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.'"

Comments

Interesting

[tttonyyy]

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

Re:Interesting

[radl33t]

This ABC article title says a device failed an FCC test. The actual article reads that broadcasters simply "fear" interference. Which is it? Do they fear signal interference or ubiquitous broadband at the expense of their decaying empire?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

This ABC article title says a device failed an FCC test. The actual article reads that broadcasters simply "fear" interference. Which is it?

Let's brush up those reading comprehension skills, shall we? The second paragraph from the aforementioned ABC article: The Federal Communications Commission on July 31 said the devices submitted by the technology coalition could not reliably detect unused TV spectrum, and could also cause interference.

no problem

[mrjb]

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.

Re:no problem

[Phreakiture]

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.

Yes, that is ignorant.

If you up the frequency until out of the first block of TV channels (2-4), you interfere with wireless hearing aids.

If you up it out of the second block (5-6), you interfere with FM radio.

If you up it out of the third block (7-13), you interfere with the military.

If you up it out of the last block (14-69), you interfere with cell phones.

Of course they are dropping channels 60-69 from the dial. This is the "700 MHz" band we have heard so much about lately.

The trouble is that while you could probably use the 700MHz band for this, it performs poorly in hilly, rural areas. VHF frequencies (like those around channels 7-13, and especially around 2-6) perform really well in such areas.

Re:no problem

[gEvil (beta)]

I bet you were standing right next to Orville whispering "It's gonna crash..ssss.." right in his ear.

Yet he still made a damn good bowl of popcorn...

Re:YAFWS - Yet Another Fscking Wireless Standard

[morgan_greywolf]

Why can't these bozos come up with One Good Standard (tm), implement it and go with it? Because as technology advances, we come up with better and better ways to do stuff. Each standard gets faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper. You might as well ask 'why can't these bozos come up with One Good CPU design, implement it and go with it?', it's about the same thing.

Re:Interference Prevention

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

Need to protect the incumbent telco's

[Anonymous Coward]

-- 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.

In fairness...

[tygerstripes]

I can see the TV people's point. It's not like those frequencies are a big truck you can just dump stuff on.

FCC happens to be right on this one...

[Ancient_Hacker]

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.

Re:FCC happens to be right on this one...

[Bluesman]

"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."

Huh? How big of an area are you talking about? Cell phones don't transmit with many watts of power, and they still work in rural areas.

The UHF TV stations are within 100MHz of commonly used cell phone frequency ranges, so the propagation, antenna length, and power requirements would be very similar.

Being that the user would be based at home, and not limited by the size of a mobile phone and battery, there would be more than enough power.

Whitespace is fitting

[Joebert]

Whatpornifpornallpornwhitespaceporninporncommentsp ornwaspornusedpornlikepornthis ?

Re:The ol' Upstream Question.

[Intron]

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.

Re:The ol' Upstream Question.

[MrNaz]

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!

Re:Deadline

[MrNaz]

As a non-US citizen, I too hope your government subsides.
(Not a spelling Nazi, just poking you coz you pointed it out :P )

White Space

[Darth Cider]

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?

Re:Interference Prevention

[Puff of Logic]

Here's an idea for the cable broadcasters ... drop the rates or give me the option to select only the channels (a per-channel fee, if you will) I want to watch instead of lumping me into a "plan" that gives me a massive subset of them. I've been campaigning for this for years. Ideally, I'd like to see a true a la carte system that let me pick as many or as few channels as I liked, but I'd accept a 5, 10 or 15 channel plan too. Some have argued that indie or less well-known channels would suffer, but I don't see it as my responsibility to subsidise them. Alternatively, I'd even go for a "geek" channel package (that would obviously need a more marketable name) that contained the usual suspects beloved by the tech/history/science/history watchers. Until this happens, however, I refuse to pay a hefty cable bill for a channel line-up that consists of 90% channels that I have no interest in and are stuffed with commercials.

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.

Re:Interference Prevention

[Bluesman]

"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.

Re:Interference Prevention

[SpecTheIntro]

15 (less that 20$)

Thank you for clarifying that relationship. :D