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FCC Rejects Cheap/Fast Internet Device
Tech.Luver writes "ABC News reports that a group of technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and Dell, have failed to convince the Federal Communications Commission of the utility of high-speed internet access via television airwaves. The FCC concluded the potential to disrupt consumer image quality was too high, in a statement released Wednesday. 'The technology companies say the unlicensed and unused TV airwaves, also known as "white spaces," would make Internet service accessible and affordable, especially in rural areas and also spur innovation. However, TV broadcasters oppose usage of white spaces because they fear the device will cause interference with television programming and could cause problems with a federally mandated transition from analog to digital signals in February 2009.'"
Interesting the timing of this article given Ofcom's recent approval of Ultra Wide Band for consumer devices in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6938941.stm
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Ignorant as I am, I'd say all they need to do is to just up the frequency until outside TV spectrum. As an added bonus, all you'd have to do to cook your food would be to place it near your wireless router.
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And we all know that that "February 2009" deadline is actually going to be upheld.
It's interesting to see that th FCC is taking the stance that they are with this one.
They're pushing ahead w/ the BPL approvals despite the known and measured interference that the ARRL has presented to them. (They've shown that it's not just the hams that are effected too.) Yet they are concerned about interference on a new system before it's even tested because of the possibility of interference.
It's sounding like the power companies using BPL and media companies may have purchased a few FCC employees to look after their corporate interests.
Heck, many TVs can't reliably detect unused TV spectrum as can be witnessed by tuning your TV into the airwaves (instead of your cable/satellite) and watching the screen turn blue on stations that come in fine, but have a slightly weak signal. (like say, Windsor, Ontario's Channel 9 in Detroit).
Anyway, I say the whole broadcast TV thing needs to just die anyway. Seriously, how many people do you know personally who don't have satellite or cable? I know of one person, but that's it.
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Anyway, I say the whole broadcast TV thing needs to just die anyway. Seriously, how many people do you know personally who don't have satellite or cable? I know of one person, but that's it.
I think this is the first time I've seen someone on slashdot advocating the elimination of the FREE option and requiring people to pay money for something.
This guy's the limit!
-- This is just like broadband over powerline (BPL). The FCC makes sure the requirements are inadequate, such that there is guaranteed interference with somebody (with Congressional influence). The FCC then quashes it, in order to help it's telco friends.
-- BPL still exists for the moment, as, there is not enough influential pain being relayed to Congress yet. Don't worry, BPL will be quashed.
-- Gotta protect the telco's, so that the commissioners have lucrative future position and employment.
But aren't TV broadcasters mostly on cable now??
I've ditched the cable/satellite in favor of terrestrial HDTV. You'd be surprised with the amount of content that you can acquire through time shifting and a good antenna (especially if you like PBS stuff like Nova).
Cable/Satellite TV's days are numbered with solid internet broadcasting.
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I can see the TV people's point. It's not like those frequencies are a big truck you can just dump stuff on.
Meta will eat itself
Unfortunately the affiliate system in the U.S. has been holding back the technological infrastructure for some time in this regard and many others. The affiliates have a vested interest in maintaining the old structure of pre-cable American television and so they fight innovation too-and-nail. They fought cable when it came in. They fought to get a law passed banning satellites from carrying major networks if they weren't through the local affiliate in the area. They fought the long-overdue HDTV switch. And now that they've lost that fight, they're fighting any interference with their broadcast signals because that is the only clear advantage that they still have over cable and satellite (because they can still broadcast their HDTV signals over-the-air without compression).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't have satellite nor cable, and I don't see why I should lose them just so some geeks can have better Internet access.
Or maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/satellite corporate monopolies...
Putting wireless internet on the freed-up TV channels is a particularly poor use of the spectrum. Each TV channel is only about 6 MHz wide (4.5 plus some guard space). That would accomodate maybe 50 million bits per second of service, across the propagation range of VHF and UHF, which depending on power and weather, can range from a few hundred meters to several hundred miles. If you use a few hundred watts you could cover a few square miles, but so can the current Wifi channels. Covering a large rural are is impractical as you'd need many watts of power transmitted at the user's end, and only a limited number of users could be handled.
COFDM, the modulation used in Europe, may be more robust in that area than 8VSB used in the US, still I don't believe it would be a serious concern.
I think the biggest fear for those broadcasters is, as usual, money : if those bandwidths, which they are given free and exclusive access to by the FTC, were to be auctionned off to telco operators, they might eventually have to pay to remain on air.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Er, $20 per month is the _lifeline_ offering?
Over here, 15 (less that 20$) is considered expensive for cable...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Or maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/satellite corporate monopolies... Too many people take for granted the $40~$50 per month they spend on their cable/sat TV bill.
Even people in serious debt will keep paying for their Cable/sat TV (& cell phone( until the very end.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The downlink speed using UHF is quite fast. They didn't mention that the upstream link uses USPS. The rate increase makes this pretty high cost/bit. Secure TCP (letter rate) is 0.41/packet and insecure UDP (postcard) is 0.26/packet.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
When you first said "USPS" I thought "nah, he couldn't be talking about the postal service" but then you said "letter rate", and now I just have to say that I don't fancy the idea of printing all my ACK packets and sending them back. What happened to the paperless office? Obviously it's only paperless if you're using UDP!
I hate printers.
I don't think DVB is the worry. Analog interference is, and with the power required, even DVB can be overpowered and interfered with.
Video Production Support
It's true, TV spectrum is afforded more protection than in areas right now that are being bombarded with unintended RF from the BPL trials. BPL is given almost a 'do what you want' license right now for testing, when the FCC knows it's causing problems.
AT&T, Sprint or whomever wins the auction will provide some form of high speed Internet on that 700mhz pie they won. There's already speeds of greater than 1gbps on the gigaherz spectrum, and claims of 54mbps on around 20mhz of 900mhz.
I'm not going to speculate too much, but I'd garner that with the 700mhz auction coming up, the FCC isn't likely to go 'easy' on any device that uses TV spectrum, lest they scare away record numbers for that auction.
In any case, this partnership helps one key thing: smart radios that pickup and re-use spectrum not being used. There's too much waste, even the cellular companies are guilty of this, and it's the next generation to detect and re-use.
It's time the radios get smarter, and start talking to one another.... coordination by the radios themselves is the only way to assure the spectrum is used all the time.
Rain/snow/brimstone may affect your reception so why can't that be exploited?
Anyway, I say the whole broadcast TV thing needs to just die anyway. Seriously, how many people do you know personally who don't have satellite or cable? I know of one person, but that's it.
Well, since it seems completely impossible to find any market for figures for the US, I'll just talk from my experiences from Norway. How you get TV is very dependent on where you live, if you live somewhere central you typically have cable and it seems like "everyone else" does too. Go a little bit further out and you'll find there's a good mix of satellite or broadcast reievers. Once you start talking cabins, very few have satellites but many will put up a simple aerial antenna. By moving to digital, DTT will offer pretty much the same package as cable/satellite and would make it a lot more attractive again. Besides, using broadcast systems for pushing Internet, while using the networks for pushing IPTV seems like the least sane switch in history, at least if you're talking IPTV over wireless. Broadcast TV does a smashing job of sending the same content to everyone. Leave broadcast to be broadcast and start pulling cables so there'll be some decent internet connection instead.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't have satellite nor cable, and I don't see why I should lose them just so some geeks can have better Internet access.
You're using the TV version of free dial-up access if you're relying on terrestrial TV signals for entertainment. If you had access to wireless, high-speed internet, you could watch streaming video instead. I should even have to into the difference in choices of entertainment available between the two. Plus, most UHF stations in the upper numbers are really low-quality programming.
By the way, it's not just geeks that use the internet anymore, just so you know. They're replacing the generation that uses UHF anyway.
Or maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/satellite corporate monopolies...
I dunno. Sounds to me like maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/phone corporate monopolies. <g>
Opening up wireless spectrum to high-speed, two-way internet access might provide us with at least as much competition as there is in the cell phone market right now. At least, we'd no longer be dependent on whichever two companies run two types of wire to our houses.
There were even proposals on the table from a group that wanted to do free, ad-supported access, so if their long-shot proposal wins you'd get much of the same experience of free TV you have now if price is your concern. Even Google is making rumbles of ad-supported devices.
Still it's a shame their device wasn't properly engineered.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Check out how much TV spectrum goes unused across the U.S., and not just in rural areas. Unbelievable waste. Does this look like a free-market allocation of resources? Does the FCC realize it is making earnest citizens literally sick with disappointment? How many people would welcome a movement to just seize the airwaves, creating wireless ISPs that don't ask for permission to broadcast? Bring on the interference?
The media culture is now the biggest challenge to democracy since it's inception. We are both better informed and more easily brainwashed.
Now this is not to say that pay tv is any better for such things. Cable stations advertise just as much as over-the-air stations (with the obvious exception of premium channels), but saying that over-the-air tv is "free" is like saying that gasoline used to cheap. We are now all paying a steep price for that delusion (and I don't mean at the pump). How long before we realize that advertising will do us in faster than global warming and jihad combined?
The real problem with "whitespace" devices is intermodulation interference. Just because there isn't a signal in a "whitespace" doesn't mean that if you transmit there that your signal won't mix with other signals in receivers to create intermodulation noise.
t mlt ml
Unlicensed signals on first adjacent channels next to DTV signals may generate third-order intermodulation product noise in DTV receivers.
There is nothing wrong with trying to set up "intelligent radio" unlicensed systems in their own band, but putting them adjacent to DTV channels is not a good idea.
More info:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.1598.h
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.2005.h
In a perfect world, there'd be pure digital distribution of television series and movies. All content would be streamed on-demand in a high-quality format, with a basic fee covering access to the network and perhaps a low-cost fee per hour of watching (like $.25 per hour) with no interstitial commercial "messages". I'd be very happy with that.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Me. I don't have $50/month lying around to pay for 8 channels I'd watch and 100+ I wouldn't. I'll get cable as soon as they offer an a la carte version for under $25/month. Until then, Netflix meets my non-broadcast needs. Sure, I can get "basic cable" for $25, but it includes nothing that's not broadcast, news, or shopping - so I'd be paying for about twenty channels I wouldn't watch, and a dozen I can get with my antenna. Woo!!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Yay, I'd LOVE to pay $20/month for what I get for free now! Sounds GREAT! I also eat a ten dollar bill every morning for breakfast, it is TASTY!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I'm commenting on your reply, but you'll have to wait for about a day- please read it, stamps are expensive!
+5, Truth
In the long run it would be better to kill TV altogether, use the spectrum to provide wireless Internet everywhere and then provide "TV" over the wireless Internet connections.
Quote: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to let wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) to operate in unused spectrum space currently occupied by TV broadcasters. The proposal is aimed at giving consumers an alternative to cable and telecom broadband providers."
???
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
"The level of signal redundancy (using Viterbi encoding) combined with the forward error correction (FEC) mechanisms introduced in the signal, practically reduce the risk of interference to none."
I'm sorry, but that's just misleading.
In any channel transmitting digital data, you have a certain bit error rate (BER). Using error correction techniques, you can improve the performance of the channel such that the BER is equivalent to that of a channel with much less noise, or much higher transmit power, or much higher antenna gain. Error correction provides gains that you can measure in decibels, just like an increase in transmit power would.
But a dB loss is a dB loss, it doesn't matter if it's due to weather, interference, etc. If interference causes a dB loss over and above what the channel was designed for, you lose more bits than expected, and quality degrades.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
"Scrap the FCC. Use frequency hopping spread-spectrum devices to avoid interference."
You do realize that this would have a snowball's chance in hell of actually working, right?
If there are no restrictions on who can transmit what, whoever transmits the strongest signal wins. It's not going to be you.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The a la carte system will eventually happen, just not yet. Once all the broadband connections going into enough homes are sufficient to handle the bandwidth (and likewise the core infrastructure along with it), what you'll see is middlemen (like cable companies) getting eliminated. End users will buy their products directly from the manufacturer, so to speak. I'm just waiting for the day where I can buy CNN, the History Channel, SCI-FI, and, um, the Hustler Channel or something. And that's all. Won't be long now. Any delays will be associated with the broadband itself. That's all that's in the way.
C//
Thank you for clarifying that relationship. :D