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Spectrum Wars: The Hidden Battle

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pretty-soon-we-are-talking-about-real-money dept.

PacketMaster writes: "The USA Today is carrying an interesting commentary entitled All-but-secret battle rages over fate of airwaves. The article sheds light on some topics that many people are completely ignorant on - the fight over the broadcast spectrum. The most interesting tidbit is that the current broadcasters, who were given the new digital spectrum for applications like HDTV for free, now want to keep their old ones too and auction them off for industry profit to help pay for the transition to the new spectrum."

2 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Digital Radio by silicon_synapse · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are several providers of satellite radio. The target market is mostly high end cars. Two popular ones are Sirius Radio and XM Radio. If I had the money, I'd love to give it a try. I believe they're subscription based, but it's probably well worth it. Has anyone here used such a service?

  2. No, we won't see problems with interference by megalomang · · Score: 4, Informative
    The reason that the spectrum is partitioned off is precisely why we won't have interference. Each band is regulated and has either sufficient guard band so that the energy "leakage" into adjacent bands is minimal or simply has a prescribed permissable leakage that the adjacent band can tolerate.

    Digital communication is inherently immune to noise caused by several types of interference. Many channel encoding schemes exist precisely to deal with interference that is typical of the frequency range of the band, doppler effects, echoes, etc. Yes, there is a statistically small amount of bit error you will receive given a statistically small amount of noise energy present in the band, but there is no recent trend of rising noise energy in any given frequency band.

    So don't worry, your phone, tv, AM/FM radio, talkabout, bluetooth device, etc will not eventually stop working due to the noise level passing some magic threshold.

    For more info, look at the frequency allocation on the FCC web pages:
    http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf