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Putting the TV Broadcast Spectrum to Better Use?
KoshClassic asks: "Recently, on the NPR show All Things Considered, an interview was broadcast with Thomas Hazlett, formerly the chief economist of the FCC. Although short on details, Mr. Hazlett raises the point that, with the high penetration rate of cable / satellite TV into American homes, broadcasting television over the air has (or soon will) become superfulous and that this portion of the radio spectrum could be better utilized for other purposes. What do Slashdot readers think of this idea and, for those who agree, what alternative uses of the broadcast spectrum would you like to see?"
I think the airwaves are still good for HD content (cable company here doesn't throw any our way). Over the air hdtv is still a reason to use the airwaves.
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$480/year for repetitive movies, videos, shows, channels is too much even for the gainfully employed.
Broadcast is by definition a local service. Strong cable stations would crush weaker local stations, leading to an even more homogenous TV experience than exists now.
Finally, how else can we enjoy major league sporting events for free now that tickets and food at the stadium cost more than a day's pay (and Wrigley Field has been screened from the neighboring apartments)?
It is dead eventually, current FCC rules dictate that the current broadcast spectrum goes back to the FCC for re-use after HDTV is officially the standard (2006 or a certain % penetration, probably 2010+ in reality) this is just talk about accelerating the deprecation to not wait for HDTV.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For my money, we're already heading in the right direction with the switch to digital broadcasting, since that change involves moving all of the TV broadcasters up to UHF. The big VHF give-back is, IMHO, the important part. There are 12 channels of VHF TV. At 6 MHz each, that's 72 MHz of space, or more than a quarter of the available VHF spectrum. VHF is prime real estate that could be much better used than for a fixed-point broadcasting service (most TV receivers don't move).
The larger point, however, is that networks of terrestrial broadcast stations are already obsolete. Back before widespread adoption of cable, it was the only option. But now, having NBC programming come out of a few hundred transmitters scattered across the US is wasteful, given that just about everyone gets TV programming from a satellite (directly or indirectly from their cable company). NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and PBS should each have a single channel on that satellite, just like Comedy Central, and the local broadcasters should use their bandwidth to serve local needs. It's just common sense.
You can get satelite service anywhere in the lower 48 and most of the populated parts of Alaska. Besides the VHF and UHF bands are already scheduled for eventual obsolesence when the digital bands become the standard.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If I have received a license to broadcast programming to a certain market, my programming (whatever it might be) is "must carry" content for the broadcast spectrum of my market area. If someone (intentionally or not) intrudes on my spectrum and prevents my potential viewers from receiving my programming, I have a course of action against whomever is causing the interference.
Contrast this with the other media outlet formats mentioned. For both cable and satelite, the owner of the service decides what content will be carried, and how much extra will be charged for it.
And anyone who thinks the Internet is a replacement for broadcast television is off their rocker. Not only can an ISP (or anyone along the pipe, for that matter) choose to block access to a selected web site, we have laws requiring libraries and such to perform exactly that function.
We need to ensure that there are platforms for free speech to ensure our democracy. The closest thing we have for that right now is the Internet, but even there sites are getting disconnected left and right.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
UHF would be great for wireless internet, especially in rural areas. The "wave" would be able to travel farther than it does using 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz technology.
Off-hand I know that UHF TV (approx. 440MHz I believe) is usually city wide in coverage, but remember analog TV is far more accepting of data errors (no error correction, no retransmissions) than digital data needs to be.
Also UHF TV still follows the 1-directional broadcast methology. That means, one powerful transmitter (~10-100kW I think) and an antenna at one high location, e.g. hilltop.
For wireless networking, you need bidirectional transmission, longer antennas (17cm versus 3mm if I have my math right), and because the signals transmit further you need frequency coorditation (i.e. licensing) from the FCC to prevent interference if you also want higher power station, over 100 milliwatts.
Strangely I'm actually considering going back to broadcast. I'm extremely sick of the "quality" of the digital cable signal I'm getting. It's significant worse visually (artifacting, and the occasionally complete loss of picture when the signal hiccups). Re-allocating the broadcast spectrum is a interesting idea, but it's also a fairly bad idea to get rid of it completely. The new HD specs should let them combine everything into a single HDTV band with several SDTV channels, which might be an acceptable compromise.
Erm. No. You've got that completely wrong.
It was decided years ago that digital TV broadcasts (whether HD or not; that hadn't been decided at that point) would occupy the same slices of spectrum we used for analog broadcasts: 6 MHz channels. So a single HD channel occupies the same amount of spectrum as a single analog channel. Which is why HD has to be so highly compressed for broadcast. (HD starts out at over 1.3 Gbps, and gets MPEGged down to 19 Mbps.)
The 6X figure comes in when you start talking about subchannels. Inside a 6 MHz channel, you can broadcast as many subchannels as you want, dividing up the channel's bandwidth among them. A SD broadcast can be squeezed down to about 3 Mbps (1 MHz) and still look acceptable, so you can put 6 SD subchannels inside a single digital broadcast channel.
This is not HDTV, however. In order for a broadcast to be called HDTV, it has to have a vertical resolution of at least 1,000 lines. (That's the ATSC's definition.) Broadcasting SD digitially is not the same as HD.
Nobody is claiming TV is a right, just that the use of the spectrum should be in the public interest, since it is a shared resource, and as such, really needs to be regulated, or it won't work.
Same as the water we drink and the air we breathe, and the food we eat.
They did this a generation ago w. channel 1 (there is no lnger any channel 1, because that's been given over to other services). UHF was supposed to supplant VHF, but it didn't because the higher frequencies required only allowed for line-of-sight transmission, whereas the lower-frequency VHF signal can be bounced off the ionosphere, giving a greater coverage area. Superstations then boosted their signal output to get more viewers, higher revenue. This doesn't work w. UHF, b/c of the aformentioned relative transparency of the ionosphere to UHF signals.
Besides, let's not forget that most of the excuses/uses for grabbing the VHF channels will be just more of the same old shit, anyway.
First off, I'm all for liberalizing the rules for using spectrum, things like allowing people in rural communities where ther are one one or two broadcast TV channels to make use of the wasted spectrum in their area.
But, the guy on NPR claimed some stupid statistic like 90% of american homes get have cable or satellite so we don't need broadcast. One of the big groups he is forgetting is all those DSS subscribers who still have to have bunny ears to get local channels. The best had to be though when he was asked why there was so much lobbying to surrounding allocation of television spectrum if it was such an unused commodity. basically he said...well....um...there is always resistance to new ideas. they jsut don't realize how few people are watching.
I live just 1/2 mile to the end of the cable line. Time Warner keeps saying that any time now they will run cable to my house. Therefore I get TV from satellite. However, I must get local channels over the air because of copyright violations between the local channel affiliates that are in the area and the ones that are broadcast over satellite.
There's a company based in Saskatoon, where I am, which manufactures wireless internet connectivity products that emulate cable. So, basically, you plug a cable modem into it, and as far as the modem is concerned it's connected to Coax all the way to the central office. Currently the units they sell cost about $400 CAD each... but they can sell a unit that does the same thing to people in India that costs only $50 CAD, because they can use the TV spectrum there.
An ISP can provide wireless internet in a radius of 20 miles with the technology... they can set up a whole ISP in a day in India for under $2000... can't do that in North America, of course.
You have to live in the market areas in order to get that market's local station. If you live in a market that Dish doesn't carry the locals for yet, you can not get another market's locals. The exceptions to this is if you live in BFE and can't get locals (you can then choose NY or LA locals) or if you get a waver from your local stations (almost never happens). Dish has about 60 locals and are adding another 40 or so by year end. Donno about DirecTV.
TV in North America uses 54 to 88 MHz for channels 2 to 6, 174 to 216 MHz for 7 to 13, and 470 to 806 MHz for channels 14 to 68. Much of the UHF spectrum is now shared with radio services in big cities. Several European countries have no VHF television at all now.
At one time UHF TV went from 470 to 890 MHz for channels 14 to 83, but the top end was changed to various radio services (including cellphones) some years ago.
Wavelengths:just under 6 meters at the bottom of VHF to about 130 cm at the top. About 70 cm for channel 14 to 35 cm for channel 68. The higher frequencies have essentially optical line-of-sight propagation, but the lower ones can follow terrain for a while. Unusual conditions can affect this, including tropospheric ducting (best on UHF), sporadic E-layer skip (VHF), even F2 (not so much channel A2, but some countries have TV down to 45 MHz or so).
Digital TV can be (and usually is) pretty robust in the face of various transmission errors, but like all such systems does not degrade gracefully. As you get close the edge of the coverage area of an aanalog station you get snowy pictures. As you get close the edge of the coverage area of a digital station you abruptly go from a perfect picture to none at all. Being a one-way medium digital TV doesn't do retransmission - the station adds error-correction informaiton to the transmission, which the receiver uses to correct bit errors on reception. Look up "forward error correction" in any decent communications text book. Also look up "convolutional codes", "Viterbi Algorithm", and various other goodies.
...laura
Um, nope. Any novice-class ham will tell you that HF (3-30MHz) is where the ionosphere bounces occur regularly and predictably enough to be useful. Occasionally, the upper limit "maximum useable frequency" will shoot well up into VHF (I've seen it get to 2 meters, 146 MHz, and 6 meters, 50 MHz, is fairly common), but for all intents and purposes, VHF is line of sight.
The UHF TV broadcast channels were allocated when it was apparent that the 12 VHF channels would not be enough. Google for things like "why is there no channel 1" and you'll get more details on this.
It's amazing that even the suggestion that PEOPLE DON'T ACTUALLY NEED A TELEVISION is regarded as a troll...
Eliminating the Airwaves of Free TV is most likely lobbied by Cable/Satellite Providers... That is a market they can't tap into... Alot of people are happy with just a few local channels and don't want to look at all the Blah Blah commercialized Hype. Once there is no more free TV it will force them to get cable/sat and pay a rate and get alot of what they don't want.. Big Network TV with the absolute minimum ammount of localized content they can get away with...
US TV is way over commercialized.. There is getting to be less and less programming available as the big media conglomerates continue to buy up their competition untill the FCC say Slow down your going to upset the balance.. so what is left is a minimal ammount of content left which is watered down with commercialism..
The CRTC Canada's Similar Equip of the American FCC actually does alot of good to promote new original content.. If you have kids you would be Very interested in seeing what Canada has for children programming its some of the most top notch tv you can find.. instead of Pokemon and Power Rangers ect which are just huge marketing machines influencing the minds of the young into "Gotta have the newest action figure/trading cards" mind set.
The reigns need to be pulled and the massive media conglomerates need to be slowed down and new original networks need to be let onto the market place to bring back original programming that is allowed to be truly unique. The barrier of entry has been raised substantially and its not so easy to break into this market and eliminating free tv will only help raise this barrier even higher.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt