AVS Official Topic - The FCC & Broadcast Spectrum - Page 78

And one day we will have a USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D so we can go visit the Klingons. Sure it won't happen today, maybe not in a few years from now, but it eventually will happen.

Certainly the only cost-effective way to bridge the last mile(s) to end users is via some wireless technology. Satellite broadcasting could be used, but unlike current satellite services, new services would need to be licensed to operate "in the public interest", with free basic service which does not disenfranchise those who can't pay arbitrary tribute to some commercial provider. The airwaves are a public asset, not something that should be sold off for one-time fees to be tossed into the bottom of our huge financial hole. Universal reception of information via free broadcasts is just as important a public right as free education or a reliable water supply or an effective highway system. U.S. citizens should not be viewed by their legislators as a herd of cash cows to be managed for the benefit of commercial interests.


Exactly! This spectrum grab is being promoted in the name of national security, but surely first responders don't need high-def video phones to talk to each other, and what they do need will surely not be needed full-time. The spectrum being grabbed will be probably be used with staggering inefficiency by its new "owners", even compared to the technology currently being used for digital broadcasts. Surely emergency communications could be compressed and multiplexed so that much less spectrum would be required. Is there no money to be made by doing this? Is it politically incorrect to question simply throwing spectrum at national security?

Of course, there are insidious forces at work who want as much spectrum as possible to be grabbed, because they're using this crisis as an excuse to eliminate their competition, OTA broadcast TV. And if they can buy enough legislators and/or fool enough regulators, they may succeed.

That's the scariest thing I've EVER heard. One snip of a terrorists wire-cutter, or one smart kid with too much time on his hands, and we're a caveman society again .

Plus, we all know what happens when there's no competition: Innovation stops, and prices rise. I hope legislators remember that, too.

Confirm and conform Kilroy...

Just my opinion.

My problem with wires relates primarily to cable company drones always performing busywork fixing corroded connections, etc. That kind of twig-level maintenance isn't needed in a wireless network, like the OTA broadcast system that worked well for 50+ years and works even better now that it's digital. I'm sure we can agree that this is a golden age for OTA TV.

You're referring to two-way wireless networks. Even there, I may be more optimistic than you are about scalability. Those "last mile" wires have to connect to some type of concentrator even in a wired network, so any network that handles massive amounts of data can be susceptible to saturation somewhere. I agree that wired infrastructure is more reliable and has more capacity, but the last-mile wiring can eat up a lot of the maintenance budget. OTOH, my DSL is carried on a wire pair that may have been in place for about 30 years, so sometimes wired infrastructure can be stable.

I keep thinking people are going to wake up and realize how much they are missing with MP3 players and 4" video screens. They are at least starting to realize that it's a lot of money for very little convenience.

I can see your point. My parents live in an older neighborhood (where I grew up) where the lines were all above ground. They had constant squirrel problems with their cable lines. I had all of my telecom and power lines buried shortly after i moved into my century+ old farmhouse. I have had no problems in nearly twenty years.

Correctly buried cable can eliminate many of the problems you forsee, plus there is an added benefit of a much lesser chance of storm damage and storm related outages.

While I ditched cable TV nearly 4 years ago after 22 years of being a subscriber, I still have Charter Cable for unlimited telephone access and 60Mbps internet service. I have no complaints as my service is rarely out (once in the last several years, and that due to a traffic accident that took out a major hub many miles away).

Again, I can't stress enough that allowing (and in our government's current considerations...helping to speed the process) OTA TV and radio broadcasting to be overrun and eliminated by the forced sale of their spectrum rights will be disasterous to our nation as a whole.

A month or so ago I read that there are now roughly 48 million Americans who get their TV solely from OTA transmissions. This is up from roughly 30 million only two years ago. Fifteen percent of our population NEEDS these services. It has been proven time and time again that these services are the most reliable in tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes. They have the ability to reach the most people...nearly 95% of our country's population lives in an area where at least one commercial TV broadcast is available and nearly 99% live in an area where at least one commercial FM radio station is available.

Broadcast TV and radio are not only a quaint way of life from the American past, it needs to remain as a part of our future. A great many of our poor and elderly rely on it as their only form of media. My family relies on it as the most cost effective way of receiving TV and radio broadcasts.

Too many of my colleagues are telling me that no one really cares about the quality anymore, that all they want is the content. And, they tell me that we should not care how the customer gets the content, as long as they get it somehow.
So, with that same line of thinking, there is little need for anything more than a cheap camera and a toy microphone. The people who want quality will just have to give up on it.
And, the day may come when we will have to pay to get our content transmitted, since we won't control any part of the pipeline.

Goodby to Neumann, Sennheiser, Neve, Manley, Massenberg, AKG, etc.
Hello, Radio Shack, Motorola, Google, Skype, YouTube, etc.

Yes, and most of that video gets watched by very few people.

What would happen is 10 million people tried to view the same video on YouTube, all at the same time? What if they tried to do son on wireless devices? What if it's an emergency situation (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, whatever) that has knocked out a significant portion of the telecomm infrastructure while increasing demand by users at the same time?

In the best case scenario, you're using a lot more bandwidth to transmit duplicate data to those multiple viewers. In the worst case scenario (the emergenecy situation), people just can't access the data that they're looking for -- and, in the absence of some sort of broadcast service, they're cut off from the outside world.

When we further consider the data caps that telecom companies are imposing on their wireless data services, I just have a hard time seeing this sort of service being an effective and efficient replacement to broadcast TV and radio.

My expectation is that broadcast and Internet will coexist in some manner, since both seem to serve a useful role. For that matter, I doubt that cable/satellite will get killed off, either -- although I do suspect that cable/satellite penetration has peaked.

They already press a few numbers to watch a TV show, or look through a guide to watch a TV show. Bookmarks and content aggregation will make content consumption over the internet every bit as simple as the old days, if not even simpler.


That's funny, last I checked, people today like to dial their number from a digital address book stored on their telephone. Internet telephony already is the same thing.

Well let me rephrase that then: it is already in progress.

Ah but that's the beauty of the Internet Protocol: It is routable. Modern day routing protocols quickly detect changes in the network topology, whether accidental or purposeful, and the network re-converges quickly.

Current OTA can't even offer that much. Take out a single broadcast tower, and television in an entire region is out. Internet connectivity on the other hand has various redundant links. It was designed that way from the beginning; DARPA wanted a communications network that didn't have a single point of failure.

(Seriously though, this is actually the least educated comment I've seen on here, and I'm somewhat caught off guard that many people believe that the internet is linear as opposed to being a mesh.)

The internet is all about competition. On OTA broadcasts you have 20 or so content providers. On the internet, you have millions.

10 million? Is that it? Youtube alone receives over a billion views per day.

And the funny thing is that youtube is just one single component of the rather vast google cloud.

So in other words, you're a "the government knows whats best for us" type of person. Whatever floats your boat I guess.

I prefer to make my own decisions, for better or for worse, and learn as I go.


Every single aging generation feels this way about the newer generation. Every single time, without fail. "When I was young, we had radios!" "When I was young, we had comic books!" You are in the "When I was young, we had television!" generation.

How do you think the WWII generation felt about the hippie generation? Now the hippie generation are in their 60's.


How did I ever imply that?


that's funny, because I hear otherwise

http://newsofthemedia.com/2011/05/ma...rship-decline/

In this debate I think we should take our queue from nature and economics. Diverse non-correlated systems prove to be the best way to improve robustness.

For example the 9/11 attack took out the TV transmitters on the World Trade Centers, the Internet did a great job informing the public.

I'm in NH, while I was spared the wrath of hurricane Irene some folks were without power for up to 5-days, and some in Vermont and New York are still cut off. Extended power outages result in the loss of Internet. TV/Radio works just fine with a few batteries, or in your car as long as you have gas.

The Internet is an open fault tolerant communication systems except for the first-mile. There the choice of providers is extremely limited, making a mockery of voting-with-your-wallet.

Even worse the first-mile providers are not content being in the transparent bit delivery business they want to be a content aggregators. They want to rent content not just carry your bits. This runs afoul of the basic tenant of an open Internet.
Much of the change in content distribution seems to be a move away from consumer ownership, I purchase something I want and I have it forever to a rental model. The consumer owns nothing and pays a gatekeeper a monthly fee for the privileged of access the stuff they want.

Lastly the impetus to reclaim even more broadcast space is being driven by bandwidth shortage claims. Given the short range of personal communication devices, there is tremendous spatial reuse. It would be nice to see a non-biased scientific study looking into the claims of bandwidth shortage,

I agree except in the first-mile. In the first-mile many of us have only a single provider or at most a duopoly.

First-mile providers are in a powerful position to determine what can and cannot be viewed and how congested the links connecting the customer to the content are.

If OTA survives at all, it will eventually be at lower power levels, and the programming and sponsorship will be geared toward the demographics in and closest to the cities proper.

Other than the CN Tower (and even that has some mitigation from surrounding rimshot stations), I'm trying to think of any place in the whole of US and Canada where taking down a single tower would wipe out all OTA service and backups. I'm coming up blank. During 9/11, while some broadcasters were out, WCBS-2, WNYE-25, WXTV-41, and then-WHSE-68 were up and running without issue, and all were carrying live coverage. Meanwhile, cell phones stopped working due to overload.


It's redundant if you have multiple links, perhaps. Most people only have one connection from one provider.


One outage took out Comcast's DNS resolving across a significant chunk of the US population. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023949-93.html While the connection was technically "up," we're dependent on DNS to the point that anyone who wasn't using 8.8.8.8 like I was effectively had no connection.

The Internet is a mesh once you get beyond your ISP's ISP. Before that point, linear.


I only have one ISP. Perhaps you have millions available to you, I have one. $50/month for 2-10 outages per month and 1 Mbps symmetric.

- Trip

That's because they are spinning the numbers. Network viewership was down this summer, but still outpacing the top shows of cable viewers by a margin of ~2:1. If they don't show the raw data, I don't buy it anymore. And since Nielsen adjusted the estimate of TV households down a million after the census data, to say viewership dropped a million from last year's numbers is a given.

I've been hearing that ever since I've heard of the Internet. But that would imply that if I have a connection that can see anything on the Internet, then I should be able to see everything out there unless the actual server I'm trying to reach is down. Since that would be an extremely rare occurrence, I believe that the difficulties I have reaching sites from time to time indicate that routing around problems works much better in theory than in practice.

OTOH, broadcast covers large areas redundantly. I receive about eight channels (not including subs) transmitted from about six towers in at least four different cities. If all of those are down, it's likely that my Internet would also be down.

Well, as said earlier, the census downsized young american adults by about 1 million, which is reflected in the ratings that you linked to...which are ONLY FOR ONE AGE DEMOGRAPHIC. Overall, I can find, however, that American viewership in which OTA is the ONLY form of TV delivery is up from about 30 million in 2008 to about 45.6 million viewers today. That is a 50% increase in total households from about 11% to 17% in just two years! While the article I quote is about minority viewership, the article quotes the overall American trend, then simply states that much of this change is due to minorities. The data still holds true that America, as a whole, is increasing viewership of OTA quite rapidly. In fact, you will find that it is increasing while both cable and satellite are decreasing!

http://www.mediapost.com

And what happens when the government shuts down all cell phone use (and internet access by proxy) as happened right here in the United States of America in San Francisco just this last month??? Geez, talk about scary.

Then, why were people so pissed off when BART cut off their service?
Didn't it just come in from some other route?

An observation on this Labor Day weekend... While I vehemently disagree with some of the comments on this thread, I do respect the opinions expressed here. This give and take, points and counter-points, back and forth dialog is one of the truly impressive things that I love about our country... This, I think, is one thing our forefathers envisioned and embraced.

This. Plus, I don't know if many of you recall, but it was pretty well noted at the time that most people were getting their news from the internet during that disaster.

Depends where you live. There are 3 major ones in my area.

There is actually an interesting current event going on that might change that. The hollywood studios are pressuring the US government to push for DNS level censorship, believing that the populous is too dumb to switch DNS servers when theirs is being filtered. What they don't realize is that people will start using their own DNS services (script kiddies will provide "dns switcher" apps, I guarantee it,) and it will be common for people to have redundant DNS servers configured.

Failing that though, it is becoming more common these days for people to own home gateways that keep a rather large DNS resolver cache. If you have a newer linksys home "router" (I use that term lightly because these aren't exactly routers, more like multi-function NAT devices which don't even use any routing protocols) for example, they have their own DNS server, and when your local PC makes a DHCP request, the router offers its own DNS server which holds a cache.

Ouch that sucks. I have 3, and the best one has an outage maybe once every 3 months. But this is mainly unique to the US. Most of the world generally has larger selections of ISPs. Since we are so spread out, and have such a low population density compared to the rest of the world, it's naturally more expensive to offer coverage here.

Well how about this one:

http://socialtimes.com/report-iphone...on-star_b25399

The role of the government IMO is to grant you the freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Although the declaration of independence says god should, I am personally an atheist, and I don't believe in the right to happiness like liberals seem to; just the right to the pursuit itself.

BTW please use inline quotes, it makes it difficult to quote you when you put your replies inside of other quotes. I'm doing that for you, so please return the courtesy.

Yes, and that age demographic is the new generation. They grow up and phase out the older generation.

BART didn't cut off any service, they just disabled their cell repeaters. Cell phone reception is kind of difficult underground without repeaters.

Maybe it's me, I read his comment as sarcasm.

During the recent earthquake, cell networks ground to a halt as everyone and their mother was trying to use the service at the same time. The cell companies build for peak performance, not "emergency" performance. All the spectrum in the world will not change that.

If you don't think people are that dumb, you haven't done computer repair or tech support like I have. Or lived with someone like my father who calls me downstairs (if I'm home) or on the phone (if I'm not home) the moment something changes in even the slightest on the computer. He knows how to click on his pre-defined bookmarks and if he's feeling adventurous, type an address he saw somewhere into the address bar. Anything beyond that, not a chance. And there are a lot of people like that, who know the absolute bare minimum that they need to and nothing more.

I don't remember how long ago it was, but my ISP had a DNS outage and even on my router which claimed to have DNS caching, I couldn't get anywhere without putting in (then) 4.2.2.1 as the DNS. If Hollywood gets their bill, I'm sure they will attempt to obfuscate the ability to change DNS servers on routers.

Off subject, but I've got an old 1st generation Pentium 4 computer in my closet. The "closet-server" is running Apache2, ssh, squid, bind, and maybe one or two other odds and ends. Its fallback if it doesn't have a domain is 8.8.8.8 from Google, but it sped up DNS performance in the house a ton.

Lucky you. My backup 26.4k dialup, provided by my ISP for its frequent outages, says hello.

Oh, and even at that price and level of service, they still lose money on my area. While paying no rent for their space on the tower, I might add.

They require line sharing and often have government subsidies to help pay for or regulations to require service in other countries. I hold out no hope that will become true in the US any time soon.

If that was the case, service in places like New York City would be on-par with these other countries in the world, but it is not.

What we need is another project on par with rural electrification for fiber optic cabling. Every home gets it, run by a local utility who then allows private corporations to sell service on the lines, much like long distance service on wireline telephones. Anything short of that is not going to solve our problems.

- Trip

It doesn't link to primary sources, but IMO 22 minutes of games per day isn't a threat to an average 35 hours of TV a week.

ETA: and presumably, this is 22 minutes among those having such devices. I'm not one of them.