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Spectrum Wars: The Hidden Battle
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."
Gore Vidal, the great American essayist, novelist and playright said, "When you hear the word privitization, there is a burglar lurking."
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I think one of the problems we will start seeing before long is interference. With more and more people/devices crowding into a static amount of space (until more of the spectrum is released) it is bound to get a little bumpy. How long until your wireless network won't work when you sign on to your local wireless "last-mile" provider?
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I think digital radio would be a logical first step before digital TV - there's tons of wasted spectrum b/c of the pathetically outdated mandatory distance frequencies.
Fix the easy stuff first (or at least concurrently).
Unfortunately, International treaties seem to have remarkably short lives, around a certain GWB. It wouldn't surprise me, if his "resolution" to the problem was to deregulate radio transmissions entirely.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If they would have payed for the new spectrum, My guess is they would have had an argument for auctionning the rest, but since they've got it for free, they've "saved" that extra investment (or tax), plus, knowing that in the end, it won't be a reason to lower the cost of the products they will sell using that spectrum, I'd say, leave the lower almost unused spectrum a bit more open for developpement for projects or org. that couldn't afford to pay a tax/license right for it (i.e. local or + wireless community internet access, school research projects).
It's a bit like computers, it's not because a workstation is old and not useful for rendering in your graphics/video editing company, that it cannot do a nice web server (or anything else requiring less power) in an non-profit organisation.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
What were the conditions of returning "their analog spectrum to the public"? Did they forbid broadcasters from making a profit when they returned them to the public? Did they limit how the broadcasters could return them to the public?
After my knee-jerk "how dare those bastards" reaction, I took time to think about it and I'm not so sure this is a problem.
-jhon
Aren't our elected officials supposed to at least TRY to protect their electorate from this kind of thing? $200 BILLION is a lot of money! I don't think we should have to rely on one or two reporters to stop a $200 BILLION theft. It would be nice if our elected officials would stop counting their kickbacks, bribes and lobbyist money and start doing their jobs.
While the whole process is working out less than ideal, I'm pleased to see the government taking an active stance on bringing 3G to the states. I know there are a couple of GSM cel carriers here in the states now but they don't really have the same coverage as the old CDM and TDMA (I think those are the acronymns) systems that AT&T and such have. I'd love to have some of the whiz-bang new phones (or one of the more stylish australian models) but because the rest of the world operates on a different system I'm out of luck.
Chalk it up to good intentions but (potentially) poor implementation I suppose.
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You think?
The rest of the world waits until the U.S. is finished making the mistakes that often come when a new technology is introduced. The problem is that once we realize we've made mistakes, our "solution" is to patch things up, not throw the whole thing out and start over. In the meantime, the rest of the world says, "Ok, the U.S. has invented this technology and discovered some of the problems. Now how can we implement it correctly?"
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
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The machinations on Capitol Hill are increasingly out of control. Of course the broadcasters will get their cake and eat it too (selling spectrum they were given for free) since they only have to funnel a small % of the proceeds to suddenly supportive senators.
Let's dispense with the formalities and just post a large for-sale sign outside the capitol:
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1) Get something for the government for free / dirt cheap.
2) Go back on the contract / agreement.
3) Make bucketloads of cash.
4) Government (and taxpayers) suck it up
Rather than a a shortage of bandwidth, I think the true problem in the States is a lack of decent, informed, relatively unbiased regulation headed by the Fed and too many interested parties such as corporations with a lot of money and lawyers.
The whole HDTV plan is a disaster. No one is buying HDTV (and, reports to the contrary, I don't think it looks significantly better, so I don't think anyone will). You can't force people to buy it, and you can't deploy it when no one has it.
It's a spectrum-hungry technology that no one really wants. Plus, it's a big selloff to companies that don't deserve the help.
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This quasi-privatization of the airwaves combines the worst of both worlds, with few, if any, of the best. All the worst of government regulation, and all the worst of business since they control a product which someone else owns.
Let's have real privatization of the airwaves. Yes, their is a fixed amount of frequencies available, but the market works for other fixed resources, like real estate. Will there be some large players that will grab up large chunks of frequencies? Of course! But I would rather have half a dozen mega conglomerates competing with each other, than a single government agency accountable to no one at all. (and of course, government regulation has done nothing to hinder the current crop of megacorps, but plenty to keep the small independent off the market)
How would it work in practice? Just take a look at the internet. Next to zero regulation, backbones that in many areas are fixed resources, heavy commercialization, yet there are unlimited opportunities for individuals, non-profits, and other noncommercial organizations.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
while it brings in alot of $$$ has always seemed somewhat shady to me. While this article isn't well balanced, it has always seemed like the users of that spectrum have been well-funded businesses and I get nervous when they get in too tight with the regulating agency. A breath-taking example of this coziness is that the NAB would have the balls to propose auctioning their old analog spectrum and keeping the money. And yes, I read the article and if you don't think they won't manage to stuff most of that money in their own pockets, you're crazy. I thought that by giving the networks free spectrum for HDTV (or whatever it may be called by now) the Gov't and, by extension, the people *were* speeding up the process and cutting broadcasters costs.....sheesh.
I don't have a lot of experience with wireless communications. Thus far all I've used is radio, a wireless phone handset, and an emergency cell phone. In my daily life then interference has never caused any critical problems. Sure there is the occasional static on radio or what not, but the signal to noise ratio is generally quite good and a little corruption isn't that bad.
My question to you then is how bad is interference now and has it been getting worse? When you are running wireless networks and systems where single bit errors can be serious, how well do the failsafes work? Can you give examples where interference was/is a persistent serious problem?
Obviously if we keep expanding the spectrum and pumping more things into the air, there will be more interference. So right now are we doing pretty good that we can tolerate more interference, or are in the position of making a real problem much worse?
PS While I respect radio astronomers, your problems are not typical. We may simply have to accept that what's useful to us is harmful to you and the overall utility might trump some methods of research.
Actually the amount of spectrum currently allocated to cellular is similar in the US to many other countries. One of the main reasons we do not see 3G yet is the expensive of overhauling infrastructure on a massive scale compared to many other countries, combined with an economic slowdown in the communications sector. US users have also been historically slower to adopt new features, so carriers are more cautious. Its the classic chicken and egg problem of new technology - industry needs users to spur revenue for 3G development, but users want widespread 3G technology before adopting.
The US gives a lot of spectrum to TV (and the military, but that's another story). So, Americans are behind in cell phone technology, but get to watch more TV channels (even without cable).Network Magazine has an interesting article about this.
Which seems to be quite a few knee-jerk posters...
The point of the article was that the broadcast industry wants to profit from the sale of the analog spectrum they agreed to return to the public in 2006. They were given the new spectrum, valued at over 70 billion, for free. So, they want to take our property, and sell it.
In addition the current military spectrum is very much desired. The military would either like to keep it, or obtain the anaolog spectrum from broadcasters. Some folks in congress want to auction off the military spectrum, and the debate is whether the money goes to the military to help convert to another spectrum, or to other programs.
Well, of course the broadcasters are going to try to do this. Do the math, they only need to contribute 20 million or so of soft money to reap a 200 billion windfall. That's a 1000000% return on investment.
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Eben Moglen (Prof. at Columbia Univ. and General Counsel for the FSF) was talking about the spectrum giveaway to TV broadcasters 4 years ago. See here. Interesting historical perspective.
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Digital Television != High Definition Television.
Of course HDTV typically has a digital signal (some countries actually have tried analog high-def signals), but digital television just means using a digital signal instead of analog and that can include the contemporary TV format.
Afterall digital cable companies and satelite providers already commonly transmit digital signals of contemporary sized and formatted television programs.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
Of course the companies would like to get everyone behind the higher res, wider, bandwidth hungry HDTV format and spew that all over the air waves as well or exclusively, but personally that seems more like a marketing gimmick than an especially useful technology. Even if digital broadcasting takes off, don't expect all the shows on the air to be HDTV formatted, at least not any time soon.
OK. I'll bite.
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There are a few things the US has been a fore-runner of that didn't involve killing people somewhere else.
But with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it was Trent Lott who prohibited the auctions, and forced the FCC to give licenses away. The act also prohibited consideration of anyone but the renewal applicant for the license, assuring that only the owners of the ill-gotten licenses would be keeping them, and I quote:
You do the math.
Deciding whether to side with the FCC or with Corporate America in this matter is easy. I live in a democracy; if I don't like the government I can run for office and change it. I don't like Carnivore, Echelon, the DMCA, and I would like to play a significant role in having the NSA and the CIA dissolved and opened to the scrutiny of the world. Why does it work this way when 90% of the country, left and right, libertarian and conservative, doesn't like it? Why can't I change the way this government works? It's because no one takes office without large corporate donors behind them, and no one campaigns without the millions of dollars needed to get themselves on corporate airwaves. The public would never know your name, and that would gaurantee you a sideline seat for the election debates that, by the way, happen to be corporate-sponsored as well. It's one big joke.
Aren't they a subsidiary of Sirius Cybernetics?
You know, the inventors of the talking doors...
The first ones with their back against the wall when the revolution comes.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ultra WideBand looks promising for PDA/ Wireless data transfer, and with that kind of bandwidth you could shove quite alot of stuff including video.. Lets just do away with 'traditional' broadcasters - Its the future already.
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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
The optimal money-making strategy for the Government would be to lease, rather than sell, spectrum. Auction off 5-year leases every 5 years. That would keep broadcasters on their toes.
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IIRC, a couple of years ago when Congress balanced the budget, they used a little bit of trickery. It seems that they took the amount of money to be gained in 2006 from spectrum auctions and applied it to the current budget in order to balance it, essentially borrowing against future income.
Now what happens if the broadcasters keep the spectrum?
The government doesn't own the spectrum, the people of the U.S. do. However, as you point out, someone needs to be in charge of this sort of thing, and when it was decided somewhere back around the 1920s that it shouldn't remain in the hands of the military they put it under the Commerce Dept. or somewhere like that until the Communications Act of 1933 was passed and the Federal Communications Commission was created.
The idea is that the FCC exercises stewardship over the airwaves on behalf of the public, and broadcasters used to be granted licenses to operate "in the public interest" a particular type of service (AM, FM, TV, microwave relay, weather radar, air traffic control radar, amateur radio, citizens band, whatever)within a particular frequency range, at a certain power level, in a specific geographical area, at particular times of day, etc., according to specific technical requirements to prevent interference with other services. If you didn't behave yourself and keep the FCC happy you could find yourself with a lot of money tied up in land and equipment that you no longer could legally use for its intended purpose.
Nowadays, however, the broadcasters have come to believe that they have some divine right to this license to print money, and the auctioning of spectrum space (instead of leasing) means that certain bandwidths are gone forever no matter what may happen in the future that would make it desirable to re-assign them for some other service, including, I suspect, even instances where the military is denied something that they need and our national defense is compromised.
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