Slashdot Mirror
TV Airwaves To Deliver Internet?
roscoetoon directs our attention to a proposal from an odd assortment of tech companies — Google, Microsoft, H-P, Intel, and others — to reuse TV wavelengths to deliver first-mile connectivity. The Washington Post article is subtitled "Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily." As well they might. One of the big content companies that the incumbent duopolists propose to soak by dismantling network neutrality, in company with some powerful allies, is striking back at the heart of their business.
Terrestrial DTV?
And there's not much to be found, but tv technology website has a little more info in this article.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I didn't think a company like Microsoft would be so deeply entrenched in something like this. Its a bit of a stretch from thier core business model. I'm just curious how they plan to market this.
But choking on the unwieldy sentence in that write-up made up for it.
Id like to see more independent TV stations. Of course once there is enough bandwidth everyone can have their own TV station...
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Little Sebastians grandmother would have a fit over this.
That might alleviate the forecast bandwidth shortage that is due to occur when TV over the internet is rolled out in force!
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Satellite bandwidth with only the lag of the distance to a local TV transmitter. Now that would be interesting. Even more so if they could get a two-way connection going over the air...
Rewind back to 1988 - I'm at a community radio station (mostly washed the dishes and played with whatever gear was lying around) and a bright electrical engineering graduate student there worked out how to easily and on a low budget get a fair bit of bandwidth out via the FM signal without disrupting the radio broadcast. The problem then as now is how do you know what data to send? You can't easily get the request packets if your bandwidth the other way is low even if dial-up has improved a lot. That is the main reason you didn't see this in 1988 or proir, and the main reason why people like the engineer mentioned above moved on to two way microwave links.
If over the air comes in like regular TV in my area, the internet will be fast and sexy with a Spanish accent.
The article is *extremely* light on details, but if they're talking about one way signals like current radio then you'd only be able to cache the internet on a set top box, for instance... say if it rebroadcast a set of sites every 24 hours in a continuous loop. Otherwise it would have to act similar to wifi... but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.
I'm not an engineer or anything, just basing the power off the amount/size tower they need to cover an area. One possibility could be to use regular radio towers to broadcast on their end, and small directional dishes to send user requests?
Why would the cable/phone companies be worried about television signals?
Last i checked, TCP was a 2 way communication for every message. Every packet is sent and gets an acknowledgment or some message if not received (like only go 13 out of 15 packets). Also, last i checked, my computer doesn't currently have the equipment to transmit television signal over a mile. So, how are those packets going to be sent back? Cable? Phone line? Unless google finds a way to deliver the internet via a non tcp/ip format or puts a 1.21 gigawatt antenna in every home, the whole error checking feature of tcp/ip is going to keep a bit of fat for the phone/cable companies.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
I mean, John Kerry introduced legislation in January to direct the FCC to do this, and the FCC has been issuing rules last year to get this going for WiMax. The TV frequencies turn out to be really helpful for getting signal to mountainous areas. (gee, big surprise why that range was originally selected).
I suspect there's more to the story than a bunch of tech firms saying, "me too!", but the article doesn't cover what that might be.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I recall a demo circa 1985 or 1986 at a Usenix of a scheme to send a continuous Usenet feed in the blanking interval of a TV signal. It certainly worked in pilot projects but I guess the broadcasters couldn't figure a way to make it worthwhile (ie profitable).
Of course the required bandwith for "a continuous Usenet feed" was orders of magnitude lower in those days.
-- Alastair
1999 called. They want their Geocast back... The idea of delivering internet via airwaves is so NOT new. It never got off the ground then, and it won't now. If you want wireless internet, get a $50 router or a $60/month Verizon aircard.
Done.
HELL NO!!!!
This opens the door for the FCC to regulate content on the Internet.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
How are Google, Microsoft, HP and Intel and "odd assortment"? It seems like a fairly sensible selection of the big players in the personal internet/entertainment/computing realm to me.
Woah, waoh, woah, woah.... Woah... I thought this area of bandwidth was supposed to be reserved for emergency services, when the analog TV's are shut off in 2009?
This news is really about 6 months old. FCC has been planning to use vacated TV Broadcast Bands for Unlicensed Operation for a while. Looks like the bands will be freed up about Feb 2009. This makes way for 802.22. I think small wireless internet service providers, cable companies and telcos will all look at using this new spectrum to extend broadband internet services in to the rural communities. These lower bands (700mhz) are great for that. This is similar to the 900mhz spectrum some WISP use today. See FCC Documents: DOC-267867A1 FCC TAKES STEPS TO ALLOW NEW LOW POWER DEVICES ON VACANT TV CHANNELS and DA-06-1813A1 - Public Notice of Projected Schedule for Proceeding on Unlicensed Operation in the TV Broadcast Bands
It's just an infinite loop. It's not like they'll emulate the full experience of the internet by introducing blue screens to the telev--oh wait...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
http://www.google.com/search?q=tv+airwaves+broadba nd&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:of ficial&client=firefox-a
You guys are so closed mined, they're gunna to send the all the interwebs over the airwaves-tubes. Easy. Brilliant I rekon
Oh right, there was:
RFC 2728: The Transmission of IP Over the Vertical Blanking Interval of a Television Signal
Of course, back in 1999 we all knew what Zork and null modems were. Oh brave new Slashdot.
What's the point of 0 gain? How it it better than the input signal be decreased by the same amount as the gain?
Still WTF is a Zimbabwean poet doing coining Geeky Computer terms? Fuck off buster! I don't try making clever terminology about poetry.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
wireless tubes or radio tubes?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
This is actually quite an interesting concept. If memory serves, the typical cable modem, uses the bandwidth within the allocation of a single cable channel (video has quite a high bandwidth demand). So utilizing the over-the-air equivalent for local connections makes an awful lot of sense (adding an extra channel or two for redundancy and error correction, due to the increased noise of radio).
I used Direcway satellite for a couple of years, and it was good, but pricey and high latency, due to the trip to the satellite and back for every packet (and I was on two-way, doubling the fun). With local over-the-air broadcast, latency wouldn't be an issue. (I would imagine, dialup-return would be the norm; not a big bottleneck for the typical web-surfing/email-fetching individual.) I think this would be far preferrable to satellite for those out of range of cable, and hopefully more modest in pricing than satellite.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I hope they're not planning to cache the whole of the www on a reciever, I haven't finished reading my copy from a couple of years ago yet.
A few years ago when we were looking at ways to bring broadband to a rural school in Vermont, I trecked up to the highest point we could reasonably put an antenna. What I saw was trees -- hundreds of trees. Maybe thousands of trees. It was pretty clearly going to take us several intermediate relays to get to a place where we could connect to existing broadband. And each intermediate was going to need power and access and probably a tower to get above the trees. Scratch that idea.
I think that using TV frequencies for broadband wireless may be a workable idea in the plains and Great Basin. I've managed to raise a cell phone signal in some pretty unlikely places out in the west. But I don't think it is going to work very well in areas East of the Mississippi since most of the potential users are going to be in valleys and surrounded by trees. And no, cell phones didn't work at the school although there was a spot out at the end of the driveway and a couple of hundred yards down the road where one could raise a couple of bars if you held the phone just right.
(Thanks to a peculiarity in the local regulatory structure, we were finally able to get a T1 at reasonable rates.)
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
As we all learned in college, words have meanings and deconstructing those meanings is the only worthwhile human pursuit. The UN excels at this. Take the situation in Darfur, for example. A simplistic person such as an American might look at 250,000 civilian deaths and conclude that its a "genocide". Silly American with your black and white views of the world! Learn to see shades of grey! While it is an easy mistake to make to call Darfur a genocide, everyone knows that only white people commit "genocide". When brown people kill black people its grey! Quoting from the UN report:
"In particular, the commission found that government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur... These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity... [But] The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing..."
Phew, we dodged a bullet there! See, if there had been genocidal intent in those 250,000 murders, then we would have had to do something about it! But since there's no intent, there is no genocide, and we can just tut-tut about it a little and then get back to important things, like textual deconstruction! After all, the US firms practice of saying Last Mile instead of First Mile clearly has negative connotations for people living on it, and we wouldn't want to discourage people in places like Darfur by implying that their discursive status is to be dismissed as cavalierly as their lives! Then we can concentrate our efforts into the political and ideological reasons why people don't have Internet technology, and ignore those silly American corporations who persist on trying to find technical and financial solutions to the problem. (See the excellent breakdown in parent's article for the UN.) I mean, who expects something prosaic like *broadcasting* and *cheap, mass-produced hardware* to work at reaching the rural population? Its not like that worked for radio and television! No, we got radio and television deployed essentially everywhere by deconstructing the root political and ideological reasons for absence of television!
