QRZ! Ham Radio 4/QRZ Ham Radio Callsign Database - Volume 4.iso/digests/tcp/940241.txt

Internet Message Format | 1994-11-13 | 15KB

Date: Fri, 28 Oct 94 04:30:02 PDT
From: Advanced Amateur Radio Networking Group <[e-mail]>
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Subject: TCP-Group Digest V94 #241
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TCP-Group Digest            Fri, 28 Oct 94       Volume 94 : Issue  241

Today's Topics:
    If they're gonna sell frequencies, what about these? (3 msgs)

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 10:12:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: California Wireless Incorporated <[e-mail]>
Subject: If they're gonna sell frequencies, what about these?

Folks, this 2390-2400 MHz and 2302-2417 proposed frequency sell-off makes the
220-222 MHz fiasco seem like child's play.

Saving these frequencies will require a full-court press to the FCC, Congress,
and the White House...as well as much behind-the-scenes activity by individuals
and groups lobbying important decisionmakers...

To suggest a way to get some frequencies that are exceedingly underutilized,
a friend sent me the following article.  Enjoy.  -Mike k3mc
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [e-mail] (Harold C. Forbes)
From: [e-mail] (Tucker Balch)
>From [e-mail] Wed Oct 26 17:01:04 1994
From: [e-mail]

CYBERURBAN REDEVELOPMENT
by Bill Frezza, October 1, 1994
Copyright Network Computing Magazine

I would like you to try an experiment, the results of which may help you
decide for yourself what kind of spectrum scarcity really exists in this
country.  Go to your TV set and if you have a cable box, unplug it.  Switch
the TV over to the antenna input.  Now, tune to UHF channel 14 and slowly
scan the channels, one at a time, up to channel 69.  Pause a few seconds each
time to fully appreciate what you are seeing.  You've just scanned through
about 300 MHz of the most precious real estate on the planet, occupied with
but a few exceptions by white noise.

The FCC in its historic summer spectrum auction raked in $617 million for a
measly 825 KHz of bandwidth cut into tiny little slivers on which the new
owners are trying to build 100 story skyscrapers.  Yet, in the middle of
downtown cyberspace is a giant empty lot which, at these prices, is worth
over $200 billion.

Is this what they meant when they called TV a vast wasteland?  Can you
imagine how many wireless network computing businesses could be started if
this spectrum found its way into innovative hands?

The story of how this state of affairs came to be spans the 60 years since
Washington nationalized the airwaves in 1934.  The saddest chapters of this
saga, ending with the creation of the cellular industry in 1983, began in
1957 when the FCC first initiated an overall review of spectrum allocations
and future requirements for frequencies between 25 MHz and 890 MHz.  At that
time the television broadcasting industry had exclusive access to 70 channels
worth of UHF spectrum.  This ran from 470 MHz to 890 MHz, each channel a
honking 6 MHz wide.  Most of this, then as now, was dedicated to white noise.


After seven years of studies and hearings in which the FCC let the
broadcasters fight it out with the fledgling Land Mobile Radio business, at
that time a collection of cops, firemen, and electric utilities, the FCC
decided to dispense its largesse on the more politically influential TV
moguls.  In their wisdom, they determined that a full 82 channel system, 12
VHF and 70 UHF channels, was "absolutely necessary" to develop a "nationally
competitive" television industry.

And Congress obliged by passing a law making it illegal for TV set
manufacturers to sell TVs that didn't have full 82 channel tuners.  The
mobile guys were told to shut up and go invent some new technologies that
would help them use their overcrowded spectrum more efficiently.

Now we watch upwards of 50 channels of snow-or at least the minority of
Americans that haven't already traded in their antenna for a Cable TV hookup
do.  Meanwhile, cellular frequency re-use was invented to solve the
"scarcity" problem, making American suppliers of mobile radio technology the
most competitive in the world.  The US television set business got carted
away by the Japanese who never had to worry about hitting a moving target,
while the cable operators ate the broadcasters' lunch.  And you thought
digital industrial policy was a new invention.

Have you ever wondered why we've forced the wireless LAN vendors to build
their business in a swamp of Part 15 unlicensed spectrum polluted by
microwave ovens, garage door openers, retail security tags, AEGIS radar, and
vehicle location systems?  Don't they deserve to buy a homeland of their own,
or does someone actually enjoy watching them battle to the death with
cordless PBX manufacturers?

Are you tired of barely squeezing a few Kbps of data throughput out of your
narrowband cellular or packet radio link?  How'd you like to run at a fat
megabit per second?  Better yet, wouldn't it be a hoot to round up some
venture capital and take a whack at starting a local phone company to compete
with the Baby Bells without being forced to dig up the streets?  And why is
the government getting ready to auction off 200 MHz of bandwidth already
occupied by-you guessed it-cops, firemen, and electric utility companies, all
of whom will have to be relocated at great aggravation and expense, while
this big empty lot sits there growing weeds?

Frankly, the root of the problem is that no politician in his right mind
wants to pick a fight with Dan Rather's boss.  While the broadcast industry
has the right to use its wide open tract of spectrum, it doesn't actually own
any of it and, hence, has no way to sell off excess capacity.  As a result,
broadcasters quite naturally fight tooth and nail whenever someone casts a
hungry eye at their turf.  They've gotten quite expert at weaving stories
about how new television services will someday require them to use more
spectrum in order to serve the public need and "uphold the democratic ideals
of fairness, diversity and universal access".

Remember HDTV? Reserving the airwaves for this sure-to-be-a-hit product was
once deemed "important to our national competitiveness".  Never mind that the
benefits of digital compression more than offset the extra bandwidth needed
to send higher resolution pictures of Roseanne.  And OK, the broadcasters
lost a big one in 1974, when after twenty years of mud wrestling, the top 14
UHF channels were reallocated to ultimately create the cellular telephone and
Specialized Mobile Radio (SMR) industries.  Aside from that they've done a
pretty good job of holding back the tide.

But how much longer can they hang on in the face of both the growing demand
for all sorts of wireless services for businesses and consumers and the
enormous paydays that Uncle Sam is enjoying selling off spectrum?

Well, here's an answer someone might want to suggest to the information
policy wonks in Washington.  Why not let the broadcasters have all the damn
spectrum that they're actually making use of.  That's right, just hand them
the deed,  no strings attached.  No need to drag these old media squatters
off to the reservation just because we've discovered oil under their teepees.
 Let them molder in peace.  They'd be hard pressed to refuse the offer.

And if sparing them the hassle of regular license renewals is not enough to
buy them off, for every broadcast license they currently hold give them
another 6 MHz for having been such wonderful custodians of the public trust.
They can put these channels into their own private warehouses if they think
it's so critical for their future expansion or they can just sell them.  Use
tax breaks to encourage the people that really want to run TV stations for
fun or profit to buy, sell, or swap their way into one neighborhood, say
under channel 29, then throw the rest of the UHF spectrum that's not owned
into the hopper and fire up your gavel for another round of bids.

Civilization Ho.

The taxpayer wins.  The broadcasters win.  The computer industry wins.  The
telecommunications industry wins.  The consumer electronics industry wins.
The FCC wins.  American business wins.  The consumer wins.

The only losers are the grandstanding politicians who like to hold up an
occasional TV license renewal because some Howard Stern wanna-be said
something that offended their oh-so-virtuous ears.  If any other pressure
group squawks claiming that the privatization of the airwaves is
anti-diversity or some other politically correct slogan, just hand them a
designated entity bidders discount.  That seemed to shut them up last time
around and it didn't even cost anything.

The entitlement tycoons didn't interfere with the real action this summer in
the narrowband PCS auction and the stampede of front organizations claiming
to represent women or minorities that went after the dubious scraps of
Interactive Video Spectrum that the serious players ignored ended up bidding
the prices higher than they would have been anyway without the 25% discount.
 So what if 40% of these clowns defaulted on their down payments; back into
the hopper the spectrum goes for another round and a caveat emptor to you to.

