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WiFi Signals In Between Television Frequencies
compgenius3 writes "The FCC unanimously voted today to allow wireless providers to use the frequencies between television stations to broadcast WiFi in rural areas. Broadcasters argue that this will cause interference on television stations but the FCC chairman says otherwise."
Update: 05/18 23:40 GMT by T : compgenius3 points out NAB president Edward Fritts' skepticism of the plan, as reflected in this press release citing fears of intereference to over-the-air broadcasts.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
This will provide millions of people who cannot get wired broadband with an alternative along with a possible cheaper alternative for those of us who can but are too cheap to get it.
Perhaps it will drive the wired broadband prices down as well. That way whoever wins the election can take credit for it.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Rock on! - Maybe now, we can truly get wifi (high speed) Internet Access out to the millions who can't get cable/dsl access. I live in the country - and thankfully, I live within 5 miles of a WiFi Tower - the new frequencies will certainly help the industry out!
Doesn't the entire FM range fall between channels 6 and 7? Why aren't the TV stations getting pissed off at the FM stations???
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
on ever TV in town unless you are really close to the cable company when you turn to channel 8 (local information) you can see channel 7 as a shadowy background presence.
This article
http://www.busyweather.com/
It was Friday.
Story from Reuters
Now we won't have quality material on TV
Won't someone think of the children?
It's not enough that the liberal media broadcast a *nipple* during a family show, now they have to fill the bits between stations with the internet, which Fox News told me is full of degrading pornography!.
I for one am angry about this political correctness gone mad, and would like the FCC or DoJ to take some of my rights away in response.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Commercial broadcasters haven't really done much for the spectrum they were given. IMHO there should be substantial taxes on commercial use of spectrum. Theoretically, it would seem that Wi-Fi could deliver much more content than is now done with the spectrum the broadcasters are using. Perhaps we ought to look at completely eliminating the television spectrum and replacing it with Wi-Fi.
Broadcasters argue that this will cause interference on television stations but the FCC chairman says otherwise.
/sarcasm
I'm sure with his broad experience and expertise in the field Chairman Powell should be trusted on this matter. Where do these broadcasters get off questioning the word of a man of such stature in the industry?
Kind of like repeated Slashdot articles:
4 247&mode=nested&tid=103&tid=129&tid=137&tid=188&ti d=193&tid=99
;-)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/14/215
Not exactly the same signal but close.
In all seriousness does anybody else see this as an attempt to lock in an approved set of wireless equipment and keep people form building their own wans?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Sure there might be some leakage...and the channels may get some interfearance...but that would mean that the networking signal would be getting interfearance too. And hence they will move to a "cleaner" frequency to lessen the problem...so if there is a problem its a problem for both...and hence they will work together to avoid such problems.
...who do you trust...TV company chairmans or the head of the FCC?
Selling my K5 account
I gave up on griping about snow on high cable channels because the cable company did not have the will to do anything about it. So, if I see lines or other interference patterns on broadcast signal, am I supposed to bring this to FCC's attention?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I thought my spooky blonde daughter was communicating with poltergeists on channel 17.35. Turns out it was just WiFi.
This way to the egress...
When all stations go digital, will this still be an issue? Can the digital TV hardware compensate / filter these harmonics, spurious signals, and oscillations?
'Rural'.
great, well that dashes my hope for seamless internet connection from my home to starbucks.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Have you driven by one lately? There are a surprising amount of satellite dishes at some of them. Even before all of the DirecTV and Dish Network varieties there were those behemoth dishes sitting next to the cable spool/picnic tables.
just stating the obvious.. since I knew I had seen this as a headline... about a week ago...
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
Lower Frequencies = Better reception, wall piercing bandwidth. This is two fold, as your signal is going to simply work "better" for not only you, but john q. hacker sitting outside your building (or say 4-5 stories down inside your building should still get great reception.) Then again, this isn't really being sold as residential grade wireless, but rather transit links to and from customers. This is really where it's going to shine.
