[CobrastanJorji]

I think that reserving bands for meteorology, Radio navigation, radio location, critical services (maritime mobile, time signal), science (space research), amateur radio, and microwaves is a very good idea. But if you were to redesign the allocations from scratch with modern technology, you could probably clear up a whole lot of spectrum.

[jychang]

On the other hand, how bad is congestion in practice anyways? Sure it's congested, but rarely to the point where it's unusable.

I don't think we need to clear out all of the spectrum from 100khz to 100ghz. If we doubled unlicensed spectrum around 2.4ghz, 5ghz, and 6ghz, we'd solve 90% of our congestion issues at the cost of barely any spectrum. Overhauling the entire electromagnetic spectrum allocations would cost millions of dollars of replacing devices; just throwing a bit more at wifi bands would cheaply solve most issues.

[lazide]

Define ‘unusable’?

If you assume it’s a smooth degradation where it goes from 50MB/s to 100kb/s, yeah, that’s rare. It is often ‘nothing at all’ for a second or two.

And that is unusable for a lot of things. Or at least infuriating.

[eru]

Why does amateur radio make the list?

It seems like a fun hobby, but they could probably have just as much fun without an exclusive band for them.