Building on this, although frequency allocation charts are aesthetically pleasing, they are cumbersome to use for research or determining what frequencies are allocated to what services. In practice, simple table formatting provides the easiest way look at allocations and compare country by country.
One main reason is that allocations are accompanied by footnotes that provide further clarification for how each frequency band can or should be used. For instance, footnote US334 states that the in the bands 17.8 GHz to 20.2 GHz, fixed-satellite services transmitting from space to earth via geostationary and non-geostationary satellites may be authorized on a primary basis. For people/companies looking to provide services, this is the difference between being able to operate in a band and not.
Additionally, it’s simply much more practical to look through and filter a table of allocations. As an example, this very simple site allows for easy comparison’s between the allocation tables of 25+ countries: https://spectrumdatabase.io/. It’s not as pretty, but it’s more practical.
Either way, it’s great to see people interested in frequency allocations!
Not only it clips some colors for no reason (look at the blue background around "broadcasting radio" house -- the gradient transition is totally gone. I assume the editor just used lasso tool to select "white-ish" parts and replace them entirely with a single color, instead of using color level?), it didn't even correct the background to pure white (but some reddish color)? Ugh!
It is copyright 1944. So it rather charmingly hand-waves away frequencies above 10 MHz or so. Such frequencies will be useful for television! And the plot stops at 100 MHz. (Nearly all radio used today is above 100 MHz.)
That said, much does still hold true. Longwave is still used by giant shore installations to communicate with ships. (Mostly by coincidence. Long wavelengths can reach submerged submarines.) The aeronautic band is still used by aeronautic non-directional beacons. The AM broadcast band is still AM broadcast. Some of the amateur bands are still in the same place today.
The physics and electronics depicted seem accurate. Its creators were clearly informed of the cutting edge in the 1940s; it depicts a magnetron, which had been invented about a decade before, and not widely used until high-power models were developed and then applied to radar c. 1940. A section about the health effects of ionizing radiation is conspicuously absent to my modern eye.
There are few books by the American Statistician Edward Tufte worth checking out. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations, all exceptional works of art. The books act as both a teaching guide and a compendium of beautiful historical infographical-artifacts.
I hadn't seen one of those in a while. It's now full all the way up to 300GHz. The last time I saw that chart, there was little if anything above 100Ghz.
Terahertz, here we come![1]
Incidentally, radio regulation, by international agreement, ends at 3 THz. Above that, it's called "light".
> radio regulation, by international agreement, ends at 3 THz. Above that, it's called "light".
That's true, but it's also tautological.
If you gave an intelligent but blind alien the task of describing our international radio regulation they'd probably put the visible signal lights on airplanes and ships under the same umbrella as WiFi or FM radio.
In reality visible light is also highly regulated, and in much the same way as the radio spectrum.
Is visible light really regulated in the same way as radio? Certainly there aren't frequency allocations or licenses as we'd think of for radio.
The regulations I am aware of relate to safety (laser precautions or FAA requiring markers on tall structures, e.g.), public nuisance, or environmental protection (e.g. for protection of sea turtles or light pollution reduction).
It looks like the details are behind some paywall, but my first thought was whether visual morse code signalling at sea was standardized. From [1] and [2] it turns out it is, but I don't know in what detail.
Overall it's probably not as formal as the radio spectrum in being regulated by international convention, but US and EU regulation is a de-facto standard when it comes to things like any external lights on cars, ships, airplanes and other vehicles.
Just counting headlights, tail lights, break lights and indicators the average car has at least 10 different sources of light.
If you own a car that number of "visual radio" transmitters[3] on your car alone probably outnumbers that other transmission devices you might have, and certainly if we account for "signal strength" (your bluetooth headphones probably don't have a range of many miles, but a car will easily "transmit" light over that distance).
An old lab I worked in had a malfunctioning RF power supply for a vacuum plasma generator.
None of the researchers were cognizant of the fact it was spewing noise outside its frequency allocation until some relevant government agencies quickly visited and had it shut down. We were impressed with the response time :)
Related, the FCC still maintains a network of monitoring stations around the US. Back in the day they were manned, now they're automated and remotely controlled.
(And yes, GPS-linked direction finding units are definitely a thing that can be purchased commercially. They're big in the amateur radio world for "fox hunts" - competitions to try and find hidden radio transmitters.)
Fun fact about modern radio direction-finding techniques: you don't need directional antennas, just an array of antennas you can observe phase differences across. It works shockingly well.
That's got some usual Nyquist limitations, right? For high enough freqs you'll be able to identify the plane, but the direction will potentially alias?
If you infringe on a mobile carrier’s spectrum, for which they have paid a handsome dollar, you can expect to find a man with a Yagi antenna and frequency analyzer in your backyard within a couple hours.
How far off from its allotted frequency does a device have to be in order to interfere? We are all aware of tuning an old radio where a station (e.g. broadcasting an FM signal) will come in slightly at 102.3 but much clearer at its real value at 102.4 so there is some range for each station.
Does the range change as frequencies increase (i.e. does the margin of error get smaller as you go up the spectrum)?
You should visit a WebSDR site like this one http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 as it nicely visualizes the bandwidth actually taken by a single broadcast, as well as how tightly neighboring signals can be packed. To answer your question, a broadcast of a certain kind will take the same amount of bandwidth regardless of the frequencies, but it's typical for the higher bands to simply offer more bandwidth and as such offer more broadcasting spots.
What you're describing isn't anything related to what the original post describes. The "real value" an FM broadcast is not 102.3 but 102.3 +/- 75 kHz. It's expected to be able to observe the signal even with the dial 100 kHz off because the signal width is 150 kHz.
You don't even have to be off your frequency.. insufficient filtering of your harmonics can cause interference in other bands. Your interference is characterized as the amount of energy you are radiating above the "noise floor."
Question for the audience: which parts of these allocations are actually fiat decisions made by each country; which parts are actually global decisions (where as soon as someone starts using it for X, every other country is stuck with that band being polluted with X, so they may as well use it for X as well); and which parts aren't decisions at all, but are just "the only possible frequency-band that kind of thing would work well on"?
Global decisions are made by treaty, through a United Nations organization known as the ITU.
Some allocations are harmonized globally. Others are divided up into one of three global regions - roughly the Americas, Europe/Africa, and Asia/Oceania. Then these are further divided into one of 90 zones that roughly follow country-specific boundaries.
All of this is decided very bureaucratically. In some cases decisions are constrained by the laws of physics (HF signals are going to bounce across the globe), in other cases by practical necessity (aviation/maritime allocations are harmonized to facilitate global movement of vessels, satellites are going to orbit across the globe). However, in some cases allocations will differ between ITU regions or zones (especially local broadcast and land-mobile communications users).
Further, priority is usually given on a first-come/first-served basis, but harmonization is encouraged. Individual countries can modify their local allocations, provided this don't interfere with other global users.
I presume that while "this is decided very bureaucratically", there are at least some use-cases where the use-case preceded the formation of any multilateral body to coordinate usage, and so is essentially "grandfathered in" where the ITU (or any predecessor body) said "I guess we're stuck with that." That's more the case I was curious about with the second one.
Also — and this is sort of a hybrid case of "grandfathered in" and "practical necessity" — I presume that, despite the ITU making no ruling on such, the band centered around 2.45GHz has ended up being "commercial use" in pretty much every country? My thinking being that it is the lowest-cost-to-generate dielectric frequency for cooking food, so microwave ovens almost exclusively use that frequency; and microwave ovens are common in pretty much every country (or is there a country that outlaws microwave ovens?); so the local regulatory body of each country is inevitably stuck with that radio interference source on that band, mucking it up for any "dedicated, clear-channel" licensed use; and so they may as well give that band away to industry, to come up with noise-tolerant use-cases for it.
> there are at least some use-cases where the use-case preceded the formation of any multilateral body to coordinate usage
The ITU-R was founded in 1927 (it was known as the CCIR back then). At that point, we were mostly worried about telegraph operators using spark gap transmitters, which have been effectively illegal since 1934. There's not much to grandfather in.
> I presume that, despite the ITU making no ruling on such, the band centered around 2.45GHz has ended up being "commercial use" in pretty much every country?
In the case of 2.45 GHz (the ISM bands), that's done under Part 15 rules (in the US, similar rules elsewhere) that allows for low-power, unlicensed transmitters. Your WiFi signal is intentionally run at extremely low power so that it won't travel more than a few hundred feet before it's attenuated by the environment, and in that frequency range there's no risk of it bouncing off the ionosphere. Meanwhile, your microwave oven is shielded to keep any signal leakage to a minimum.