If they do come out with AP's that run on this sub 700mhz spectrum, I'd be the first to buy them and ditch the near-microwave oven freqnency of 2.4ghz. That just seems like we're asking for trouble.
the FCC is totally clueless in this iteration. there is a reason the space between TV channel assignments is called "guard bands," it keeps interference from generating third signals in the receivers (heterodynes, if you want to check the engineering details) that fall in the intermediate tuning circuits and mung up the signal. heterodynes with a strong local signal can wipe a whole TV out. and since there is no shielding worth noting in a commercial set, this means whoever puts up a wi-fi is responsible for zoning out the neighborhood.
there would of course be little impact if the darned TV sets were shielded from RF interference. they aren't because it would cost a few quarters to do it, at worst case $5 to the retail buyer when they wave plastic at the best buy counter.
if you have tried to put a cable TV or satellite box under your TV set, you know what I mean; screens full of little electronic worms.
unless FCC mandates retroactive shielding and all future sets being shielded before sale, this will become a nightmare.
ex-broadcaster, ex-ham, ex-recording engineer, I know interference is real and ugly. don't make any more.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
er... "review"
We have your neighbor (you wouldn't do this of course) watching streaming video of Shelly Vixen and her three boyfriends, three girlfriends and a Poland-China sow ghosting in over the Disney channel. Definitely educational television.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Since FM Radio is sandwiched into the middle of the VHF stations (between channels 6 and 7, I believe), if you can get Channel 6 at the very bottom of your FM dial, as I can, you might be able to get WiFi screeching as well. Assuming that they place one of these near Channel 6.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...about tv signals interfering with my wireless.
As long as the interference from the WiFi doesn't impinge on Rupert Murdoch's broadcasting, what does Michael Powell care? This kid has been in the pocket of the big 3 for his entire time as Chairman of the FCC.
If there was any doubt that this new regulation would cause problems for the media giants, there's no way it would happen.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
How many people use an antenna to pick up tv? I don't think I know of a one. My grandparents even have cable and they hardly watch TV. This won't mess with your cable or satellite.
Evolution or ID?
OFDM is used for over-the-air digital TV, and it is fairly robust to nasties. A digital receiver can eliminate interference to an extent through adaptive processing, or compensate for it through FEC, but you can always get to a point where interference and/or noise will wonk a signal (eg, sun outages in geostationary satellite applications).
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I, for one, am willing to accept the opinion of the FCC Chairman (read: PHB) over a detailed technical analysis.
Anything to further diminish the viability of broadcast TV, with all of its pesky "fair use" and legalized home recording. Of course, once everything is HDTV, and all receivers everywhere have built-in, FCC-mandated DRM, there will be less to worry about.
[/tinfoil-hat]
dinner: it's what's for beer
Here you go. Makes me wonder if you have ever even seen cable TV:
Fox News is cable, and is not broadcast.
Murdoch is not a member of the Big 3: CBS, ABC, NBC.
Given that signal strength is an issue with WiFi now, wouldn't the broadcasters need to have a really strong signal to reach the rural areas where users don't have broadband currently? And, more importantly, wouldn't the users need to have some pretty hefty equipment to send their signal back?
If you don't want interference get a bigger antenae (and or turn up the juice). FCC and 'regulatory commisions' who the fuck cares. Its our electromagnetic spectrum as much as it theirs. Is there be a technically (rather than pollitical) solution to the frequency sharing problem? What if everyone had their own frequency segment...
Jon Bardin
They know good and goddamn well that this will cause interference to broadcast TV. Just another way to force people to purchase cable at its ridiculously high prices, or be similarly raped by the satelite companies.
Note: The following is a "Any opportunity to rant about cable companies" rant:
Back in my day, cable only cost $5. Everyone said, "Who would ever PAY for TV? hahah". The cable companies lied about their intentions to raise prices exponentially, until once they locked in monopoly power with 20 and 30 year contracts in some areas.
Nowadays some of you pay excess of $100/month for cable or satelite. $100 per month!! WTF? And you still have to watch commercials!?! And you still can't find anything good on, and channel surf for hours?? hahaha, you tools!
My basic cable bill goes up dramtically EVERY year. Sometime twice a year. If I could get a decent broadcast signal with even a few interesting programs, I would drop this mafioso company like a bad habit.
All that needs to be said to naysayers of this proposal is: DOCSIS, DOCSIS, DOCSIS (a.k.a. cable modem technology).
Cable modems don't hurt analog cable television, and they've been using spare television bandwidth for over 5 years.
That this is in your neighbor's yard...
Astonishing!!
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
i like to see why this is considered trolling????? I thought it was funny!
rural as in BFE rural...where the cable companies do not care.....
My parents still have an antenna for the local broadcasts, and DirectTV for the rest. They have a 20' antenna with a booster, it can pick pick up about 30-40 over the air channels.
They could have gotten cable but my mom doesn't care for the local cable company's tatics for installation and service. Satellite seemed a much better fit to their existing system.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Don't forget TV signals are mandated to be all HDTV in the near future so this might not be an issue in the future...
