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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."
Over-the-air TV now serves less than 20% of the market. Each analog channel could be replaced by six digital channels. And one TV tower blankets an entire city transmitting a single program, instead of hundreds of small street-corner antennas each sending out hundreds of different shows and reusing the same bandwidth over and over again.
And what would happen if this was the case? A single entity would buy up all the individual local markets and begin transmitting their own crap back over it. They might even keep the individual programs but still carry them under their own waving flag.
We all know what I'm talking about so I won't even bother to give them the free advertising space... So when the local market is bought up by the conglomerate company what happens? Any number of things but most likely a dampening of freedom due to needing to show the world what a great company your station represents.
An end to freedom.
And third, spectrum is so politicized that nimble decision-making is impossible. For more than a decade the FCC, in a vain attempt to save the U.S. consumer-electronics industry, has pushed high-definition TV onto broadcasters.
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.
HDTV is a joke. It's a waste of money and time. There were thousands of better things that we could have used that money on. Not to mention that it was mandated to be in every TV and every broadcast by a certain date. We had to pay for it once to be mandated and now we have to pay for it again to be used. THANKS! Just what I wanted... To be able to see the noise hairs and sweat on an NBA player.
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.
Talk about win-win-win! Everyone would gain, especially the U.S. economy. As the successful pioneers of the first broad, free-market-driven spectrum exchange, we would set world standards for usage and equipment. The U.S. economy, the home of innovation and the lone entrepreneur, would prevail once more.
You are suggesting something that the government and the business world cannot fathom. You are suggesting that there be a true free market. Not one regulated by a single entity handing out slices like it was the last piece of pie on earth... Not one that gives instant money in large chunks rather than small bits here and there over time...
Businesses want control so that they can continue to win. If everyone had access then they couldn't dish it out and hold on. Why would they want to have other people innovating and using the networks like they could be? They can run everything on antiquated crap and offer shit services for high prices.
Isn't that what communications is all about?
Kiddies. Way back in the years before the FCC or even the FRC, radio spectrum was free. You would think that people would have approached this with wisdom and respected each others rights in using the spectrum. But this didn't happen. In the early days of radio, there was a lot of fierce disagreement about the best modulation schemes (AM vs. FM), frequency bands and other related issues. There was also a lot of corporate crap going on where one company would make a radio that would only recieve stations that used their transmitters (again a modulation scheme roadblock). So if you wanted to listen to certain programs, you had to buy more than one brand of radio. On top of that, without any regulation, people just picked the frequency they wanted and used it while paying no mind to their competitors. The reult was a completely unworkable radio scheme. This is WHY the FRC (which eventually became the FCC) was created. They wanted to prevent the kinds of interference that all of this bad behavior caused.
The frequencies were divided up by region in order to ensure that there wouldn't be two stations operating on the same or even close frequencies within a certain distance. This is why you will see that if a large city has a n FM station at 107.9 MHz, you won't see another station at that frequency for a very good distance. In the past it used to be better because the FCC didn't used to bend over and spread them for the broadcasters like they do today. Now the geographic regions are smaller so the distance isn't quite so great and you hear more interference where you have bigger cities close together.
If you like wild west style shoot-em-ups then you'll love unregulated radio spectrum. But if you just want to properly use the technology, then you need to have regulations. The flipside to this is that you also need to make sure those regulations benefit the end user and not the broadcaster. The FCC has certainly been corrupted, but don't throw away the concept of controlled spectrum usage because of that. Otherwise we'll have the same unusable mess that old fashioned radio was before the FRC (remember most people are just laughable boxes of jizzrags) affecting our newly re-invented radios.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
We're still using 100 year old technology to receive radio broadcasts, and it's the major reason why the bandwidth is so underutilized. Nowadays, we can fit very complex receivers on tiny chips, as illustrated by cellphones, so why do we continue to use frequency division as the basis for allocating spectrum?
:P
If we move to code division, the need for regulation of the spectrum almost disappears entirely. It's too bad no one thought of this before deciding on the OTA HDTV standard.
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