The big conversion will be in a few days. Probably a good thing for television to be digital, in my opinion. But how can the government demand it? It has nothing to do with safety or welfare of American citizens – so why do they even care? Am I missing something?
The government doesn’t care at all how clear your television picture is – what you’re missing the fact that the radio spectrum is effectively property. You can’t really have dis-separate services running on the same frequency without a high risk of interference.
It is in fact a safety and welfare situation when you consider some services (say, air traffic control, military systems, etc) have to be able to run without said interference.
It’s also a complete logistical nightmare to have unrelated industries competing trying to settle on standards. And if left alone, we could risk total monopolies on all things wireless.
The spectrum is 100% allocated. Analog TV takes up a pretty big chunk of it, and it’s almost totally unused. If we want new/better/faster WiFi or 3G services we need a place for them.
If the Government didn’t reclaim the space, it would be in court for decades. That would hinder the free market and technological innovation.
AFAIK Verizon and Google (among others) were planning on bidding on parts of it. They have some pretty ambitious plans… for next-gen devices.
Yes you are missing something…
The FCC – a governmental entity – needs the bandwidth for other purposes.
References :
The government doesn’t care at all how clear your television picture is – what you’re missing the fact that the radio spectrum is effectively property. You can’t really have dis-separate services running on the same frequency without a high risk of interference.
It is in fact a safety and welfare situation when you consider some services (say, air traffic control, military systems, etc) have to be able to run without said interference.
It’s also a complete logistical nightmare to have unrelated industries competing trying to settle on standards. And if left alone, we could risk total monopolies on all things wireless.
The spectrum is 100% allocated. Analog TV takes up a pretty big chunk of it, and it’s almost totally unused. If we want new/better/faster WiFi or 3G services we need a place for them.
If the Government didn’t reclaim the space, it would be in court for decades. That would hinder the free market and technological innovation.
AFAIK Verizon and Google (among others) were planning on bidding on parts of it. They have some pretty ambitious plans… for next-gen devices.
References :