FCC votes to silence 700MHz lurkers The Federal Communication Commission has voted unanimously to ban the use of low-power transmitters operating in the 700MHz band from February next year, but wireless microphone users aren't going to go down without a fight. The order (pdf) will particularly affect the 30 licensees who don't have anywhere else to go. The FCC …
The efficiencies of digital transmission could have allowed tie free broadcast of many additional channels.
Or, some of that spectrum could have been repurposed toan unlicensed broadband (like, you know, WI-FI)
Instead it has been stolen from us and auctioned to the thieving^H^H^H^H^H highest bidders.
Paris should have bought some to sell her shoes.
So what is this story doing being presented as home news, rather than a foreign affairs story of little apparent relevance to us?
Judging by the title I thought this was something to so with a county cricket club, except there aren't any counties in England beginning with F - maybe Fife or Fermanagh?
The Register needs to recognise - there's us, and then there's foreigners. That's what they think about us, after all.
cricket story I saw on El Reg so I am going to assume mister Islander is a troll, but if it will make anyone feel any better I think Ofcom outlawed those same mics months ago we are only a little bit behind.
Hint troll with an eye to the specialty of the site, and keep the tricky trolls for other than the Register simple works best here something like Jim The Boss all caps and misspelling will get them every time.
Alan, even mentioning the point you made would have given the story some relevance. But writing it as if it was a domestic story when it plainly isn't demonstrates a disappointing submission to our friends in North America. We pay more for kit and software than do people in the US, and most of the kit and services featured in The Register is either not available to us, or is only available at significantly higher prices.
Unfortunately, not all our stories can be relevant to all our readers all the time - incidentally, more than two-thirds of our readers come from outside the UK.
But I take issue with the lack of relevance about kit, especially about consumer products stories and reviews. All of our reviews are for products that are available in the UK. All of the prices for those reviews are UK prices first.
In February of next year, analog teevee broadcasting goes away here in the States. If you don't have a modern digital set, use cable or satellite, and get your signal OTA , then you are out of luck. The FCC, or whoever, issues $40.00 vouchers for aerial-bound old-fashioned non-digital tv owners like myself to purchase set-top digital converter boxes. This doesn't cover the entire cost, but with most converters going for around $50.00, you don't have to cough up all that much.
So, that being said, why doesn't the FCC give a little financial support to the 700MHz users? Like the vouchers they provide for the unwashed masses and their ancient TV receivers. Give them a voucher, or buy their kit outright. Lord knows that they made enough money from their spectrum auctions.
We, of the colonies, offer good terms to any Briton who will lay down arms and swear fealty to the Grand Empire of the Antipodes.
We weary of this war, and wonder for how long we can continue drubbing you at your own sports before it becomes a sad and cruel affair that diminishes us all.
In the great tradition of the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Normans, and the iPhone, it is our intention to liberate our vitamin D deprived British cousins from the drudgery of self determination
We will allow you to retain your national identity, in a fashion, as we re-christen your home in its original latin form - Manx Proximitus - with the less formal term being The Australian Territory of Lesser Tasmania. Each of the original constituent countries of "mainland" Great Britain will remain but will, of course, be referred to as hamlets of greater Lesser Tasmania as befits their geographic significance as compared to the whole. The village of Scotland will be named capital of the territory because... well... its their turn, and we find the Welsh slightly odd.
In the name of natural justice, Northern Ireland shall be excised and restored to its original status as a province of Canada.
We hope you will all work with us to make this takeover as painless as possible. We trust the transition to a government that is remote, disconnected, disinterested and antipathetic to your own interests and aspirations will be a seamless one.
We, too, will abolish the use of the 700mhz spectrum, along with all other man-made electric emanations and radiations. Words and pictures traveling through the air sounds dirty and wrong and we wont stand for it.
Once everything has settled down and we have taught you cricket and the Kiwis have taught you rugby, we will all sit down and nut out what we should do about the seppos.
While I agree there are a lot of non-british readers out there (I am one), I too would like to raise my voice against this lackadaisical approach at locating stories.
How hard would it be to tag the beginning of the story with the country of origin? After all, even AP does it ("dateline USA: blah blah blah" or some such).
God knows it'd certainly help with the TLAs and ETLAs.
The main issues are latency, packet loss, and many users requiring a licensed band (I know in this case this is not the case, but keeping hardware broadly compatible brings the prices down).
On the latency side, it would only take a few hundred samples of delay to be noticeable, and both 802.11 and Bluetooth are packet based, so you ideally need to fill the packets for transmission efficiency.
Just think how bad a West End(/Broadway if we must!) show would look where you got big splats on the sound system because someone over the road just fired up their shiny new wireless router on the same channel. Now they should be using licensed frequencies, but it's still embarrassing when it happens in a disco, church, or any other venue where you're trying to give a professional look.
this one size fits all website went out years ago.
Segment for goodness sakes (corn darnit jimpin josopher-again for the merkins).
Your advertisers will love it = your F.D. will too!
Your (megalomaniacal journalistic) ego will hate it.
You even admit it yourself!:
"Unfortunately, not all our stories can be relevant to all our readers all the time".
err...yes they can, tag each story as someone suggested earlier, put in a filter, or just separate the stories on .co.uk
if you don't do it someone else will............cuuuuuuuuut.....paaaaaaaassste....
I'm from the States, and I like to read a site that is from (and mostly for) the UK. It gives me a different perspective on issues, ones that I would not get if I limited my reading to only stories from my country about my country. Not to mention a useful advance warning of developments of CCTV cameras, detained photographers, identify loss, etc.
I worry that if I were to limit my information to a nationalistic bent, then I'd only have a limited, slanted view on the world, and would then make poor decisions. If folks from the UK only read news from the UK and ignored the rest of the world, they may find themselves lead into such poor decisions, such as ill-advisde wars that....um...er...never mind.
The title has FCC in it, its as good as tagged USA. If I know what Ofcom is you should know what the FCC is, I mean I'm American, overweight, over-armed, under-educated right?
Re: dear staffer trolls...
"Segment for goodness sakes (corn darnit jimpin josopher-again for the merkins).
Your advertisers will love it = your F.D. will too!"
Your right, advertisers love it when less people view the pages their ad is on, glad to see you thought it all the way through...
Go back to reading the daily mail f@#ktard!
I for one am happy for the input our Colonial & European cousins put in here, because it just goes show that there is really very little between us (expect the huge amount of water) the only real diffrence being what bunch of halfwits are leading us. And where these halfwits get the inspiration for the next bad idea.
*\. Mines the one with the daily mail as I have ran out of toilet paper.
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