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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.
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."
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.
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