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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."
How feasable would it be to do the same with the AM radio spectrum? A look at the US radio spectrum shows that a huge portion is allocated twards AM radio.
This is great, now after helping national media powerhouses like ClearChannel and Rupert Murdoch take control of radio, cable, and billboards, Michael Powell is going to finish off regional TV stations by drowning them out with wireless internet access. And yes, even with all the empty spaces on the dial, this can and most likely will have this affect. Michael Powell has proclaimed that free TV programming is on its last legs and it looks like he intends to hasten TV's demise. I believe that free TV is an important thing to maintain in the face of rising cable and satellite subscription costs.
The act of opening up the TV bands to wireless devices could breing about a sharp increase in new business. Similar to the large impact that the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards did.
Although a far more heartening prospect is the potential for this to bring more broadband services to remote areas, particularly rural ones, which are often exclusively plagued with dial-up.
One of the biggest power tools that the broadcasters use to shut down competiting uses of their frequencies is to claim that when you put radio transmitting equipment into the hands of people other than them, it'll be either incompentently or improperly used such that it exceeds the rated signal strength.
Pringles Can setups are a perfect example. There's nothing wrong with using such a can to redirect the signal... however, if the resulting redirection is too sucessful, it can take a consumer device that started as a perfectly illegal omnidirectional transmitter and put more than the legal limit of signal going in the direction its pointed at.
Sometimes, the urge to hack can be cited against us...
While I hardly think that Powell and others are 'in the pocket' of the presidential administration, there are valid criticisms of Mr. Powell. What was a rational and forgiving approach to indeceny placed on TV (when Bono from U2 accidentally swore, FCC chose not to fine him, recognizing that it was a mistake) has now become a witchhunt on the subjective term 'indecency'.
I think the FCC's role was minimalized and trivialized as of late. They have a smaller role since the Internet is currently unregulated by the FCC largely, unlike phone or other companies. So now that they're twiddling thumbs, they feel they have to jump all over any minor outrage.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
This is kinda like what some amateur radio operators are doing with 802.11b transverters to lower the frequency to help in non line-of-sight situations. You can even increase to frequency to evade interference issues.
Frequency Transverters for Wireless LAN Devices
2.4 GHz to 700 MHz Converter
One interesting point is that the FCC doesn't and can't investigate an offending program until some viewer steps forward and claims to be offended.
An interesting case in point is forming now that Howard Stern pointed out a questionable discussion on Oprah's show. A Stern fan has now stepped forward to be the complaining witness... and now Oprah's being investigated in a way that most likely would have slipped under the radar had Stern not said anything.
Think outside the box. Broadcast TV over internet.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
I hope this is not an excuse for the FCC to regulate the Internet. Would use of the public airwaves give them an excuse to regulate the Internet the way they regulate television and radio?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
The people that accept the broadcaster's position blindly would IMO have been either bought or are plain naive.
I don't see how a sub-watt transmitter can hope to be competing with a transmitter running on tens of kilowatts in any meaningful fashion. Add that with the channel separation that should be involved if you aren't even using the same bands.
Wasn't some sort of datacasting part of the original digital TV spec, but kicked out of the US implementation? That certainly happened here in Australia. So, instead of a range of digital TV braodcasting entities, some using HD, some using multiple camera angles and some datacasting, we have a boring set of official digital TV signals with some half-assed wireless networking or something show-horned in.
Your tax dollars at work.
The practice of using the bandwidth of non-present broadcast TV stations is almost the rule in professional audio equipment, such as used at concerts, clubs and even tv stations gathering news.
It is a somewhat questionable practice, but due to the low power of the transmitters it rarely causes interference. The exceptions to this are, for example the theatre districts in major cities, such as New York, where dozens of establishments attempt to operate large numbers (40+) of wireless microphones each, in close proximity, in an enviroment which already has little unused bandwidth in the broadcast TV allocation.
Interestingly, broadcasters can actually file an FCC form to semi "license" their wireless microphones on these frequencies, since they are in the broadcast TV business anyway.
-Mikey P
Hmm.
;-)
Having grown up a fair distance from most of the TV channels (probably no towers were less than 50 miles from us except maybe one), yet being able to view 15-20 channels with a large yagi antenna, I am concerned about this. Well, heck, I'm concerned about HDTV reception too.
I grew up in southeast Minnesota, near Rochester (where the Mayo Clinic is), though the town I was in was one of the highest regions of land in the area. My family mostly pointed our antenna northward at the Twin Cities, from which we could receive eight major channels (well, except when the weather was bad): 2 (PBS), 4 (CBS), 5 (ABC), 9 (was UPN, now Fox), 11 (NBC), 17 (PBS), 23 (now WB, and the infamous originator of MST3K), 29 (was Fox, now UPN). As the PAX network started up, we could sometimes see 41 from St. Cloud.
When the weather was bad, or annoying things like late-running baseball games took up a Cities channel, various other options were available by turning the antenna. CBS stations were also available from Iowa and Wisconsin. There was an ABC affiliate near the Minnesota/Iowa border, and the local NBC affiliate's tower was not far from the border either. Several PBS stations were able to be picked up to the east, west, and south.
Recently, I experimented with receiving HDTV signals with a Linux-compatible pcHDTV card. I was really annoyed to see that we had to directly point our antenna at the transmission tower to have any hope of picking up a signal. In the analog days, it was at least possible to get the gist of what was happening on most channels, even if they weren't aimed at directly by the antenna. Channel surfing at my parents' place is going to get a lot more dull (it wasn't great to begin with
HDTV transmitters (at the moment, at least) put out significantly less power than their analog counterparts. Theoretically, the same coverage is available with this lower power, but as I described, I think the FCC has a different idea of what reception and coverage actually are compared to what I think they are.
Then again, the pcHDTV card probably has a relatively poor tuner, but I definitely worry about it.
I think Michael Powell has said a few times that he things that "Free TV" (over-the-air broadcasts) are going the way of the dodo. Certainly, many people have been more interested in cable and satellite, but there is a loss of local flavor in that arrangement. I certainly credit a lot of my education and interest in science and technology to the availability of several PBS channels in my area. Even now, I live in Minneapolis, where I cringe when I think that only two PBS stations are available (well, you can say that more are available when the HDTV sub-channels are considered, but the programming on those doesn't really interest me at the moment).
Anyway, I just feel that the FCC probably won't properly answer this question. Maybe they will, but I have significant doubts.
No, he merely has an informed perspective on the issue, unlike you.
Even if the linked proposal had gone through, the change would still have been miniscule compared to the massive media concentration that was allowed by the Clinton-signed Telecommunications Act of 1996. ClearChannel, for example, is entirely a creature of that act. Other Clinton-signed blow jobs to the corporate media include the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 (in the tradition of the Carter-signed 1978 Copyright Act) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.
By the way, guess how John Kerry voted on both the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the DMCA? Why, yes, he did hold up the fine Democratic tradition of giving the corporate media a blow job in both cases. (His vote on the Copyright Extension act is unknown, as there was no roll-call vote.)
But, hey, we all "know" the Democrats are the good guys, so close your eyes, forget you ever saw any of this, and vote to let Disney own your soul.
Let's not forget what usually happens with road widening. The road is heavily congested with four lanes, and by the time two more are added, the road needs another two or its still just as congested. Highways through really developed areas are being widened every two years or so, some have reached phenominonal widths such as the 12 lane interstate now passing through the center of Atlanta GA and supported by a loop bypass that is at least 6 lanes in most parts, and yet these roads remain on the brink of massive rush hour gridlocks.
Won't broadband access go much the same way? By the time the technology exists and can be widely implemented to move X amount of data over TV bands, won't the demand be for 2X, or more?
Some people have claimed that widening highways is an expensive and very short term solution, and that some real developments of mass transit are both cheaper in the long run and more able to actually grow faster than demand. In the same way, isn't it likely that something else, such as (for just a few examples)laying some good solid fiber optic cable, or modifying the phone company's baseline all digital systems to extend the potential range of ADSL, are potentially much better solutions? I'd even look at Internet over Power Lines before I'd have much confidence in this (well, maybe not).
Who is John Cabal?
Quite frankly, broadcast TV is a dead medium: the sooner it can be replaced the better, and several countries are working on that. I tend to wonder whether digital/HDTV is just as short lived as mini disc was, and the reality is that in the next 5-10 years, we'll be streaming media over IP.
It makes sense for FCC and regulaters to accept, and even push forward, the kinds of technologies that can superceded TV, even if it upsets the TV operators.
Seriously, broadcast TV is increasingly junk and fails to serve the original purposes it did: it's been supplanted by the Internet.
Full speed ahead on the replacements.
its faster to bittorrent a show than to watch it. we dont need terristial broadcasting anymore.
bye bye. pack up your vacumn tubes and go home now tv broadcasters.
For years, broadcasters have been insisting on "adjacent channel protection", to "protect" TV sets with crappy tuners from interference. That's the main reason TV bandwidth utilization is so low. Now it's coming back to bite them.
The FCC should open the bandwidth unused by broadcasters to the more equitable (and increasingly more popular) digital network protocols, especially unlicensed and local. But thinking Michael ("Colin Jr.") Powell as elevated humans over corporations in his agenda under BushCo is a delusion. We're much more likely to get spectrum access turned over to users like you and I under President Kerry than under Return of Bush Jr. (we're be more likely under Colonel Klink, but he's not running, thank the TV gods). So let's not kid ourselves about what we're getting in the package with this announcement from Powell's FCC.
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make install -not war