L.A. TV Stations Free Up Some Spectrum For Wireless Broadband

Posted by timothy on Friday September 12, 2014 @01:34AM from the slightly-less-waste dept.

alphadogg (971356) writes An effort to free up some of the airwaves used by TV broadcasts and make them available for wireless broadband took a big step forward this week in the U.S. Two TV stations in Los Angeles, KLCS and KCET, have agreed to share a single frequency to deliver their programming freeing up a channel that can be auctioned off to wireless carriers next year. The change, which the Federal Communications Commission calls "repackaging," is possible because digital TV broadcasts don't need the full 6MHz of broadcast spectrum that was used for analog TV.

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Sharing channel == worse picture quality by sunderland56 · 2014-09-12 02:22 · Score: 1, Insightful

So two stations that were previously using 6 MHz bandwidth each, will now share one channel, presumably using 3 MHz each.... and so each will have a 50% drop in picture quality. How is this a good thing for the consumer?