Currently the relatively few people who use over the air TV vs cable/satellite, should face the facts, that if they want "free" TV they should have to suffer if more people want "cheap/free" ranges to broadcast their WiFi on.
Broadcasters argue that this will cause interference on television stations but the FCC chairman says otherwise.
Okay, it must suck somehow... But how?
Sombody with mod points, correct this injustice.
Not only is the parent offtopic (note: "cable", whereas article refers to broadcast TV), but a one line personal anecdote is not worthly of + moderation in the first place.
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
As the article says, the WiFi gear would have to be responsible for scanning the spectrum for existing broadcasts (and other WiFi gear) and finding a quiet spot to use.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
The only problem here will be interference for those rare individuals who make a hobby out of receiving broadcast TV from 100 or more miles away.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
what happened to the plan to move all TV air boroadcasts to UHF? that was the intention as of a few years ago and open VHF for wifi or cell phones or something. i think the idea had something to do with moving analog TV to UHF, and prepare for it to be relatively short term till digital TV broadcasting comes of age.
TVs in the USA will be required to have digital tuners very soon. i think it is first TVs over 30" or 35" then a year or two or three later all TVs sold in the US have to have digital tuners. the planned obselescence of a TV is something like 5 years (less than 10) so they figure they can boot the analog TV transmissions in that time. yes, i know your grandmother has used the m TV since 1968, but the FCC does not believe it.
That's one way to get them to move to digital TV faster - crowd them out of the old analog channels.
The jewelry here is called "bling-bling", baseball caps usually have NASCAR insignia, and they wear t-shirts with no sleeves (affectionately called "wife beaters").
Does anyone know which the FCC regulators are mostly?
Are they techies and scientists, or are they buerocrats and politicans?
The FCC seems to make fairly intelligent decisions whereas our Congress seldom does.
And yahoo news had the report by 9am, over 24 hours ago. /. is getting as old as american idol.
If you hate the cable company so much why do you give them your money?
With regard to solving th problem of interference, the argument of "switch to a different amateur band" could be equally applied here as "switch to a different TV channel"...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I used to live in Springfield, IL, which is like most of down state Illinois: corn and soy bean fields right up to the city limits. There was one VHF TV station and the rest were UHF. The stattions covered the Peoria, Decatur, and Springfield. So there was a lot of unused spectrum in an area that had few natural barriers. It is better use of resource if businesses can use the unused TV spectrum for WiFi in these areas.
Seriously, both cable and satellite have cheap enough packages that we should be able to kill broadcast, and reclaim that bandwidth for lots of other things that could be rolled out, but require spectrum to do so.
If you don't like whats out there, buy a damned DVD. .05% like you, or ditch it in favor of WIFI and other cutting edge services that need the spectrum. I say to hell with the .05% (people who actually USE broadcast TV)!!! !!!!!
no one gives a rats patootie about your opinion. should we keep broadcast TV for the
Quit yer bitchin. Do you honestly have nothing better to do than whine on /. about some poor sap's moderation score? Get a life (or get back to work, whichever applies)!
Yeah, I have a question here that I'm probably going to get flamed for, but I really want to understand exactly how this works. As far as I know, TV signals are one-way communication... So how do I get WiFi over television? I mean, say I'm browsing Slashdot and I click on something, how is that click uploaded? This part just doesn't make sense to me, so if anyone can help clue me in, thanks!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I have several thousand dollars of wireless microphones that opperate in at least one of the frequency ranges we're talking about here (170MHz to 210 MHz). If the signal from the WiFi is strong enough, I'm going to have several thousand dollars of paperweights instead... I'd like to see more details on exactly what frequencies they plan to allocate and how much power will be allowed. I specifically bought my microphones such that they wouldn't conflict with existing TV stations.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
TV over WiFi.
Take up the entire VHF/UHF band for WiFi.
Trash radio too.
Now thats WiFi.
Now enjoy internet radio and soon to be invented internet TV.
If you don't like whats out there, buy a damned DVD.
Does local news come on DVD? No, because the DVD model is a poor fit for local news delivery in the style of a typical 18:00 TV news/weather/sports broadcast. Were local news outlets to adopt DVD for local news, the logistics of the format would look more like those of a daily paper than anything else.
I say to hell with the .05% (people who actually USE broadcast TV)
Could you back up such a claim that 99.95 percent of American households with a TV set have a home computer, let alone cable Internet access? I sure couldn't.
Some people get cable TV only because the cable company ties leasing Internet access to leasing access to entertainment television programming, and the DSL company ties leasing Internet access to leasing access to a telephone land line.
You're whining cuz they make you pay $100/mo ! Right ?
