrate, communication distance, and both the financial and social interests supported by the respective communication services. But that does not deny us from seeing the injustice of the convention of license auctioning, for who would agree to having their four-dimensional slice of pizza simply be taken away because it was auctioned by the government? One might argue that this is still fair because everyone can enter this auction, but that’s a naïve thought to say the least. Spectrum licenses are auctioned for billions of euros. Few people would be able to compete in such auctions, especially when they’re not in the position to gain any financial interest from the respective licenses. We can use the same method with respect to radio-piracy, and ask ourselves if anyone behind a veil of ignorance would prevent themselves from achieving a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum because it only serves public interests, but amounts to little market value due to its localized significance. It is questions like these that we will have to ask ourselves in order to imagine improvements to our current spectrum allocation conventions.
I’m very aware that I did not provide anyone with a clear cut solution for fair and just spectrum allocation, and I’m afraid that solving this problem will require a lot more ethical research. But at least I hope to have made a first step in making the social elements of frequency distribution somewhat more visible, and I do believe that this would already be quite valuable in itself. Wireless communication services are becoming more and more entangled in our everyday life, we have become dependent on them. So understanding, debating, and accordingly trying to improve their foundations can only be advantageous.
