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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.
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!
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.
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.
When all stations go digital, will this still be an issue? Can the digital TV hardware compensate / filter these harmonics, spurious signals, and oscillations?
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.
...about tv signals interfering with my wireless.
True, but up till this point television broadcasters haven't cared. What do they care if they intefere with others broadcasters they're likely other companies. So long as the FCC doesn't tell them to cut it really doesn't have any negative impact. If they stuck to the original wording, which I'm not sure if they have or not, then there are going to be lots of problems. It seems by the first articles I read about this that the WiFi better not be interfering with the Television broadcasts but they didn't seem to concerned about the inverse. Does this mean that the Teleivision broadcasters will intentionally overdrive so they broadcast spread-spectrum and tromp all over the WiFi? It's not practical for the WiFi to use the kind of wattage that the Telivision broadcasters are able to do, at least not on the consumer (upload) side. If the FCC doesn't stick to this it could easily get washed away by the Television broadcasters and made useless.
Let's just hope they keep this on their radar and don't let it fall under their watch.
-J
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
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?
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.
>>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???
Brilliant observation of the day. Please mod up the parent of this reply.
Of course, the general public doesn't have a clue about frequency allocations, but that won't stop the misinformation campaign from the large OTA broadcast conglomerates.
Those big guys probably own many of the FM's in their markets anyways as well, and the FM transmitters are frequently co-located on TV broadcast towers too. If the big kilowatt and megawatt FMs don't leak into my TV channels I can't see milliwatt WiFi being a problem either.
Pure protectionism, nothing more. Write your local television broadcaster and point out the obvious.
--
sig not installed.
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.
It's more likely a CBer than a WiFi ISP. Them CBers love to hook up huge amps and flood the spectrum with noise. I had one here knocking out the TV. They got busted.
The above is not worth reading.
I am an ex-broadcast engineer and can guarantee that they aren't using the guard bands between TV stations - because there are no guard bands! Each channel butts up next to the last one.
Interference is avoided by not assigning two adjacent channels in the same market.
Television channels are 6Mhz wide. A Wi-Fi signal occupies 30Mhz so I'm guessing they will need 7 channels in a row with nothing broadcast (5 for the spectrum needed with 1 on each side to avoid interference).
Interference avoidance is nothing new to broadcasters. Aside from television channels assigned they also have had to deal with microwave live trucks, satellite transmissions, etc.
Andrew