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FCC Plans to Allow Wireless Networking on Unused TV Channels
RKBA writes "Federal regulators have endorsed a plan to use vacant TV bandwidth for wireless Internet connections. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell says it would 'dramatically increase' the availability and quality of wireless Internet connections -- especially for people in rural areas. Powell says it would be like 'doubling the number of lanes on a congested highway.' But TV broadcasters oppose the proposal. They argue that it would interfere with over-the-air television signals for millions of people. The FCC commissioners voted unanimously to begin the lengthy rulemaking process for the plan."
There are what, 69 television broadcast channels available? Even with a high-gain yagi on the roof, I only get a handful in my local area (San Diego) plus another handful from LA and the surrounding areas.
The other 55 or so channels are just static... begging to be used.
I for one welcome our new broadband-in-place-of TV overlords.
You are wrong. Channel one is somewhere around 50-54MHz which is the Amateur Radio 6 meter band. You can work the world on 6 meters during certain parts of the sun spot cycle with very little power. Not good for broadcasting.
The scale is logrithmic. Am is from 530 kHz to 1720 kHz. This is about 1.2 MHz.
Uhm, the biggest loosening of the rules on media conglomerates in recent memory happened in 1996 under Bill Clinton's watch...
Mike hasn't really had much to do with that.
This was one of the driving reasons behind the federal requirement that TV stations broadcast in "digital" and "HDTV" by a certain date. The digital signals take up less bandwidth and the FCC knew all along that they needed more bandwidth for wireless phones. So once all the TV stations switch over, they will be required to surrender their old frequencies back to the government, who will re-allocate them to wireless/cell phones.
The frequency of radio waves has absolutely nothing to do with data transmission speed. Nothing. It is just how many times the electromagnetic wave oscillates every second. The data transmission speed has more to do with the amount of available spectrum you can use, and the effieciency in which that bandwidth is used.
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By the way, look at the term bandwidth. That actually originally meant the width of a band, in the EM spectrum. The wider the band, the more data/clearer voice/etc you could transmit, generally.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
This is sheer stupidity. the UHF bands were supposed to be "vacant" by 2000 originally, welcome to america, DTV recievers aparently made of platinum. Besides that, hams will have a field day with this, quite literally. Remember how much stuff "fits" between TV allocations. (The entire FM spectrum is between channel 6 and 7) Think about the size of the TX required, and how much the FCC will have to limit/license this to hell and back? Channel 29 requires 5 megawatts of power just to cover a metro area. (minneapolis minnesota usa for those who know the area) I sure as hell wouldn't want that power bill. Something to think about.
Powell's the wrong one to blame. For that, you have to go to Democratic commission member Michael J. Copps.
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Copps was one of the two members of the panel who voted to levy fines in the Bono case, while Powell was one of the three who voted against. Copps is also the dissenter who said there shouldn't just be a fine in the Stern case, but instead license revocation hearings for stations that carried Stern.
Despite "liberal" prudes like Tipper Gore, Joe Lieberman, Catherine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, there's this continuing unthinking automatic identification of censorship with the Right. So the pro-censorship actions of Democrat Michael J. Copps get blamed on Republican Michael K. Powell. After all, he's a Republican, so he must be the censorious crusader . .
With good propigation you can talk, or "work" as most call it, all over the world. One time a friend and I were driving around in his truck when he got a phone call from another freind saying "6 just opened wide up!" We flipped on his 706 and talked from a drive-thru in northern CA to a guy in Greenland. It only lasted about 10 minutes, then the band closed, and we ate our burgers. You wouldn't want your TV signals doing that.
KG6NMP
The frequency of radio waves has absolutely nothing to do with data transmission speed. Nothing.
That's absolutely incorrect.
It is just how many times the electromagnetic wave oscillates every second
Do you know anything about modulation and keying? Sure we manage to come up with new encodings to pack a few more bits onto each cycle now and then, but data speed is still related to frequency in any practical system.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
DOCSIS (your cable modem) uses unallocated space in the cable access band (quite a bit of it) to transmit data, and I've yet to see anyone complain about their cable television quality (apart from how much static is there originally).
Also, most analog-allocated bandwidth will be replaced by HDTV bandwidth, so there will be lots of space in the airwaves when it's made mandatory in a couple of years.
I think this is much more than doubling the lanes. With ATSC, each _channel_ represents about 20Mbps, which is better than the 5 or 11 Mbps that we get out of wireless "b" that possibly hundreds of neighborhoods have set up up.
Multiply that by the 40+ unused TV channels at any given location, dividing by the fact that 2.4GHz wireless ethernet now has three effective channels (1,6,11 under 802.11 in US) and you have an expansion factor of maybe over 30 times the aggregate bandwidth of current industy standards.
Of course, I'm not counting the various fairly proprietery networks and bands, such as Canopy and Tropos, but client stations for those fetch over $500 each, and base stations going for over $2000 I think.
You can carry more information at 2.4Ghz though. Think of it this way if you use each peak to carry one bit of information then the frequency of peaks affects the data rate.
900 MHz = 900 M bps 2.4 GHz = 2400 M bps
To see how different encoding system work AM, FM PCM look here
There are a lot more UHF-TV frequencies in use in LA than your quick scan of the dial reveals.
You can't use channels 14-20, because they're shared with public safety two-way communications.
There are digital TV signals on channels 23, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66 and 68, so those frequencies are unavailable.
There are additional analog full-power signals on 24, 44, 52, 57, 63 and 64 that aren't on your list.
There are low-power analog stations on 25, 26, 33, 45, 55 and 66 that make those channels unavailable. (Even if you can't see them in some parts of the market, they still have to be protected from interference.)
There are full-power analog signals in Palm Springs (36 and 42) and San Diego (39, 51 and 69) that would have to be protected from interference.
Channel 37 (608-614 MHz) is reserved internationally for radioastronomy and can't be used by anything else.
Mexico has been increasingly belligerent about interference from the United States on its border signals, so the use of the channels reserved for Tijuana (21, 27, 33, 49 and 57) would probably be impossible.
And the UHF TV spectrum has ended at channel 69 for more than two decades now; the space above there (806-890 MHz) has long since been filled by cellphones and various trunked two-way radio systems.
Some of the spectrum will be freed up when analog TV service is phased out, possibly as soon as 2006 but more likely beginning around the end of the decade. Until then, though, the spectrum the FCC wants to share right now is largely full in most big cities.
(A few additional notes: the "channel 83" that you may have on your cable system is a completely different band of frequencies from the old UHF channel 83. As noted above, UHF TV has ended at channel 69 for quite a few years now. And MW radio services outside the Western Hemisphere aren't spaced "on any old frequency"; they're at 9 kHz intervals [531, 540, 549, 558 and so on.])