Seriously for a moment: you want Last Mile connectivity? Stop arguing about what its called, get the "development" eggheads out of the way, and tell American industry that there is money in it. Bam, they WILL find a path to the cheese. You don't even have to tell them there is money in it because they already know -- everyone is looking at bypassing the guys who own the physical networks and if you surmount the Last Mile problem then networks cease to become really impressive because you can't own the customers attached to them. The fact that surmounting that problem will also make for vastly cheaper infrastructure expenses for the portion of the world that isn't wired yet (which, if you're talking about broadband, includes most of the States!) is one of those happy accidents of progress. Capitalism: It Works.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
How, with such a system, would you send out your requests and whatnot? Surely you won't have to have your own broadcast tower?
Imagine using the TV Airwaves to broadcast internet TV.
Now if only they could develop an optimized protocol for this.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This is the very reason why Analogue TV is being cut and the change over to Digital to free up badly needed spectrum for such rich services.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
For example:
"Brian: Thank God you've come, Reg.
Reg: Well, I think I should point out first, Brian, in all fairness, we are not, in fact, the rescue committee. However, I have been asked to read the following prepare statement on behalf of the movement. "We the People's Front of Judea, brackets, officials, end brackets, do hereby convey our sincere fraternal and sisterly greetings to you, Brian, on this, the occasion of your martyrdom. "
Brian: What?
Reg: "Your death will stand as a landmark in the continuing struggle to liberate the parent land from the hands of the Roman imperialist aggressors, excluding those concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture and any other Romans contributing to the welfare of Jews of both sexes and hermaphrodites. Signed, on behalf of the P. F. J. , etc. " And I'd just like to add, on a personal note, my own admiration, for what you're doing for us, Brian, on what must be, after all, for you a very difficult time. "
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Hmmm...High download speed and low upload speed. Sounds like a plot to kill bit torrent (and pretty much any form of file sharing). I'll bet it has the support of the MPAA/RIAA.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Is it time to break out the old bunny ears again.
"Hey, turn that one 9 degrees to the left. awesome, 84KBPS more..."
Back in 1999 I was hired by a company in Houston, TX known as AccelerNet to come in and rebuild their existing ISP solution, as they had no idea what they were doing on the backend. They literally had an ISP in a box setup, and needed some real infrastructure designed by someone who had actually worked for a large ISP. The owner had made his money in cellular during the late 80's and early 90's, and he saw the Internet as the next big thing. Since he was in Houston, and there is a considerable amount of urban sprawl with subpar telco/Internet access, he devised a plan to use cablemodems over the air. He got funding and applied for an experimental license from the FCC to use UHF channel 43 in Houston. The system was essentially a cablemodem setup, with each cablemodem plugged into a single channel UHF antennae instead of cable run through the ground. The problem with this type of system was that you could receive packets, but not send. However, each Hybrid Technologies cablemodem had a serial port and ethernet jack, so you could use a wired connection for the return packets. With a 33.6 modem connection, you could reach top speeds of ~850Kbps. This was due to a combination of latency and overall bandwidth for the return packets. With an ISDN connection, download speeds reached between 1-3Mbps, depending on whether you had a 64 or 128Kbps connection. I consulted with the company after I left for a Fortune Ten company in early 2000 due to VC funding issues, but I continued to use my 3Mbps connection for free since I continued to consult with them since I had built their infrastructure. I believe they sold to a large regional ISP in Dallas sometime in 2002 or 2003 who immediately decommissioned the UHF technology for more traditional connectivity.
Here's an article from Broadband Week from April of 2001 that goes into some detail about it. So while all these heavyweights may be getting into it now, they're 12 years behind a little company from Houston, TX called AccelerNet who pioneered the way and spent considerable lobbying dollars to get two-way UHF transmissions going.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
Wavetop
You've heard the saying: "No pain, no gain." Well the converse is true too. "No gain, no pain."
...sort of. "Robert X. Cringely" (the PBS one, not the InforWorld one) has been squawking about WiFi and WiMax for years. And he predicted that Google's series of new regional data-centers was part of a secret plan to replace/take-over Internet infrastructure.
However, I don't think he put all the pieces together in *quite* this arrangement. His idea for the data-centers was more that they would take over the *backbone* side, or at the very least supplant Akamai in the distributed web content/caching business. Now it sounds like they may be intended as regional hubs for local Google-net broadcast COs?
'Cause if you did, and you knew how much they pay for such little bandwidth (there are still places where $45 for high speed internet gets you access to the V.90 modem pool), you would realize that delivering broadband is an emergency service.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
RIP, Edward. Hope your corpse is fertilizing a cactus.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Why not take back the digital TV channels and let the networks keep the analog ones? The analog ones do get a lot more use.
...They want their technology back: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wc_summ.htm (or http://web.archive.org/web/19971211230117/www.haup pauge.com/html/wincast.htm for the first occurrance of the proper hauppauge site in the web archive)
Broadband over UHF/VHF is covered by the 802.22 specification, and use of white space is an ongoing endeavor. (See dailywireless.org, 2006 and 2007", for example.)
The chief obstacles are political, not technological. The National Association of Broadcasters has tremendous lobbying power and wants to protect its business interests. Most people still get their news from television, and political campaign spending on TV ads is a huge source of revenue for broadcasters. Although they receive their spectrum for free in exchange for public-interest duties, news coverage of political issues is at an all-time low. (Check out this Illinois study.) Broadcasters have discovered that by reducing coverage of political issues, they increase ad revenue while also giving an advantage to whatever candidate has the most money to spend.
The problems are least of all technological. Vecima Networks of Canada, for example, already sells wireless ISP systems that can use the 470 to 862 MHz frequency band. (UHF channels 14 through 79.)
I hope readers here understand that interference is a side-issue. Despite the switch to digital TV, the FCC is still of a mindset that open spectrum should be auctioned to established players, for established uses. The amount of white-space TV spectrum going unused is staggering, even in major metro areas Just imagine how many billions of dollars it is worth to certain companies to maintain the current state of affairs, and that is how much they would be willing to spend on lobbying.
On no, not again.
I seem to recall an article in Computer Shopper (remember that old tree killing monster of a magazine?) or somesuch about a service where you could plug your computer into your TV and download bits that flowed on a non-visible portion of the TV signal spectrum to get free shareware. This was probably pre-1996 or 1995, but I definitely remember this being offered though I'm not sure if it ever actually worked.
There were a number of these systems over the years, ranging from glorified teletext systems (teletext itself is digitally encoded on one of the vertical blanking interval lines, so are close captioning texts) to something more complex. While working at Metabox AG in Germany, I helped deliver a system called BOT (Broadcast Online Television, originated at the University of Dresden) which allowed datacasting from 80kb/s (using just some spare space in horizontal intervals) up to a theoretical 4Mb/s (taking over a whole channel). While obviously just one-way, we used this to broadcast web content to our set-top boxes. The STBs ran web servers which could avoid expensive connect charges (usually POTS or ISDN in those days, and in Germany, there was no unlimited local calling, all dialup was pay by the minute) for content found locally. This was started in 1998 or so.
Intel had a somewhat similar technology for analog TV datacasting, though it didn't exactly set the world on fire, either. The advent of digital television and real broadband pretty much rendered these technologies pointless.
And these are not what's being discussed here. Reliable last mile broadband wireless, whether based on Wifi, WiMax, or something new, would be a great thing for folks like me, who are too far out in the boonies to get wired broadband. My current choices are cellular broadband (I've had Verizon EvDO for the last year, and it's flakey here, running from near DSL speeds to slower-than-POTS to nothing, even with the 10dBi roof antenna and 3W PA/LNA) or satellite (HugesNet guys are coming tomorrow). Both are dramatically more expensive and slower than wired broadband, and have other issues (satellite's latency, cellular's flakiness and double-secret usage limits).
-Dave Haynie