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FCC White Space Rules Favor Tech Industry
holy_calamity writes "The FCC has come to a decision on the rules governing devices that make use of the unlicensed wireless spectrum between TV stations, with commissioner Genachowski trumpeting a new era of 'super Wi-Fi.' Most crucially, the FCC dropped the requirement that devices sense TV and wireless microphone signals. Instead, they can geolocate and use an online database to learn which white spaces are available in their area. That makes tech firms happy because it provides a software-centric alternative to developing complex new sensing hardware."
Geolocation, followed by a lookup in a central server presumably administered by the FCC... So what you're saying is that my device will constantly determine my location and report it to the government. Wow, I'll take fifty of 'em.
We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.
We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.
We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.
I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.