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America Needs Unchained Spectrum?
pillageplunder writes "Businessweek has an interesting viewpoint on the state of the wireless spectrum and how it's not being utilized to its max. While it's an opinion piece, the author raises several valid points. Establishing an exchange-entity to facilitate trading wireless spectrum, ridding the restrictions on spectrum available for sale, and weeding out the politics behind many of the recent and not so recent FCC policies. A thought-provoking read."
What a USELESS article...
Yes, that's *exactly* what we need is more confusion as to what goes where in the airwaves. No, we don't want standards like "Channel 6 is always ~87Mhz" oh no....We want each company to just pick their own frequencies and purposes and then CHANGE them on a whim. What a GREAT idea!
You know, the FCC has a purpose other than censorship...they are there to organize what goes in the air, different frequency bands for different purposes. So what if we waste some small partition of frequencies? Change the classifications for what goes where if you want, but don't just throw it to the dogs.
There is one major difference between the spectrum and the internet- creating a webpage does not stop others from doing the same, while broadcasting over a frequency does. When BuisnessWeek says it wants to "open up the spectrum" what they mean is "license the parts of the spectrum that are available to the public".
Back in about 1992 I read a fascinating article about Spread Spectrum on a mailing list called the Fringe Report. (Sorry, I can find no links to archives.) In a nutshell, the article proposed that instead of divvying up the spectrum into channels, it is left wide open for everyone's use. Broadcasting and receiving, instead of happening in one narrow band of frequency, would be spread throughout the entire bandwidth, using a packet-like system. The broadcaster would send out packets wherever there was an opening, and receivers would monitor the entire bandwidth, pulling in the packets they wanted.
It turns out that bandwidth allocated in this way is unlimited. Bandwidth scarcity is simply due to the way we have allocated the spectrum into channels. The best explanation I have read is to think of a pinhole camera. All the light from the scene in front of the camera, visible or otherwise, has managed to squeeze through a pinhole without any picture degradation.
Imagine if every PC, phone, radio, iPod, etc., had wireless spread spectrum capability, along with some sort of peer-to-peer scheme. Except for the cost of electricity, we could have a free, world-wide wireless internet with unlimited bandwidth. It would be the end of paying for phone, cable, sattelite TV, ISP, pagers, etc.
On a totally different topic, can anyone explain to me one of the article's suggestions for new spectrum uses:
Imagine, for example ... new games, such as three-dimensional hide and seek.
If there's any other way for people to play hide-and-seek, except in three dimensions, I'd like to see it!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Like I give a fuck about the broadcasters. The FCC pushed HD on to the people. The same people that own that fucking spectrum and should be the ones choosing what happens with it. Sadly the FCC has taken on more and more power to do what IT thinks best not what IS best.
The FCC was essentially asked at the behest of the broadcasters to do this through several politcings that caused the broadcasters to shoot themselves in the foot. In the 1980's land mobile (cellphones, pocket radios) wanted more spectrum and the TVs had some prime spectrum. The Broadcasters didn't want to give this up due to the interference issues they would have. So they clambored aboard a HDTV/DTV bandwagon so they could keep the spectrum (so that the consumers could have a better picture was the claim). They thought that any DTV was decades away at the time but this one guy working at DigiCypher came up with a compression algorithm that would work.
So now DTV exists, and they can find out they can put 4 SD DTV (Noter: 6 is wrong for decent quality, it should be 4) channels in the place of 1 SD Analogue channel. Now, they weren't too hot on HDTV at the time so they were keeping mum about it. The senators get wind of this and start to say then that why should they have all 6mhz of bandwidth and not a quarter that if that is what it takes to broadcast a DTV station? And the broadcasters come back and start talking about HDTV, since that would require the entire 6mhz channel. So they shot them selves in the foot with all this.
Long story short, they originally didn't want to go to DTV much less HDTV but are doing so in order to keep spectrum and interference from occuring. So they did decide to go to DTV to keep their spectrum.
As for pushing Digital TV on everyone? They did that in the 40s/50s whenever it was to standardize on the original B&W TV standard. Then later on the RCA Collor TV Standard as well so that their wouldn't be a format war. The FCC has always decided on how the TV and Radio is broadcast. This is nothing new.
As for that 20% that recieve over the air? Is that people that still recieve it over the air or that don't have cable/satelite? That is still a lot of people no matter how you look at it. And almost all of them I bet can not get cable/satelite due to location or expense.
Personally, I think they should have spent the time and money protecting us from consolidation in the media markets but that's me. I didn't have a say in it and neither did any of the rest of us.
I agree against the consolidation too, but it has nothing to do with HDTV. Of course, in a true free market that you talk about there would be no rules about station ownership.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars