Broadcasters seek to slow action on FCC's white space ruling

We knew they didn't like it, and now they're going out of their way to prove it. After FCC chairman Kevin Martin set forth a proposal to use the freed spectrum from the forthcoming 2009 digital TV transition for bringing mobile broadband to more locales, broadcasters who'd rather not deal with the trouble are stepping in with a collective "nuh uh!" Station owners and the four television networks filed an "emergency request" on Friday afternoon in hopes of convincing the FCC to hold off on its plan to vote on white space rules until "everyone had a chance to comment on the findings." The report that's mentioned found that no significant interference would come into play should the waves be opened up for unlicensed devices, but a spokeswoman for the National Association of Broadcasters stated that "the FCC is misinterpreting the actual data collected by their own engineers." Whether or not NAB will get the 45-day grace period it's asking for, however, remains to be seen.

[Via Mobile Tech Today, image courtesy of Orbitcast]

[CB17 @ Oct 18th 2008 4:49PM]

Between this and the Pandora garbage they tried to pull, as far as I'm concerned NAB can lick my....popsicle stick.

[Nual @ Oct 18th 2008 4:55PM]

This is Engadget, why i see human face three posts in a row.

[jimmyfinch @ Oct 18th 2008 5:09PM]

Maybe a Pop-Up book would be more your speed.

I, for one, can read (and write).

[egloskerry @ Oct 18th 2008 5:22PM]

Because they're really cyborgs!

[SteveJr_Ri @ Oct 18th 2008 6:07PM]

Didn't know Kruger had a human face...haha

[High Ranks make you sterile @ Oct 19th 2008 12:40PM]

Can we have illustrations?

[Charbax @ Oct 18th 2008 6:20PM]

The White Spaces are so revolutionary and so awesome, they are going to put out of business following multi-trillion dollar monopolies:

1. Broadcasters are going out of business cause of this (good bye CBS News Katie Couric!!)

2. Telecoms and ISPs good bye AT&T!!

3. UHF Microphone manufacturers are pissed, cause they want all the bandwidth from themselves. Sure a 1960s technology wireless microphone not getting $10 technological upgrade is more important then closing the digital divide.

Anyways, white spaces are going to be so awesome!

I'm looking forward for a FON network built using White Spaces, where you install a $10 router on your ADSL, Cable or Fiber at home, and with that you expand and improve the White Spaces free wireless Internet coverage in your city. And with that, you get unlimited free wireless Internet wherever you go in the whole world.

With that, the Youtube HD revolution is going to take over Katie Courics job. And it is going to be free for everyone. The US making this happen in February 2009, this is going to be copied by all the other countries in the world instantly. So awesome!

[egloskerry @ Oct 18th 2008 6:24PM]

Let us know when you're done tripping on acid.

[morgan @ Oct 18th 2008 7:12PM]

Although your Ideas are a bit out there I do agree with a few points...

This is the exact same thing that happened with Gutenberg and a little invention called the printing press.

[engadget.mlc @ Oct 19th 2008 12:01PM]

God. Tech nerds think that all the world just needs is a bit of their brilliance. It always has to be some grand conspiracy of cheapness or corporate trickery holding back hardware. Not everything is a new firewire-free Macbook.

How the hell do *you* think that you can fix the pro wireless microphone with $10 (or, heck, let's say $100) of extra hardware?

I've spoken with some wireless microphone engineers (the ones making them, if there was any ambiguity), and they're friggin' brilliant.

A few things that you'll magically need to solve (and some naturally conflict with each other):
Latency, intermodulation, signal quality during interference, and bandwidth.

Get started. You clearly have an opportunity to be really rich.


The thing here is that the whitespace devices tested so far interfered so badly in the tests that they came off like a bad joke. They interfered with *cable* television. Cable. They interfered with analog TV, digital TV, wireless mics, etc. Perhaps the FCC should have set aside the C block for the wild-west devices, but they didn't. If they're planning on approving devices that stomp on spectrum like the ones that they've tested, then they're planning on renegging on existing spectrum contracts.

[JeffDM @ Oct 19th 2008 1:33PM]

I know it might be a nice concept to try to make a huge mesh network, latency will be a b!tch. And who is going to cross oceans and low population density areas? Then there are so many malware and sniffing possibilities. Then this has to connect to the rest of the internet to reach areas that this mesh doesn't cover. Who is going to pay for that? The incumbents would try to trip up any customers that try to "share" out their connection to just any comer that's on a metropolitan mesh. I see too many choke points to making it a viable system. It's certainly not going to be $10 hardware any time soon either.

[Charbax @ Oct 19th 2008 2:09PM]

Fixing the existing microphones is a $10 add-on, source for this is official Google Public Policy blog. Check for yourself. Also channels 51-52 would be reserved exclusively for wireless microphones if you don't want to purchase that $10 adapter which basically has GPS, wireless database synch and used channel detector in it.

The $10 router is what WiFi routers cost to manufacture today. White Spaces is none other then WiFi 2.0, same type of technology. Fact is the White Spaces FON-type router is going to cost $10 each to mass manufacture within months. And meshing is not very necessary. You install a such WiFi 2.0 hotspot sharing device on your ADSL, Cable or Fiber optic connection at your home, and it covers about 500 meters diameter around your home. The whole point of the White Spaces is that it is exactly like WiFi, it just reaches much further, and much easier.

Fact is, with such revolutionnary White Spaces hotspot sharing routers, you can cover a whole city with free wireless broadband with just a few thousand hotspots spread around, installed by users themselves in their homes. And with Obama's net neutrality policy, no ISPs will be allowed to block their ADSL, Cable or Fiber customers from installing such hotspot 2.0 White Spaces bandwidth sharing device on their connection. Add a few official antennas, and you've got full wireless broadband coverage using White Spaces for a fraction of the cost of HSDPA networks. Thus much better bandwidth can be achieved cause you can also have much higher density between antennas.

[Charbax @ Oct 19th 2008 2:14PM]

Anyone saying that White Spaces devices interfere with old fashionned DTV or wireless microphone signals are simply insulting the intelligence of 100% of scientists, who all unanymously say that interference is SCIENTIFICALLY impossible. Plain simply impossible.

It is obvious that anyone saying that white spaces devices would interfere would be working for one of the corrupt old media monopolies.

[Johan S @ Oct 18th 2008 6:34PM]

People, it's time to rally for the FCC to allow white space usage. Don't let the NAB preserve its ill gotten monopoly.

[Joe @ Oct 18th 2008 7:31PM]

Poor FCC, the one time they do something to try and help the little guy out and the huge broadcasting overlords bring down their silver hammers. And here I am, trying to jury rig my Casio keyboard to interfere with my goldfish's bluetooth headset while the authorities I so foolishly rail against are valiant in their struggle to just keep everything working right.

Seriously though, I want teh networkz. FCCk those greedy bastards and let's hold it down behind the FCC with our 2.4GHz cordless phones and our Mattel walkie talkies!

[Trip @ Oct 18th 2008 8:23PM]

If you actually read the FCC's study, it turns out that WSDs interfere with cable as well. There are no white spaces in cable.

This isn't just broadcasters complaining about nothing. This is a serious issue, WSDs should not be allowed.

[Trip @ Oct 19th 2008 12:10AM]

No, what you see is an OET report in my hand. It contradicts the position Kevin Martin has taken, and if people would bother to read it, they would see that WSDs are a really, really bad idea.

[Rifter @ Oct 19th 2008 7:27AM]

I've read the report or most of it (until I hit the graphs). You apparently didn't read between the lines. The FCC isn't looking for a 100% this is do-able now. It was looking to see if its even possible to do this in the first place and it is. Here is what the public needs to know:

1. ALL the hardware used is ALL prototype hardware. This isn't some production model set of hardware.
2. Only 4 companies / hardware setups were used in the tests.
3. The companies included: Microsoft, Motorola, Philips, Adaptrum, and Institute for Infocomm Research.
4. The tests WERE successful in that they WERE able to detect when a frequency was occupied.
5. The tests state they were NOT 100% right every time, HOWEVER this CAN be fixed with more hardware/software revisions.

And #5 is WHY the FCC is allowing this thus far. The Cable Company (notice I did not make it plural) and the telcos are ticked because it will impact their current mopo- I mean business practices.

For all intents and purposes the FCC is doing what it is supped and that is look out for the consumer on spectrum that we the tax payers have paid for in the first place. We don't pay for the telephone lines, we pay to USE them. The telcos just have to sit back and rake in money. Granted they do have to maintain the lines but the upkeep on those are well under what they rape - I mean rake in. Not only that, Verizon hardly does a decent deal of actually maintaining said lines; I know this from personal experience...and not just from a consumer standpoint but from a business stand point. Businesses are good, big business is good, however when big business starts to impede the ability for small businesses to grow then big business becomes a hindrance and holds back innovation. Look at R&D in the US and compare it to say Germany, France, Japan, and China. We're screwed when it comes to Robotics...Japan is light years ahead of us. We've got what? The romba? Japan is fast on track to making a flipplin sex robot, not that is normal or anything but still.

Back on topic....

Needless to say this would help fill in the wireless gaps and make the internet just a little more ubiquitous which is how it should be. It reminds me of the movie Ai, but I suppose we run the risk of information overload on ourselves. This wouldn't fix broadband in rural areas, but it would help fill the gap for low income areas in larger cities where wifi is already prevalent along with FIOS, cable, etc. It merely *expands* those services. However, I suppose I could see a new TOS that states you are not to share your bandwidth in any way, shape, or form. Which it may already and with the caps that Comcast has in place it would be a tad hard to keep a hotspot open 24/7 if you don't have some way of keeping ppl from streaming music, video or downloading.

This *would* make it easier to find places to eat, get maps from google maps / mapquest, let alone *FREE*. Sure you can do it on your cell phone, but I'd rather have a white space cell phone that can hop onto a network that is free than pay .99 PER Kilobyte or whatever the current gouging - er going rate is with my current carrier.

So yes, for consumers this is ALL good. Sure we *might* get a few stations messed up once in a blue moon due to a device that is nearby (eg your own device), but those issues will be resolved, like I said earlier, with later revisions of software/hardware. Which, I forgot to add that these devices would only be localized...it wouldn't affect your brother's tv 1 or even 2 miles away. Although I do have to point out where a commercial product for a business to be made then it would potentially affect a larger community due to the larger output, but this would be *highly* unlikely as the company could be fined very heavily by the FCC.

[Rifter @ Oct 19th 2008 7:32AM]

Just wanted to update and correct one thing:

The FCC is actually for:

The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. - From the About page at the FCC website

[Colonel Panic @ Oct 18th 2008 8:52PM]

(Not so) Dear NAB,
Put down your hammers and/or legal teams. We know you want those oh-so-precious MHz that will be left over after the digital transition, but why can't you guys be cool for once and let us use that whitespace for mobile broadband! Think about it, the faster the speed and coverage area, the more people will go to your website and websites of the respective networks and stations, earning you enough ad money to cover the loss!

May the internet rule over the whitespace,

Colonel Panic

[High Ranks make you sterile @ Oct 18th 2008 9:02PM]

Let's all get on our pirate radio stations and complain!

[Valicore @ Oct 18th 2008 10:30PM]

This is stupid. The world has changed so much since these original licenses were issued. I don't understand why these companies that still run commercials and get to broadcast to anything that can receive it in these huge swatches of bandwidth feel they're entitled to anything, this country, for the moment, is still somewhat based on capitalism: innovate or die, right?

[dchem @ Oct 20th 2008 4:18PM]

The problem is that radio frequencies should never have been allocated and controlled the way that it has been.

NAB is in the wrong in this case, but to think about the principle of the matter, so is FCC for having the authority to conduct auctions of frequency blocks and to regulate them in cases other than for the purpose of limiting criminal use (or other externalities) of the said radio frequencies.

By what right can government claim to have owned these blocks of frequencies in the first place? The government has set the bad precedent ever since they began to regulate them in that manner. It would be as though government can claim that they can bulldoze your house down for public projects... oh wait, they already do that under eminent domain...

Unfortunately these regulatory system has been created long before people thought open and self-regulating standards were good idea.