This falls under the "non-interference" provision I mentioned earlier - the signal is unlikely to leave your neighborhood, let alone leave your country, so the ITU doesn't care. They're more concerned with signals that travel hundreds or thousands of miles.
If you check the ITU allocation, 2.45 GHz is allocated to radioloation (radar), licensed mobile radios, and fixed broadcast users. Plus a slice for amateur radio just below it. ISM use isn't even mentioned at this level.
WiFi and microwave ovens are effectively secondary users here. They get to share any spectrum left over provided they don't interfere with the primary users - and can't complain if they receive interference from the primary users. (In other words: If the government complains that your microwave oven is interfering with their radar station, your microwave oven will lose. Guarenteed.)
Most of the allocations seem quite reasonable, eg lots of navigation, radio astronomy, etc, which don’t seem particularly corporate to me. I guess TV is corporate but there are a lot more people who watch rev than listen to amateur radio. Similarly people get pressure good use out of mobile phones. Plausibly it would be good if more of the spectrum was available for Wi-Fi.
I guess one question is: are there amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?
> "are the amateur/unlicensed uses that are starved of bandwidth (Wi-Fi does strike me as something that fits but is there anything else)?"
WiFi 6e / WiFi 7 are getting a huge swath of bandwidth between 5.9 and 7.1Ghz in the US and Canada (but somewhat less in Europe/Japan/Australia/etc)
Even with current 5 Ghz WiFi, a lot of routers seem to not let you select the DFS/TPC channels above 48 even though they're perfectly legal to use in most places. As a result, those channels are far less congested.
The DFS channels have big downsides though. I don’t know much about TPC but for DFS, if your access point is on a DFS channel and it detects weather radar usage there it has to immediately get off it. It also has a slow start up period where it must first listen for radar traffic before transmitting. Though if you’re in an area without any radar on those bands it could be well worth it.
In the US, it's only one specific type of weather radar (TDWR), which is only used at 45 major airports. If you don't live near one of those, you only have to worry about a false positive in the radar detection feature accidentally knocking you off a DFS channel. And I know from experience that local topography sometimes means you can be operating an AP on a DFS channel only a few miles from one of those airports without ever having a problem.
It isn't really that simple. There are other users like satellite equipment & military radar. The military radar in particular runs anywhere they want at anytime without disclosing their actual location.
The equipment itself also has false positives, which lead to much of it being unusable.
This has never noticeably happened in my experience (UK). I've used DFS bands on my routers for years. It's far worse to use non-DFS bands because if you live in a built-up area they are almost always congested, causing poor performance (latency spikes, packet loss, etc).
Yeah, it does increase boot time a bit while the initial scan happens. But hopefully you aren't rebooting your router too often anyway. Small price to pay for avoiding WiFi congestion if you're in a busy building/area.
It's a huge performance penalty if some other nearby network is sharing your channel, so DFS is one small downside for a very big upside, IMO!
Personally I've never encountered a device (as opposed to an AP) that didn't work with DFS channels.
There's certainly some devices (cheap WiFi light bulbs, or anything really old) that don't support 5 Ghz at all, but any 5 Ghz device I've ever used found my DFS AP just fine.
5 Ghz WiFi bandwidth is really severely limited without DFS. If you're using an 80 Mhz channel then you're using almost the entire available non-DFS bandwidth, overlapping/conflicting with nearly all other nearby non-DFS networks. But with DFS there's room for 7 non-overlapping 80 Mhz channels!
You must just not be looking. It was standardized in 2003. Anything before that isn't going to have it. Even "new" products aren't going to have it mandatorily.
I have laptop from 2013 that is 2.4 Ghz only for example.
Yes, of course there's plenty of old 2.4 GHz-only devices around. But in my experiences, devices (but not all APs) which support 5 GHz WiFi tend to support all 5 GHz bands, including DFS bands (channel > 48) just fine.
I thought there was some tricky channel switching logic because of some other non-Wi-Fi uses of part of the 5GHz band, so maybe service degradation when switching away or just disabling the channels for a long time when the conflict-detection fires causes those channels to not be used much?
It's well-written but I totally disagree. Coase's prescription of auctions is precisely the means by which the People have had huge portions of the spectrum hijacked by megacorporations that they, in turn, use to extract rents from the public, while we get some overcrowded crumbs for our own use.
This market-based analysis, which is typical, omits the factor of nearly complete regulatory capture, i.e. our reality.
> Coase anticipated that full, fair, well-informed evaluations would find that decentralized resource owners generally outperformed state diktat.
That omission is pervasive, as if "state diktat" is some force independent of these same resource owners.
The auctions pit average citizens individually against the resources of megacorporations. Obviously it’s no match, the outcome of that contest will inevitably be what we have now. The point I’m making is pretty simple which is merely that the public deserves way more unlicensed and amateur spectrum. The government serves the types of corporations participating in these auctions, to the exclusion of the People, so that’s probably not ever changing.
The point of any auction is to determine who 'deserves' what.
Your reversing cause and effect.
And it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money, there are cases where they overbid and ended up losing money, to the benefit of the regulator, which is indirectly benefiting the taxpayer.
Which cause and effect am I reversing? Who deserves what is based on identity, i.e. citizen vs corporation, not money alone. So the auction determination of who deserves what, based only on money, is what is in some cases reversed.
>it's not like every auction winner is guaranteed to make money
Whether corporations made a sound business decision in the process of elbowing citizens out of their rightful resources while attempting to extract rents from them is beside the point. The damage to the People is done regardless.
It’s astonishing that corporations shouldn’t be able
to ride roughshod over the public and dominate all our resources unbridled? Shared by almost no one? Go look into the opposition to Citizens United. The idea that the government should be united with corporations which is what we have now is the real definition of fascism, supporting that is what’s astonishing.
You know an auction is literally people paying the public the most to use a shared resource, right? Whether they are people organized into a corporation or individuals bidding on spectrum, the end result is the same. The public got paid the most it could for publicly auctioned frequencies.
Well considering the U.S. Constitution remains unamended, it's a fact at least 25% of the electorate disagrees, so this is a provably false statement even in the worst case scenario.
If you have some sort of example of amateur or unlicensed spectrum that is more starved for bandwidth than the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using, I’d love to hear your ideas.
> the mobile phones that 300m Americans spend an average of 5hrs a day using
Current adoption and technology has been shaped by precisely the corporate dominance of the spectrum I'm referring to. In light of that, there's a circular implication to this point you're making.
Let's imagine a future where mobile data is fueled by citizen-run mesh/P2P networks. Who truly knows what's possible (not just in tech terms, but adoption/behavior) until it happens, but we can be sure what won't be possible if we (the People) don't even have the legal access to experiment.
Intersecting with that issue -- it's not just about "starved for bandwidth". Different bands have distinct propagation characteristics that make them suitable for different purposes, so the variation is important too.
Amateur and unlicensed spectrum allocations have also grown over time as technology has allowed for tighter bandpass filtering and more efficient digital transmission…but we haven’t seen an amateur resurgence, and mesh networks are actually dying off. Nobody cares.
And legal access to experiment is already free and available to everybody. It’s called a Special Temporary Authorization. Corporations use them all of the time for various purposes, including experimental applications. Citizens are allowed to apply for them too, but nobody ever does.
I don’t really care about hypothetical future scenarios that will never exist. Unlicensed and amateur spectrum has its place, but it’s not exactly deserving of any more bandwidth than it already has.
Many of the very real, tangible rights and benefits we now enjoy started out as hypothetical future scenarios.
> Special Temporary Authorization
> Citizens are allowed to apply for them too, but nobody ever does
It's easy, you just need to deal with the government and fill out paperwork for a permit and get it approved.
Maybe because again, the resources of these megacorporations and an individual in the general case are no comparison. Big companies have staff attorneys and compliance departments for whom the marginal cost for discovering these processes and doing paperwork like this is absolutely nothing relative to an individual. There are all kinds of things you can do with special permits and licenses and they are by that process guaranteed not to be popular with the general public, that goes for anything.
> mesh networks are actually dying off. Nobody cares.
It's niche right now because it's not easy for the average person to participate in and industry is deadset against it. The telecoms don't even want municipalities to have ISPs let alone individuals.
> not exactly deserving of any more bandwidth than it already has
What did these companies do to deserve almost all of our spectrum, capture our democratic processes with political bribes? You think Verizon is in the position they are because they "deserve" it?
> What did these companies do to deserve almost all of our spectrum
They paid for that spectrum, and they fulfilled licensing commitments to built a network that hundreds of millions of people can access and use.
The FCC has special licensing terms and incentive programs for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals. It actually is dead simple, and it’s cheap or free too. Their only ask is that is that the licensee serve the public interest and cover the population with services that they can actually use. This is the exact reason why mega corporations look like they’re preferred over the small players: the small players can’t fulfill that commitment.
The EBS spectrum, which is now used so profitably by Sprint/T-Mobile, was given away for free to academic institutions. They initially intended for it to be used for academic television, but most of those channels ended up not being used, so they gave them free reign over what to do with it. Unburdened from restrictions on how to use the spectrum, and what did they do with that freedom? They leased it to Sprint for the sweet sweet cash payout. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single academic institution using that precious midband spectrum for a mesh network.
So again, the premise here is simple: all you have to do is build something that people use. If you can do that better than a mega corporation, and at low costs to the end users, you will almost certainly have the favor of the FCC. They’ll fucking give you spectrum for free. So just do it already.
In practice do we need more reserved/unallocated bands? The problem with unlicensed bands is interference and the like - they can't be used together without stomping eachother (eg. in FPV RC, analog and digital transmitters have difficulties because digital stomps the analog signals).
Arguably given the above it would be useful to have a larger range of frequencies available to amateur/unregulated users, but it's also probably true that the general public gets more utility from more 4G LTE spectrum, if we're honest.
I'm currently going through a bit of a transit map obsession, and these frequency allocation charts just feel like they tickle the same feeling. The way it codes information densely, into simple colors, in easily understood ways. Even the part where it distorts things slightly in order to depict them cleanly echos the way subway and metro maps often fudge geographical features to make their maps more readable. I wonder if there's anything one of these diagrams can copy from the other. Maybe the radio spectrum would make more sense if organized into "lines" of some sort
I have the same obsession, I think. Do you know of any place that sells high quality printed maps or charts, with (for lack of a better word) "engineering" data? I'm particularly interested in energy, transit, or natural resource maps and charts. Or even just a collection of nice looking, info-dense charts.
Now that I look at this chart for a bit I realize its the radio equiv of the Vignelli map of NY subway. It looks nice, it feels like good design, but its actually unusable. The Y axis within each spectrum isn't used for any meaning other than just dividing into halves, thirds, quarters whatever. Sometimes there's two or more boxes of the same color and label in the same spectrum with no explanation about what distinguishes them. It color codes every minor distinction in application with its own color, which actually makes it less clear.
Here's my first pass at a redesign. All the categories are reallocated into a 2-feature category system, (Sea, Land, Air, Space) x (Science, Navigation, Communication, Broadcast). The first half-category goes on the y axis of each spectrum bar. So all the space stuff is along the top of the sub-spectrum chart, all the sea stuff along the bottom. The second half category goes into a color, of which there's only 4. The existing color stripe for federal/non-federal is good as is, but could perhaps also include operator type more generally (military/civilian/government/public, reserved etc).
Czechia has this really cool website that lets you identify what every frequency band is used for in depth [0]; it seems to be run by a telecom so I'm presuming its fairly correct and up-to-date.
I don't know if there's something like that for the United States.
I don't know what to make of the bands that they show. e.g. in the USA, garage door openers listen in the 300-390MHz range (depending on brand), but per the chart these are blocked off as "Federal-Exclusive" bands and detailed as for FIXED or MOBILE use (with a band for AERONAUTICAL RADIONAVIGATION in the middle).
As a garage door opener owner/operator isn't licensed, it woudn't qualify as FIXED (though the transmitter wouldn't be fixed in all cases) and it certainly wouldn't qualify as "Federal-Exclusive."
Many of those devices are operating under the FCC's Part 15 rules for unlicensed transmitters, which allows them to use certain bands provided that they stay below a minimum power level (or use an inefficient antenna) and don't cause interference to licensed users.
The idea is that by keeping the radiated field sufficiently weak, you avoid long-distance propagation and won't interfere with anything not in your immediate vicinity.
This is why your garage door opener only works when you're right next to your house. (Compare with a licensed mobile radio, which will easily transmit 100-300 miles given a clear line of sight.)
This chart doesn't show all of the frequency allocations. It's mostly showing who has priority on said frequency and who has secondary rights to not interfere with the frequency priority.
There's a third "level" (you can look it up on the FCC's website if you like) that includes things that have low priority (any of the items listed in the chart above supersede them) and are normally low enough power that they will not cause any interference to the primary or secondary frequency holders in the chart. This is why you don't see things like wifi or garage door openers in the chart, but they are part of the band plan, usually under "RF Devices" which falls under Part 15 of the FCC's Code of Regulations.
How do you find the regions wifi uses on this chart? I can't really find any correlation even knowing the frequencies. Or is that somehow not in scope?
Wifi is not on the chart. The chart is based on the "FCC ONLINE TABLE OF FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS". [1] That table has 3 columns of data, the first two columns are what you see in the chart above. The third column is where the wifi frequencies are defined (among some others), listed as "RF Devices (15)" since wifi falls under Part 15 of the FCC Code of Regulations. [2]
2.4GHz and some 5GHz WiFi is in the ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) bands. The 5.8GHz ISM band isn’t marked on the chart for some reason. Perhaps the little teal-colored rectangles in the middle of the 5.2-5.8GHz region are WiFi.
I believe they fall under the "amateur" bands. I.e. frequencies not requiring a license to utilize (given you obey given power limits). That's why the same frequencies are shared by WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.
Some of the amateur bands also overlap with allocations for things like radar. For example, a subset of the "5Ghz" WiFi channels (the "DFS" channels) can only be used if the access point will auto switch to a different channel upon detecting a radar pulse.
I believe you're thinking of the ISM bands - problematic chunks of the spectrum that are given over to industrial, scientific and medical technologies that emit RF by design. The FCC allows a bit of part 15 free-market anarchy on these bands so long as manufacturers limit power and print a familiar disclaimer on the device. By contrast, the amateur radio service does require a license.
This is actually a chart that shows who is legally protected from interference. A license holder of a service listed in a colored bar has the right to complain if there is another emission on their spectrum. (There are also "primary" and "secondary" users for some ranges, the latter expected to yield to the former). According to that chart, a radiolocation service is the primary user. Amateurs can then work around them (1.5KW earth-moon-earth wifi anyone?) and finally wifi is allowed to exist with all the other random gadgets.
Yes, WiFi is given nearly the lowest priority for a small slice of the spectrum that is full of garbage from other users. No wonder it's so good at beamforming, spread spectrum use, channel hopping, and so on.
Back in the early 00s, the “Digital Promise” org sought to set aside some spectral “land” to support digital education, just as the western reserve set aside land for public education. I thought it was a brilliant idea.
Meanwhile, in the late 00s,federal agencies were selling their emergency spectrum allocations to the highest bidder (and apparently still are as of 2021)
What a time to be alive the early 00's were - where the possibilities of 3G was endless along with the profits. £22 billion for 3G on a tiny island was real money in 2000, and a lot more than the £2.3 billion or so they managed in 2014 for 4G and £1.3 billion in 2018 for 5G
Before clicking, I thought it was going to look like the IP allocation charts (or Colorado River water rights), with some areas fighting for crumbs and other older stakeholders massively overprovisioned, but this actually looks quite reasonable to me.
take it to a framing store and have them mount it on foamcore or some other sort of light backing. usually will have a small hook in the back, sometimes more -- ask them them about it.
This crazy, beautiful chart illustrates the incredible complexity of managing one of our nation’s most crucial – and invisible – national assets: the radio spectrum.
I would love to know if there's a $ per spectrum bandwidth overlay that can be made on this chart and if there are any interesting observations from that?
One main reason is that allocations are accompanied by footnotes that provide further clarification for how each frequency band can or should be used. For instance, footnote US334 states that the in the bands 17.8 GHz to 20.2 GHz, fixed-satellite services transmitting from space to earth via geostationary and non-geostationary satellites may be authorized on a primary basis. For people/companies looking to provide services, this is the difference between being able to operate in a band and not.
Additionally, it’s simply much more practical to look through and filter a table of allocations. As an example, this very simple site allows for easy comparison’s between the allocation tables of 25+ countries: https://spectrumdatabase.io/. It’s not as pretty, but it’s more practical.
Either way, it’s great to see people interested in frequency allocations!