Two bills before the US government lay out plans for selling off broadcast TV channels, but one grabs the cash to pay for emergency services, while the other preserves licence-free options. On the Republican side we have "Jumpstarting Opportunity with Broadband Spectrum (JOBS) Act", which insists that TV broadcast spectrum be …

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Saturday 3rd December 2011 00:03 GMT Kevin McMurtrie

Drooling telcos

Telcos buy more spectrum for overpriced services while competition to their overpriced cable TV services goes off the air. I'm all for going to purely IPTV, but not until the US has respectable Internet delivery. Comcast is the only combined TV/Internet service in town. Their contract is that you pay them lots of money and they guarantee nothing. You can upgrade to business-class service, pay them more, and they still guarantee nothing. It makes ADSL2+ and a rooftop antenna look pretty good.

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Saturday 3rd December 2011 02:19 GMT Mage

"Television broadcasting is horribly inefficient: a massive transmitter blankets a huge area with a single frequency, while a neighbouring transmitter has to be on a different band to avoid interference – but that means the neighbouring transmitter's band lies empty on the far side of the first transmitter, which is where a low-power White Space device can lurk."

Wrong. TV Broadcasting is up to 10,000 more efficient than Internet solutions.

Wrong. It's only mostly empty. It's stupid simplistic analysis like this that is leading to the fantasy of "white space"

Mobile / Cellular radio has to use 3 to 9 channels with only one available to a particular person for a similar reason.

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1. Saturday 3rd December 2011 23:00 GMT Annihilator
  
  re: "more efficient"
  
  "Wrong. TV Broadcasting is up to 10,000 more efficient than Internet solutions."
  
  So? It's also infinitely more efficient than a two-tins-and-string solution, who's comparing it? Besides it depends on how you're measuring efficiency.
  
  "Wrong. It's only mostly empty. It's stupid simplistic analysis like this that is leading to the fantasy of "white space""
  
  All frequencies are "mostly empty", there's no such thing as completely empty, but for the sake of simplicity it's acceptable to call it "empty" where a strong enough signal can reduce whatever else is there to background noise. The point is that in the "empty" space, a low powered transmitter can overcome the noise, while not being powerful enough to encroach into the primary coverage area (or rather, just become noise there within the snr)
  
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Saturday 3rd December 2011 09:50 GMT Charles Osborne

Not the best blurb Reg, not the best

C'mon you can do much better and usually do. Reprinting talking points from political hacks and grifters is not informative, only regurgitive.

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Saturday 3rd December 2011 09:54 GMT Herby

Pretty efficient, if you ask me!

Sure a 6 MHz chunk (at least here in the USA) of spectrum is used for broadcasting, but how many multi-megabit streams would be used in its place, each taking up a considerable chunk of bandwidth (a previous commenter mentioned 10,000 as a factor which seems proper).

It just seems silly for the "on demand" streams that will inevitably clog up both wired and wireless point to point transports. And I thought spam was a high bandwidth activity, compared to streaming video, it is but a minor player.

Further reading: The tragedy of the commons.

Besides I want my wireless mics to work without interference.

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Saturday 3rd December 2011 22:01 GMT Richard 12

This may be even worse for wireless microphone/IEM use than in the UK

In the US almost every wireless microphone and IEM is actually a whitespace device.

I remember having to retune several mics on board ship after repositioning cruises, as the 'nearby' whitespaces were quite different.

One cruise we just didn't use a particular mic on the first evening because it overlapped with a nearby tx on the way out and re-tuning every cruise was nasty.

In the UK, most users of the bands being lost next year were licensed by JFMG, in the US that isn't the case - very few of them have a licence at all, and I don't think many US states even offer such a licence.

I suspect politicians on the campaign trail aren't using licensed mics very often. It could be interesting to see the stunned silence...

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Monday 5th December 2011 11:27 GMT Ru

Who could possibly be against JOBS?

Clearly we need a new act...

Senators To Oppose Predictably Contrived Ridiculously Acronymed Proposals, perhaps?

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