Broadcasters Oppose Wireless Net Service 146
kaufmanmoore writes "The AP reports that the National Association of Broadcasters is launching ads to target lawmakers over a push by a consortium of technology companies including Google, Intel, HP, and MSFT who want to use unused and unlicensed TV spectrum (the so-called 'white space') for wireless broadband. Broadcasters are airing concerns about the devices creating interference with broadcast television. In a statement, NAB chairman Alan Frank takes a swipe at technology companies: 'While our friends at Intel, Google and Microsoft may find system errors, computer glitches and dropped calls tolerable, broadcasters do not.'"
Sounds like Bull to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If broadcasts are so critical, how come.... (Score:2, Interesting)
TV quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh Yea?? (Score:4, Interesting)
This just in... (Score:4, Interesting)
Cable companies also oppose municipal fiber internet.
Cry me a river. You had your chance to help. Now get out of the way.
How Push is a Waste. (Score:3, Interesting)
a broadcast TV station that can reach a half a million homes, with a few thousand TVs tuned in at any given time. How could "pull" save any spectrum?
Because half a million people don't want to watch 99% of what's broadcast, broadcast is 99% waste. People put up with "I Love Lucy" when there was nothing else. Pull gives people the power to watch what they want, when they want so it can be 100% efficient.
"pull" would be completely impractical for TV and radio broadcasts over-the-air - how would the TV request a particular channel?
The same way you watch YouTube in a coffee shop or on your iPhone. Well, you might want to P2P it out through a mesh or cell system, but the previous examples should demonstrate to you that it's easy enough.
I can't imagine anything more expensive and wasteful than the $500,000 broadcasting license the FCC charges to allow people to pollute precious public spectrum with megawatts worth of "I Love Lucy". The principle is general regardless of media - push is wasteful, pull is better.
It is bull, here is why: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:TV quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like Bull to me (Score:4, Interesting)
This is besides the fact that the FCC rules for this spectrum use dictate that stations must detect DTV and notch their TX out of any DTV in the air.
Re:If broadcasts are so critical, how come.... (Score:3, Interesting)
A problem with the lossy compression, perhaps? It's easy to provide a good picture when there's not much going on - it's harder to be consistent when movement (on and across the field, in the stands in the background, etc.) peaks...
It could also be that your reception is marginally bad - to the point that your set is receiving enough information during those low-bandwidth moments that it can pick out a reasonable amount of data - but when the data requirements for the signal go up, redundancy in the signal goes down and you don't get quite enough data for the level of activity in the picture...
I honestly don't know enough about HDTV broadcast to say that's how it works, but it seems sensible...