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Comment by patient_zero | Hacker News Reader

The most important information in this piece is the FCC making rules favoring the very telecoms they are supposed to be regulating. Not that anyone familiar with this administration (or that scumbag Pai) is surprised.

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Yeah, specifically the sub-6GHz C-band that it is basically ripping out of the hands of traditional radio media companies (ie, npr, etc) that use it for satellite distribution of radio shows. There's been a lot of complaints from radio people about this but the telcos have more money so they'll get it.

Which also makes total sense to me: I use radio maybe once a year, mobile data once an hour.

I don't use a wheelchair at all, but I see value in having laws that mandate accessibility. Public policy needs to be set on the basis of societal goals, not individual impulses.

I fail to see how that should make a passive low-bandwidth data source prevail over active high- under any circumstances.

Radio is used more frequently in poorer and more rural communities.

In the US? Do you have data for this? Do those communities even have cell coverage?

> 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.)

Source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/am-fm-radio-holds-strong-f...

Once a week vs once an hour gives us clear winner.

https://nypost.com/2017/11/08/americans-check-their-phones-8...

Frequency of use doesn’t equate to importance.

Example: checking 100 phone notifications about spam email is probably less important to society than a radio alert about a tornado warning.

Good thing tornado warning is now a loud mobile phone alert.

I'd expect people mostly listen to radio because they are bored while driving, which has about as much "importance".

There's something to be said about the utility of old analog systems during emergency situations -- which is part of the responsibility of the FCC to account for.

Dead phones and offline towers are not unheard of in disaster situations.

For example: https://twitter.com/CarmenScurato/status/910957644256546817

It didn't say once a week, it said 90% at least once a week. It could be that 89% listen for 4 hours every day. Likewise, 12 minutes for checking the phone was an average. It could be 1% of people staring at their phone every waking hour.

I doubt it's either of those things. We can't begin to make quantitative comparisons with those bare facts. I just thought we could make a very simple qualitative deduction--that terrestrial radio is far more popular than many people believe.

No the FCC made rules favoring the public's access to telecom services over NIMBYs. This has happened years ago for ham service.

I agree with you 100%, nice to see a sane response.

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