May I ask do they hire goons to put a gun to your kids to make you pay ???
If not, you know, there is lot of life away from the tube!! Its been 5 years I stopped wathing TV and no, I don't miss it! That too when in this side of earth Cable costs $5/mo (and yeah... 30+ channels with star movies, HBO and all!!).
Its because of you idiots who pay $100 for cable and $6000 for a TV set (ok, its a large and thin plasma one... but its AFTER ALL, a "TV" set and will show the same crappy shows!!), that these supposedly "entertainment" companies are literally ruling the earth... entertainers are earning $1M an episode (remember "friends" ??) and grassroot workers... say a doctor earns far less when saving lives!!!!
Life's unfair because YOU made it so!!
- mritunjai
Each TV channel is worth 6 MHz. Various forms of modulation can make 6 MHz worth more than 6 Mbps. I see one of two scenarios:
As the original AC poster, No, I don't pay $100/month. I was laughing at those who do. Reading comprehension was apparently not your strong point in school. I'll forgive you.
Yes, I pay for basic cable. I pay the beast in order to watch the local news and a few other programs. Why? Because broadcast stations in my area come in so horribly (regardles of how creative I get with different antennas) that they are nigh unwatchable. Now they want to introduce unneccessary interference so rural pervs can get their fill of high-speed porn and warez too. Soon everyone's broadcast reception will be as poor as mine. We'll all be paying $100/mo.
"I occasionally experience 1 or 2 hours where I cannot receive broadcast TV, FM radio, or even weather alert radio broadcasts. During the event I cannot receive broadcasts at my home or FM radio in my car within a mile or so"
You are being targeted. I'd be seriously concerned!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
there are narrow guard bands in each channel between video and audio, larger guard bands between channels, but only something like 120 KHZ or something (sorry, have to go by memory at this time, not at my bookcase location) between channels.
in assignment in a SMSA, FCC has kept signals at least one channel apart in the class-B contour area (referring to level of signal out to the "fringe viewing area.") some of the largest cities may indeed have adjacent channels assigned and in use. almost everywhere, cable uses them all, and occasionally has headend issues with channel bleed requiring diddling all the channel amps. certain TV brands "are just no good" per the cable guys because internal lack of shielding or broad tuning causes channel bleed on all of them.
outside the top 20 markets, I would be shocked indeed to find adjacent channels in broadcast use.
note this doesn't apply to channels 6 and 7, or channels 13 and 14, or I think it's 38 and 39, as there are frequency breaks between those channel pairs in the assignment of 6 MHz TV "slots" of air space.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I wonder if this decision, when implemented, will have consequences for other countries.
Even now, my wireless nic allows me to select the place I am in (Europe, Japan, United States), and bases it's channel allowance on that fact.
If this is implemented, I could be "allowed" (by the software) to select a TV channel which is actually occupied in my country and thus pirate that channel with my Wifi-static...
Sure, different software could be delivered for different countries. Heck, even different firmwares. But we all know that that doesn't stop anyone from updating their card to another country-version.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
The FCC has for its entire history put most of the burden on transmitters to avoid interfering with other devices and 50 years ago that might have made sense, today it does not.
The idea was that 50 years ago most use of the airways was broascast and requiring smart transmitters enabled receivers to be dumb (and thus cheaper). Today as more and more use of the airways is bi-directional there is no particular cost advantage to putting the burden of interference solely on either the receiver or the transmitter.
And if you think it's your right to own a cheap TV that can't handle interference because the airways are a public trust, think again. The airways are a public trust and as such each of us have a responsibility to use it wisely and efficiently.
For more information on wifebeating, check out Jim Goad's criminal record. Zing!
That said, Answer Me! is the shit, and well worth a look.
Battling Beasts
After reading the information here (and the limited FCC stuff...) I believe that the term "WiFi" is being used incorrectly here.
Allocation of spectrum will lead to use, but the 802.11 protocalls are not optimized to this type of distance broadcasting on allocated spectrum.
My guess would be that 802.16a (a.k.a. "WiMax") might get used here, although the original frequency definitions for this were from 2-11GHz.
With the allocation of spectrum down under 700MHz, the RF front end definition of 802.16a, could be modified to go down to these bands without a lot of pain.
WiMax makes more sense here. Orderly calling between subscriber station and server tower, rather than the "bumper cars" mentality of WiFi. It is optimized to a multi-user environment.
WiFi was never designed for long distance communication or heavy multi-user environments. It amazes me that people attempt to use it for such. But then half the fun is seeing what you can do with it, rather than what it was actually designed for.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal