St. Louis, MO - HDTV - Page 421

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From The Bridge:

Verizon Wireless's solution for nationwide broadband coverage - including rural and underserved areas - is now available throughout the country. The wireless giant announced Wednesday that its long-awaited HomeFusion Broadband offering is live and operational in 230 markets covering more than 2/3 of the U.S. population.

Originally announced late last year, HomeFusion utilizes an installed antenna at the home to receive Verizon's 4G LTE network and transmit the signal to a broadband router inside. The company says the router can connect "up to four wired and at least 20 wireless devices" using a WiFi signal. Verizon said in "real-world, fully-loaded network environments, customers should experience average data rates of 5 to 12 Mbps (down) and 2 to 5 Mbps (up)."

Compare the pricing for HomeFusion to internet service rates from cable and ISP competitors: $60/month for 10 GB, $90/month for 20 GB, or $120/month for 30 GB - with a $10 per GB after allowance charge. In addition, there is a one-time equipment fee of $200 that includes installation, Verizon said.

Those data caps are way too low to be of any use to me, but some folks here may find this news useful.

I suspect they're getting federal funds to roll out this program, but this basic idea, but with some higher power "backbone" LTE towers, probably could provide higher speed Internet access to rural areas even without the rural broadband initiative.

Wireless Internet access is a shared, finite resource. Whether it's 3G (too slow) or 4G like WiMax, or LTE, excessive usage has to be either capped, throttled or priced high enough to keep the heavy bandwidth users in line. Otherwise, no one will be happy with the service. This is exactly what happened to AT&T when the iPhone got too successful. People in NYC, San Fran and other places can't even make phone calls during peak periods. Push SEND and get nothing!

In addition, Verizon's 4G LTE network is currently only found in major metro areas where users have many options (cable, DSL, FIOS) and not in most fringe places. If this new service is intended to reach folks in rural and underserved areas, they won't be pleased. The caps are too low and the speed too slow. Good luck downloading a NetFix movie or anything on the Roku.

FWIW, Verizon lit up 4G out in the area from Pacific to Cedar Hill several weekends ago.

Made me happy since that's what I use.

And is on track to cover Verizon's entire 3G footprint by the end of next year.

Maybe so, but what I'm saying is don't expect unlimited, fast data speeds at a reasonable price. The real purpose for their LTE network is mobility. If it doesn't perform well on an iPhone or a Droid due to saturation---and no one saturates a high speed Internet link like landlubbers watching Netflix, downloading photos, uploading You Tube, etc.---- they have no choice but to cap usage, throttle speeds, charge for overages, or other extremes to limit abuse. If fixed users clog the network so much that mobile users can't connectr, the model gets turned on it's head. Again, it's a limited resource designed and allocated for XX smart phones. LTE is fast but only when it's not seriously oversubscribed.

Keep in mind, out in the boonies, where population is sparce, so are the towers. Instead of having a tower at every exit on the highway in the city for capacity, the towers in the burbs can be a few miles apart. Less towers = less capacity. I'll bet the whole town of Cedar Hill has less than a handful of towers with LTE. No need for more to support dumb and smart phones. What do you think will happen when half the town decides to jump onto the LTE fixed-modem solution?

Hello out there?

Two quiet weeks...................

I'm back to thinking about cutting the cord and canceling D*. Still need to figure out how I'll get the stuff we care about. For me there isn't much: mostly Formula 1 racing and educational programming. Mrs. RaceTripper watches some stuff I think we can get on AppleTV. I might take some of the savings to increase our internet speed but I stand to save $50-75/mon.

Do it! I just did. I got so fed up with thier slow a$$ dvrs, I couldn't take it anymore. I'm making the switch to Charter. I'm using two Tivo premiere XL boxes.Plus with Charter, I'm getting Internet with 30Mbps download speeds. I'm pretty excited.

I assure you, if I drop D* I am not picking up Charter or UVerse. I see that as trading one problem for another (possibly worse). I am mostly content with the D* service and quality (although I agree two of my DVRs performance isn't very good).

I just have a hard time justifying $100/mon when all I am interested in watching is circuit racing and some stuff on Science/NatGeo/Discovery.

I'm really back to spending most of my free time with my analog two-channel music system. I bought a whole new stereo last year and started collecting vinyl again. I just don't care as much about video anymore.

So I have never got around to fixing my antenna. My wife and I still end up getting muti-path or something. Then something hit me, I am not entirely sure I don't have my antenna facing 180 degrees in the wrong way. I have a yagi style antenna that looks like an arrow with a little bit more of the boom sticking past the front. Like this:


A --------->-- B


Edit: I cannot get the diagram I did to look right, so imagine that the > is much larger than it is.

My question is, which end should I be pointing towards St. L?

A or B?

If you want the antenna to be pointing towards StL, point A towards StL. If you want to set it 180° away from StL, point B towards StL.

B is the Yagi's director elements, which improve the forward gain of the antenna by decreasing the amount of signal traveling through B.

Yeah, I am an idiot. I thought: "Hey, this thing is shaped like an arrow, I bet I point the arrow at St. L."

I have this thing pointed in the wrong direction, no wonder I am having signal loss. Thanks you so much.

Anyone else that is using an antenna having trouble with Channel 5 (KSDK) cutting in and out this morning (5/27/12)? In fact, it has been generally harder to get lately. It is coming in at the moment (9:50 am) but has been driving me nuts this morning. Other stations that I normally get out of St. Louis are coming in fine in Centralia, IL.

Had no trouble with Meet the Press this morning via 5-1 OTA and DirecTV HR20 DVR (which has an antenna input as well as a satellite input).

Don't expect the meteoric rise in cable/satellite rates every year to level off any time soon... and the main culprit will be the retrans fees charged by the local stations. Personally, I wish everyone could get an antenna so DirecTV/Dish/Uverse/Charter could tell the local channels to take a long walk off a short pier. When the government first allowed satellite retransmission of local into local, I highly doubt this was the intended result.

From The Morning Bridge today:

Moody's analyst Carl Salas tells SNL Kagan that retransmission revenue will hit $6B by 2020, about 25% of all revenues generated at TV stations. Even more alarming is that retrans revs only accounted for 2% of total TV station revenue in 2005 and 11% this year.

If retrans fees were eliminated tomorrow, the profits for these providers would increase as well as the the monthly rates they charge in the future.

OK, how do I mark 12,618 posts "Read" so I don't have to start at Post #1?

Thank you.

(What I mean is, of course, that [http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=793006] used to display the last message. Now it does not. In Subscription Edit I checked "Only show unread items from subscribed forums/threads" but all the shortcuts I have tried still lead to Post #1.)
Edited by Dan in St. Louis - 6/7/12 at 6:46am

Try this http://www.avsforum.com/forum/newestpost/793006

Yep! Thank you.

I was irritated when "Only show unread items from subscribed forums/threads" didn't actually do that.

Talk to me about HDTV lines of resolution. Has over-scanning been carried over form the analog world?

Example: My Samsung DLP TV is 720p. It will, of course, down-convert from 1080. But on various shows information is cut off at the bottom. On the Bill Maher show on HBO, for example, the bottom half of the names of the guests is missing. On Sunday's F1 race from Canada some of the scoring information was not visible at the bottom.

The F1 race gave a me a convenient way to compare. When I switched to the DTV feed of KTVI even more was cut off than from the OTA feed.

The Samsung has a menu adjustment for picture position. I can adjust it so all the text at the bottom is visible, but then features are cut off from the top. Could it be that the stations are using all 720 (1080) lines possible, but the receiver is over-scanning and losing some of them? And the DTV receiver is over-scanning even more so that even more is lost?

I hoped that with HDTV the days of missing part of the image were gone.

Hey Dan...must be your TV. We don't over-scan. F1 was OK for me. Fox uses AFD which can cause a problem the cable company doesn't have their receiver set right....don't think thats the case her.
Jim

Thanks, Jim. It occurred to me that since a DLP receiver is a projector, not direct view, the overscanning might be optically caused by an intentional design of the mirrors. Not much I can do about that!

I have a 1080p DLP (Samsung HL67A750). No problems here. F1 looked great. Using a D* HR24. Also looked fine on our Samsung 1080p LCD with D* HR20.

we were part of that younger generation that is "cutting the cord" (young people under 30 I guess). We cut the cord the from 2007-2010, better part of 4 years. We only added cable back because we moved and when I looked at new subscriber packages plus the obstacle of moving or buying a new antenna, re/installing it and running new coax, I just decided to go back.

I generally enjoyed it and never felt like I missed much except live sports. Now we have two apple tv's synched up with the home computer with tons of movies on it...I feel like I'm better prepared to cut it again. Before I just had an antenna and a tivohd.

What is frustrating to me is that I cannot legally purchase a way to buy live sports via broadband. If I could buy mlb.tv and watch in-market games I would definitely consider doing it again. While I understand that tv deals are huge for teams and regional sports networks, it's still an antiquated way of looking at things...for a lot of the year I am on the go in evening and would "tune in" to watch part of a cardinals or blues game on my iphone or ipad for 10-20 minutes when a tv isn't around or impossible (like on a school bus...I coach). It's simply silly to me. If the technology is there and people are willing to pay for it, why not implement it?

Dean, I replied to your message but my reply has evaporated. Did you get a chance to read it before it disappeared?

Not that I recall.

No big deal. It was more information-seeking about overscan. I guess it offended somebody. So much does these days!

So has anyone figured out how to get back to the "Control Panel" from the old AVS forum software?

I had that page bookmarked, so whenever I arrived here (at the control panel), I could see which of the forums and threads I was following had updated posts.

Since the switch to new software, that bookmark doesn't work anymore. And as a result, I come here less often because it's kind of a pain.

Thanks!