As new technologies make ever higher frequencies accessible for
communications and digital compression makes the spectrum we can reach more
useful, perhaps we can learn to live with the inefficiencies of 60 year old
regulations.  And perhaps we won't have to resort to such "extreme" free
enterprise solutions to deal with the so-called spectrum shortage.  But I
seem to remember when I got my first 20 MByte hard drive that I couldn't
imagine ever filling it up.  Human ingenuity seems to have an insatiable
appetite when given free reign. Why go hungry in a land of plenty?

# # #

PS.  If you are as outraged at this sad state of affairs as I am, feel free
to send a copy of this to Reed Hundt, Al Gore, and your friendly congressman.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 27 Oct 94 16:40:04 -0500
From: [e-mail] (WALT DUBOSE - K5YFW)
Subject: If they're gonna sell frequencies, what about these?

In Mike's message of 27 Oct 1994 at 1012 PDT, he writes:
> Folks, this 2390-2400 MHz and 2302-2417 proposed frequency sell-off makes the
> 220-222 MHz fiasco seem like child's play.
>
> Saving these frequencies will require a full-court press to the FCC, Congress,
> and the White House...as well as much behind-the-scenes activity by individuals
> and groups lobbying important decisionmakers...
>
> To suggest a way to get some frequencies that are exceedingly underutilized,
> a friend sent me the following article.  Enjoy.  -Mike k3mc

Fellow Citizens,

As Director of Communications Technology for the Young Astronaut
Technology Program (YATP) (I'm a volunteer) of the North East
Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, I find it
unconceivable that the Federal Government would "sell off" such a
valuable resource.  A resource as valuable as Yellowstone National
Park or the Washington Monument.  We protect Alaska's Coast (and we
should) but a resource that holds such potential for communications
experimentation for our student (elementary through advanced degrees)
is being tossed out to the highest bidder.

For those who are educators or have friends who are educators and
realize, or who you can help to realize, the potential for loss of
this resource, *must* be convinced to respond to the FCC, their
federal congressional delegation and the federal executive branch.

These frequencies in the 2400 (13 cm) band are some of the most
precious terrestrial and space usages frequencies that we *still*
have.  To let them slip through our fingers without a fight is
unthinkable.

I have 24 students in my YATP Basic Radio Communications course this
semester.  Many will pass their Technician Plus license exam before
the Christmas holidays.  Where will we let them experiment?  Where
will they set up their ATV repeaters, what frequencies will they use
for their terrestrial and space telemetry needs.

We, as a nation, are asked to "educate" our youth in the technological
field and then the government takes away the tools and resources we
need to accomplish the mandate.

FOUL - - UNFAIR - - This unconscionable act must not be permitted.

Walt DuBose/K5YFW

*** DISCLAIMER ***
THIS IS MY OPINION AND DOES NOT REPRESENT THAT OF THE YATP, THE
SCHOOL DISTRICT, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, THE DoD, USAF, AFMC OR
KELLY AFB.  -- wdd/k5yfw

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 21:23:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: [e-mail] (Ron Atkinson)
Subject: If they're gonna sell frequencies, what about these?

My mailer said California Wireless Incorporated said this:
>
> Folks, this 2390-2400 MHz and 2302-2417 proposed frequency sell-off makes the
> 220-222 MHz fiasco seem like child's play.
>
[much stuff deleted]

I'm amazed that the FCC hasn't pushed more and more TV stations to go to
UHF. Kick them off of VHF like many countries are doing and also have done
and make all TV stations UHF  and then reallocate the TV VHF hi/low spectrum.
IT's already being done around the world right now.  I know there may be
some people that may gripe, but there's no reason for any TV stations to
occupy the VHF spectrum in any metropolitain area.  The highest UHF channel
covers a very large coverage area too.   We should ask the FCC why they
aren't following what other countries are doing by coming up with lots and
lots of VHF spectrum just by shuffling a few TV stations around.

If the station can't afford it,  then come up with the money somehow. It's
part of the price you have to pay if you want to run a TV station.


--

Ron N8FOW

AMPRnet  : [e-mail]
Internet : [e-mail]
           [e-mail]

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End of TCP-Group Digest V94 #241
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