Slashdot Mirror
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."
Anybody who says that Michael Powell is in the pocket of the broadcasters or any other major company doesn't know what they're talking about, and this is the proof for anybody who doubts that.
The FCC is actively looking to recycle frequency space for bandwidth wherever possible. I'm not even sure this is a workable solution... but just the fact that they're even going to open hearings about it is good for the masses.
Now all of the interference I get will be in the form of reruns.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Thanks to this, now they will have it all on UHF.
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.
'doubling the number of lanes on a congested highway.'
More like putting a bike lane between two lanes of freeway.
Does this mean my TV is gonna get slashdoted somehow?
And maybe Billy Bob from BFE wouldn't be such a dumbass if he had access to the wealth of knowledge and information (not to mention loads of porn) that are available on the Internet.
If some bombed-out city in Iraq can get Internet access, Billy Bob should have it too.
With all the daytime talk shows and nighttime reality shows on now, I'd say that all channels are vacant.
Seeing how the entire TV spectrum is pretty much vacant, this means good things and more bandwidth! Let the porno webcams commence! Out with the bad air, in with the sexually explicit bad air!
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.
That's fairly elitist, and not a very good proposition anyway. How does that work, exactly? Universities say, "Oh, Billy Bob is here, we'd better shut down our website!"
If anything, the internet is being dumbed down by l33t gamers more than by country folk.
The broadcast media industry have a history of opposing technology that has a hair of a chance of affecting their signal--whether or not the science is on their side.
For example, the National Associaton of Broadcasters (and even National Public Radio) opposed extending licenses for low-power radio on the grounds that it would interfere with existing licensed signal--even though most people who really understand this know that it's not the case.
The real issue in these cases is usually not technical--it's about control over the airwaves.
...take the unused bandwidth and divert it toward broadcasting shows that havn't been dumbed-down for the masses?
Fist BPL, now this. The people in Washington are just loose cannons. None of these people understand the engineering behind the decisions they are making and therefore their decisions make know sense. This is only going to create chaos in the RF spectrum and it is going to lead too chaos in the market place. Imagine this. You buy brand X wireless router, but it doesn't work. Your friend's in the next state say, it works fine for us. Best buy has mass returns for particular routers in particular cities. Why? Because brand X is close in frequency to the 1MW erp HDTV broadcast transmitter and it's IF on a chip can't handle the overload. Lets have some discipline folks. This so called broadband uber alles is not going to be pretty.
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.
UHF covers a massive chunk of spectrum -- from 470 MHz to 890 MHz. Even if you carve out some 18 MHz notches for local UHF channels, you still have hundreds of MHz of usable spectrum. And in rural areas, the full 420 band could be used for some serious wireless networking. With good compression/encoding and high enough SNR, multigigabit wireless might be possible.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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
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.
You added an extra 'm' in "asses"
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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."
I don't know much about networking (so much for my CS degree...), but wouldn't wireless broadband mean much cheaper broadband?
And if so wouldn't that mean that many more people be exposed to the egalitarian influence of the internet? I mean, tell me which has a greater range of political expression--the Internet, or broadcast TV? I say if we can get cheap broadband, then KILL broadcast TV. Broadcast TV is the most elite media of all, in many ways; meaning that it represents Big Money and so therefore propagates status quo memes....
With cheap broadband and cheap LCD computing devices, radical activists would be able to distribute their movies far more easily and widely. Visual media is the best way to propagate memes...
I guess it comes down to whether taking over the TV spectrum for broadband would insure cheaper broadband. Would it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Slashdot: coming to a TV near you!
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
Requirements For Using Wireless Systems On TV Channels
Taking The Stealth Approach
The Bottom Line: Legal Use of Wireless Microphones
The Future of Wireless Part 1: The Challenges Ahead
The Future of Wireless Part 2: Meeting the Challenges
Enjoy
-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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree the dynamic assigning of frequencies could be quite useful. Right now the system is setup akin to a company buying an entire road and then using it 30% of the time, meanwhile people that didn't pony up the money or have their roads jammed full just sit and look at all the open space they can't use one over.
Problem is, once you start dynamically assigning frequencies, who is to say which user is the highest importance? Every industry will yell they should be higher than everyone else. Also, it requires all the radios to play very nice and move over when someone else comes in. Trunking systems are a start, but anyone that has used one knows they are not as reliable as some would hope, and they are hell for interoperability (note: that is the DHS buzzword of the year).
The software defined radio should help a ton in getting this efficient method of frequency use into the mainstream, and they are still a few years off. Some people argue bandwidth is nearly infinite and people aughta just shut up about it... I ask them to try to use a 5GHz radio to talk out of a mountainous area or beam a microwave link using 5MHz. There always will be frequencies "worth" more than others, and the fights over them will always exist.
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.])