TV Airwaves To Deliver Internet?

roscoetoon directs our attention to a proposal from an odd assortment of tech companies — Google, Microsoft, H-P, Intel, and others — to reuse TV wavelengths to deliver first-mile connectivity. The Washington Post article is subtitled "Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily." As well they might. One of the big content companies that the incumbent duopolists propose to soak by dismantling network neutrality, in company with some powerful allies, is striking back at the heart of their business.

Light on details

[imunfair]

The article is *extremely* light on details, but if they're talking about one way signals like current radio then you'd only be able to cache the internet on a set top box, for instance... say if it rebroadcast a set of sites every 24 hours in a continuous loop. Otherwise it would have to act similar to wifi... but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.

I'm not an engineer or anything, just basing the power off the amount/size tower they need to cover an area. One possibility could be to use regular radio towers to broadcast on their end, and small directional dishes to send user requests?

Aren't these already reserved?

[drkfce]

Woah, waoh, woah, woah.... Woah... I thought this area of bandwidth was supposed to be reserved for emergency services, when the analog TV's are shut off in 2009?

Re:More Details

[Tele-phoney]

http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/pr_80222.h tml [ieee.org]

Re:Can you say...

[AvitarX]

Right now each station has 2 channels (one analog and one digital) I believe the idea is to free up spectrum when the analog broadcast is shut off. I am not 100% sure though. It also appears to me that frequency has less to do with channel with DTV.

For example a line from antennaweb.org (my notes in parens)

* yellow - uhf WPSG-DT 57.1(channel) CW PHILADELPHIA PA 263° 2.7 32 (frequency)

Though I guess the station would need something in the proper frequency slot to tell the TV where to look.

Re:Can you say...

[arodland]

Though I guess the station would need something in the proper frequency slot to tell the TV where to look.

Nope. You can't do the whole terrestrial DTV thing without an "auto scan" sort of deallie. Your tuner scans through the frequencies, checks for signal power, and figures out whether it sees something that looks like ATSC. If it doesn't, it moves on; if it does, it starts demodulating, and listens for a little table that says "MPEG streams 1003 and 1004 are channel 57.1; streams 1009 and 1010 are 57.2" etc. and it stores that information away, then later when you tune to channel 57(.1), it goes ahead and tunes to freqid 32 on UHF, pulls streams 1003 and 1004 out of the mux, and starts decoding audio and video. All within a reasonable span of time, too ;)