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.

Comments

Article is a little light on details.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And there's not much to be found, but tv technology website has a little more info in this article.

well

[mastershake_phd]

Id like to see more independent TV stations. Of course once there is enough bandwidth everyone can have their own TV station...

Is this like satellite internet?

[Ant P.]

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...

Re:Is this like satellite internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

At work we've been using wireless internet. The company calls it "air power". To get it to work we had to build a 100' tower behind the building. The latency is very low, nearly everything comes up faster than I've ever seen dsl or cable. Though the max transfer speed is 6mbps.

The problem with it though, is the weather. If it's foggy, the connection constantly drops. If it's raining anywhere between our tower and theirs, the connection constantly drops. If it's very cloudy, the connection constantly drops.

I wonder if this would be similar.

As hard a problem as in 1988

[dbIII]

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.

First Mile vs. Last Mile

[michaelmalak]

Here I was about to lambast the submitter for using "First Mile" instead of "Last Mile", only to discover after Googling that "First Mile" was coined in 1997:

The term "First Mile" was coined by Titus Moetsabi, a poet/ developmental communications specialist, at a Southern African Rural Connectivity Workshop in Harare in February, 1997. He was the first to turn the "last mile" concept on its head and help us think instead of rural communities from the user perspective -- the first mile, not the last. This term expresses a more equitable and far less top-down approach to the challenge of providing universal connectivity, regardless of location and income.

The UN has a more detailed account of the coining of the phrase.

so

[TinBromide]

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.

Re:Even earlier

[zcat_NZ]

this probably evolved into Teletext.

Re:What???

[blackest_k]

look at what your suggesting pretend somebody else wrote it and see how paranoid it seems? After all we have cable modems ethernet and dialup to report on windows users already.

All this is, is just another method of data transmission. Satellite (SKY) has been broadcasting data down to customers for years. A digital terrestial broadcast is no different, there isn't really that much difference between packets of video data, and data.

  I believe upstream is provided by a phoneline. Interestingly and perhaps worthy of paranoia is what stops someone from recieving the packets meant for you? since it is a broadcast after all possibly millions will recieve data meant for you just most won't be able to decrypt it.

  Bit torrent could become extremely fast if its possible to harvest all the blocks on the signal potentially you could be recieving up to the whole swarms packets. I wonder if its possible to listen only or would it be the digital equivilent of a paper shredder lots of meaningless bits.

It is possible to take in a raw mpeg-ts stream and record more than one channel at the same time.