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Wireless Network or Weird Al?
coronaride writes "This article over on Wired discusses the current topic of the FCC's regulation of UHF's (ultra-high frequencies). Apparently, UHF channels 52 through 69 are in danger of being taken over by wireless networking!" Insert your Conan the Librarian or Wheel of Fish
joke here.
Who cares, those channels are crappy anyways.
IMO, though, the FCC shouldn't be requiring that the current spectrum holders go digital. They should change their licenses to empty channels below 52 at no cost, but make the switch manditory. It's malarky like this that makes the FCC a pox on the States.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
I'm sorry, but.... 52-69? Anybody have more than four local UHF stations? Think maybe they could fit all four between 14 and 51?
Comic Book Guy: "There is no Groening in my store."
That auction better give the government a whole lot of money (which they'll probably waste on crap like DMCA enforcement). These are my airwaves, and while I have access to television programming free of charge, I'm sure this high-speed wireless internet access isn't going to be free.
Let Disney pay for ABC etc. They are so afraid of loosing out due to new technology but never seem to understand that they indeed has gotten something for free for many years. Seem silly to use airwaves for something that is inherent stationary.
Reference MIT's media lab Negroponte's law (1990 or so) states that everything that is now via fixed media need to be wireless and conversely.
Help fight continental drift.
Sure, at only $20-$60/month, and without those pesky regulations that go along with broadcast TV.
This whole "take the UHF and VHF stations and cut them up" is the entire purpose for HDTV.
You see, the FCC under the Clinton administration (although, admittedly it sounds like a Republican plan, but yes, it was the Clinton administration) wanted to take all of the non-military band and sell it off to cell phone companies and the like to make money for the government. This new taking of outside bandwidth is just Plan B after the fact that the FCC is a bunch of morons and couldn't anticipate that the cell phone industry would find a good compression scheme for the next gen of phones in under six years.
"But I thought the whole RF spectrum was the property of the people?" Someone muses in the back.
"Not when there is someone getting paid," moaned all of the broadcast engineers that had to invest MILLIONS into a non-standard "standard" that has yet to be decided... and costs the end user way too much for the promise of better TV (but not really for most people, because HD signals are so big they have multipath reception problems. Meaning this: you might have a tough time getting a HD signal anyway, at the least it is much more difficult than getting a standard analog signal, and especially in a city).
By the way, some television stations have to broadcast right now in HDTV. Unfortunately, the FCC has yet to decide what the hell that standard should be in the USA. But then again, why should the FCC decide? They (the FCC) have been getting lobster dinners, hot lobbyists, and secret funds jerking around corporate Japan (because NONE of the HD patents are owned by US companies) for years being "indecisive" about the standard. Of course, all of this added expense and lack of vender competition has made all of the local television stations that are privately owned go "belly up." TV stations are FORCED TO PAY outrageous sums of money for an outside patented system that they are unsure whether even 1,000 people have bought in the entire area.
I know a lot about this, because I am one door down from a TV engineer at a broadcast station. As they tell me, it doesn't take long to follow the money to find out where this mess all got started from.
70-83 were removed in the early 80's. And then there was channel 1, which disappeared (to become the 6 meter ham band) in 1948.
The band plan in Minnesota has absolutely zero impact on me here in California. Heck, where I am neither does the bandplan in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona or Mexico. Why is it that a bunch of beaurocrats in Washington DC should have complete and total say over issues involving strictly local transmission and reception of radio signals?
It would be rather complicated to manufacture TVs, radios, etc. if the RF bandwidth weren't standardized... 50 different tv tuners in one would be complicated today, and probably impractical around the time they added the UHF system...
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Benjamin Coates
What a great idea. Then, when I go into the next state, my cell-phone breaks, and I can't get broadcast radio or use the HAM bands.
Your proposal gains.. NOTHING. You so stupid.
An inane right? Anyway... it's AIM is not to hinder speech. It's EFFECT is to. Yep. There was a strange, unforseen effect of auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder: turns out that when you do that, the people with the most money are the ones who get to use it. Imagine that.
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These are people who have never even HEARD of wireless networks, let alone be in a position to use them. I'm talking about people who have a TV, but thats it. A lot of people seem to forget that there is a whole section of our population who are being totally passed over - who don't have cell phones, don't have cable TV, don't have suburban homes and SUVs... hell, many don't even have REGULAR phones. I happen to live near such a city - white flight caused almost all but the poor to leave the city. The government regionalized and so now caters to the affluent suburbs. The stores and supermarkets moved out, so the city residents have nowhere nearby to buy food... the suburban shopping centers refuse inner city bus traffic, and black motorists who dare to drive out near the malls get stopped by the (white) suburban cops. The population of the city has dropped, but is still close to 300,000... but the average yearly wage in the city is less than $16,000. A whole CITY of people a large majority of whom can't afford cable, use pay phones down the hall in their projects or residential "hotels," or on the street corner... Who's local paper ignores their existence, who get only over-the-air television... who, if they EVER have touched a computer or have seen the internet, it was at their local library. These people, hundreds of thousands of them, will NOT be using wireless networking. They only just now are beginning to see some of their viewpoints and concerns addressed by their cooperative, community microbroadcasters... and when they lose those, there won't be anything to give them thier voice back.
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This is a stupid reason. If I moved to Russia, I would EXPECT to have to learn Russian for news and emergency information. Same if I moved to Mexico or Spain.
Why is it so different here. You move here, learn to SPEAK our language or MOVE BACK!
Easier said than done. Since it takes some time to learn a new language (especially one so ass-backward as English), keeping emergency broadcasts in an immigrant's native tongue makes sense. How would a foreigner know how to understand "massive volcanic eruption" if they hadn't got that far in their English book?
It's easy to say "learn the language or get out," but imagine yourself dropped into say, China, for the next five years. Or Germany. Or Nigeria. Wherever you land, it'll take time to learn the language.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.