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As most of you know by now, the FCC (Federal Communications Commissions) is set to auction off a sizable portion of electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum, once used by analog televisions, has been reallocated due to the FCC mandating that all tvs must be digital by 2009. This leaves commercial US telecommunication companies in a unique position to bid on the open frequencies, which happen to be prime for wireless communication. While the normal players like AT&T and Verizon will obviously be looking to bid on this spectrum, a new player announced their interest, Google.

Let me quickly give a non-technical interlude on why one would want to bid on a range of frequencies. The electromagnetic spectrum is very wide in comparison to what is being auctioned by the FCC. It includes all waves from infrared to visible light to Ultraviolet. Depending on the frequency of the wave, the wave exhibits different characteristics. The higher frequency waves travel considerably shorter than lower frequency waves among other differences. The FCC has taken the radio wave portion of the spectrum and allocated different bands to different purposes. check out this PDF from the FCC to take a closer look:

While some of the spectrum is left open to the public to use devices like ham radios, cordless phones, and wifi, most of it is privately used. Among these private uses are Cell Phone infrastructures. This lets the owners decided to either use the frequencies to build a cell network or lease the frequencies to other companies. As you can imagine, buying spectrum is quite expensive. When cell phones were first introduced not many companies had the available resources and know how to make buying this spectrum correct. The few that did were able to gain control of large quantities of frequencies and have not let go of them since.

This leads us to present times, where a few monopolies own the entire available cell phone spectrum in the USA. There is virtually no way for competitors to create their own (profitable) networks. Think about it, the available spectrum is gone, and while you can become a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network operator where you lease infrastructure of other companies), what do you think would happen if you started to steal profits from the company you were leasing from? (Granted it is more complicated can this, and I am not an MVNO expert, but the profit margins seem to plateau much lower than if you operated your own network, youll probably end up like Ampd mobile).

So companies like AT&T, Verizon, TMobile, and cingular (oh wait, AT&T eliminated that problem) have no fear of young upstarts stealing their profits. Further, though these companies are definitely competing with themselves over market share, they are able to implicitly collude with each other to keep profit margins high. Telecommunication companies have a golden ticket right now, why would they kill their profit margins by lowering prices like HDTV producers were forced to do? Because of lack of competition these monopolies have no need to either significantly lower prices or significantly increase features that would cost a lot to implement. It is good for these companies to prevent competition.

FCC auctions have happened before and not scared the big guns however. Why would they? Actually, its been just the opposite. Who else is going to bid billions of dollars on radio spectrum and actually make it profitable? There were no other companies that could afford to bid on spectrum as it came open, and thus the monopolies could remain that way.

This self-surviving prophecy could come to an end in the upcoming election. With the increase of wireless data network technology and usage, other companies are becoming interested. And there is once such company that aims to act on its Motto Do no Evil and bring the power back to the people. In the next article we will take a look at Google's plans and motives.

watch for the latest updates and learn more about wireless communications at http://www.freedwireless.com

Patients with lower back pain often have hip flexor tightness. The hip flexor that is very easy to locate is the sartorius due to its strap-like form stretching from the outer aspect of the hip to the medial aspect of the knee joint. This muscle allows us to sit in the taylor sit position or the lotus position.

The sartorius muscle flexes the hip as well as rolls the hip outward (external rotation). It is also a knee flexor.

To test this muscle, the patient places the heel of the tested side on the opposite knee. Patients with pain and tightness of the sartorius tend to have difficulty placing the heel on the opposite knee.

However, difficulty in performing this function also depends on presence of pain and spasm in the lower back muscles, hip extensor muscles, hip abductor and internal rotator muscles. Tightness and shortening of these muscles will produce difficulty performing this motion which is also called the FABERE testing (this is a combination of ability of the hip to flex, abduct and externally rotate).

Nerve supply: Femoral nerve
Spinal segments: L2, L3 and L4 nerve roots
2007 copyright all rights reserved www.stopmusclepain.com Low back pain - hip pain- Sartorius

Jennifer Chu, M.D., founder of eToims Soft Tissue Comfort Center is also President and CEO of eToims Medical Technology LLC, a medical device company with training programs in eToims Twitch Relief Method. She is an Emeritus Associate Professor in the Department of Physical medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of pennsylvania, where has been on faculty for more than 30 years. www.stopmusclepain.com

Jennifer Chu, M.D. emeritus professor of Physical medicine and Rehabilitation, school of medicine, University of pennsylvania, pioneered eToims Twitch Relief Method that utilizes surface electrical stimulation to locate motor points (trigger points). The motor points are then stimulated to induce strong local muscle contractions, termed twitches. This results in reduced muscle pain and discomfort in the areas that were stimulated. The involved pain/discomfort-relieving mechanism is thought to include local muscle exercise and stretch effects.

eToims Soft Tissue Comfort Center specializes in diagnosis and treatment which ends muscle discomfort and pain.