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Comment by jeffdubin | Hacker News Reader

The failure was letting encryption into the standard in the first place. This will be a never ending game, with big broadcasters continuously lobbying the FCC and congress for the ability to monetize the broadcast bands. If we allow broadcast television to become a subscription service, then just kill TV broadcasting and repurpose this spectrum for mobile (cellular) use. I'm not endorsing this idea, I'm only saying that by going down the path of encrypted transmissions, broadcasters are no different than any other ISP - except they'll own the pipe AND control the content.

You want to stop this in its tracks? Convince Amazon to start buying some TV stations. Congress would be livid.

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It's not about turning OTA into a subscription service. It's about taking control of which devices are allowed to view OTA channels. It's about taking control away from the end-user in terms of what they can do with the signal that they record with their equipment. Privately sending that video to wherever I am physically located? Not if they don't say you can.

It's disgusting, and the FCC should be ashamed for not flatly rejecting encryption on OTA channels in all its forms.

> then just kill TV broadcasting and repurpose this spectrum for mobile (cellular) use

I would much rather prefer it become an unlicensed spectrum. I absolutely abhor the idea that spectrum goes to the highest bidder in our current regulatory environment that greatly favors incumbents.

That's not feasible unless there's some regulatory body requiring spectrum sharing (CDMA or GSM or something else?)

By "unlicensed" they presumably mean a loose framework for short-range transmissions, like the rules used for ISM bands.

The ISM bands at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz used for WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. are the best-known examples.

Would the TV bands actually be useful for that? Wi-Fi has actually been going up the frequency bands looking for spectrum, from 2.4GHz to 5GHz and now 6GHz. Each one adds significantly more bandwidth (but worse propagation for a given transmitter power). If we were to make a "Wi-Fi 7R"[0] with 900MHz support, which is right next to some of the upper UHF TV stations in the US, wouldn't that be terribly slow and have lots of interference from overlapping base stations? I mean, 2.4GHz is already crowded to the point of unusability in a lot of dense areas.

[0] The R stands for "range"

I think this is one of those things where we should open it up (with limits, I’m not saying we should allow 10kW base stations or something obscene like that) and see what innovation we usher in?

I’m guessing it will be good enough out in the middle of nowhere or something that needs just reliable low speeds?

If someone is already in the middle of no where, 2.4 GHz congestion isn’t a problem for them.

I’m always for more unlicensed spectrum.

But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.

> But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.

There has to be a better way than to allocate spectrum to any one company and give them the rights to buy and sell this spectrum for ninety nine years. If the government needs money, raise taxes!

I am not saying big telco should get wireless spectrum allocation for free. I am saying nobody should get wireless spectrum allocation at all. At least not in the way we currently do things.

If we really need money so much, why not put billboards left, right, and center all over our interstate highways? Why not let companies sponsor the Washington Monument, the White House, and the US Capitol? Lets have an auction and let the highest bidder paint these buildings with whatever they see fit.

Why not give all our federal land to Monsanto for a ninety nine years lease?

Sorry for yelling. I feel very strongly about this. I don't have a solution to how we can allocate spectrum better than an auction. The best I can think of is reduce the number and amount of licensed spectrum.

I want there to be something left in the wireless spectrum when in maybe a few decades hopefully future humans will have a little bit more brains than us come up with a better way to allocate spectrum.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing for repealing Highway Beautification.

802.11af and 802.11at are already a "thing", so I guess they would be useful.

> Each one adds significantly more bandwidth (but worse propagation for a given transmitter power).

As far as I know, that's mostly due to these bands simply having more spectrum available, in addition to actual physical propagation characteristics (lower frequencies indeed propagate a bit better across obstacles like walls or floors, and slightly better through air, but not at all through free space).

In addition to that, unlicensed bands arguably work precisely because they are (by regulation) limited mostly to short-range applications, using maximum transmission power as a proxy for range. One person's signal is another person's noise, after all.

There's other unlicensed bands available that are more suitable for long-range communication, but these usually come with duty cycle restrictions for the same reason.

> Convince Amazon to start buying some TV stations.

Heh. Along those lines... When I was an Amazon Product Manager back in 2020, I was tasked to work on a plan for ATSC 3.0 support in Fire TV. I actually suggested that one of the opportunities was to buy/invest in digital broadcast towers as a way of multicasting large amounts of data wirelessly. Some people in AWS were interested in the idea as well. Note - I'm talking about using the towers for one-way digital data transfer, not owning stations.

Everything about my proposal - even the basic support stuff for Fire TV - was rejected wholesale and I left soon after. (In case you're wondering why Sony, Samsung, HiSense, LG and other TVs you can buy today have ATSC 3.0 support and Fire TVs don't.) The lack of forward thinking at Amazon has become endemic.

BTW, it's surreal to spend nearly 6 months deep diving into a technology from hardware to software, tower to TV, then hearing absolutely nothing about it for 3 years, then suddenly seeing two front page links about it in a span of days. Truly surreal.

> If we allow broadcast television to become a subscription service, then just kill TV broadcasting and repurpose this spectrum for mobile (cellular) use.

We should definitely do this, at least. Maybe keep educational stuff like PBS going, but no need to waste bandwidth on soap operas or sports.

In the US, this has happened three times already: in the 80s, channels 70-83 were reallocated to cell phones; in 2008, channels 52-69 were reallocated to cell phones; in 2016, channels 38-51 were reallocated to cell phones. So cell phones have already taken half the spectrum originally allocated to OTA tv.

We should take half that remaining spectrum and reallocate it to wifi.

Seems like it's in the wrong part of the spectrum to be very useful for wifi. IMHO, it would propagate too easily for dense residential (or dense office), which is where congestion is most apparent.

yes, instead we can waste the bandwidth on reddit, twitter, instagram, and netflix.

How about re-purposing some of it for unlicensed short-range consumer devices (a la WiFi, Bluetooth). We desperately need more spectrum for that.

For short-range communications such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, the existing higher frequencies will do just fine.

But getting more low-frequency spectrum would be great for longer-range mesh based use cases. For example, I find it quite absurd that I can't message friends a few hundred meters away (e.g. on an airplane sitting in a different row, a few aisles over in a supermarket in a basement etc.) without the both of us having an internet connection via Wi-Fi or cell signal.

I hope you submitted that as a comment, as I think it is well said, and should be heard.

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