New Comments : Broadband.gov

Comment by mswisher2

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:20:02 PST

I completely agree, the key word in the statement is IF, which if you are not a lobbyist they probably don't want to hear from you, as you have represent no financial gain on their part. A suggestion would be to make the hearings available for a short period of time, and allow consumers or the general public to have the opportunity to weigh in, prior to any decisions being made as final. Will this happen, probably NOT, as I said, we as the general public have very little voice when it comes to the government, one that is supposed to be BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE.

Comment by Community Member

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:26:13 PST

The US government is obligated under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, not the ADA. Neither are enforced; complaints under each are useless. Why should people with disabilities be treated like second class citizens and pay taxes for something to which they receive less than equal access? The US government is supposed to be for ALL the people, not just some of "the people." As for your phone bill, the relay service surcharge isn't likely to be more than 25 cents per month. Tell me you can't afford that.

Comment by Jonathan Gael

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:01:19 PST

Routing is a function. Router is hardware. How does your cable company get the video you choose to you? They don't use routers...nothing in the middle except for passive hubs. So they use channels in a broadcast architecture. As long as a channel can be one to many, one to one or one to all, then every use case can be solved with an architecture that we all know is better at voice and video because it is synchronous...like the original that didn't work too well and needed to have middle hardware inserted to be usable by more than a handful of devices.

Comment by Community Member

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:58:54 PST

There is already a national TECH CORPS (techcorps.org) and two of their programs train middle and high school students to provide tech support - Student TECH CORPS trains and supports kids to provide tech support in their schools/communities and Student WEB CORPS trains kids in Web Dev. and then gives them the task of creating websites for small bus. or NPO who do not have a web presence.

Comment by Ann

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:16:10 PDT

the net really garbled my message. I give up. Grrrr

Comment by Ann

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:14:37 PDT

the net really garbled my message. Grrrr

Comment by albert.e.manfredi

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:39:42 PDT

Fcc, as I mentioned in my first reply, there are ways of providing rural broadband already in place. And yes, they can also be adapted to use vacant TV frequency channels (white spaces), which are much more abundantly available in rural settings than in major urban areas, and whose propagation qualities (thanks to the lower frequency range) really do help. One existing standard, directly applicable to this role, is IEEE 802.16, also called MMDS and/or WiMax. You can certainly expand the frequencies of 802.16 down to the TV UHF bands, and bundle three or four TV 6 MHz channels into one, for MMDS. In rural settings, this is perfectly plausible. (Search under WISP, for example.)

There are other possibilities too, like infrared or microwave links, or even satellite, although the latter is hampered by long round trip times. In rural settings, all of these are already more or less available, depending on location. For instance, two-way satellite links are possible in rural settings because you don't have to worry as much about the uplink portion becoming hopelessly jammed, as it would in urban settings. My long-time friend who moved to rural Pennsylvania uses two-way satellite. Has done so for years. And for sure, satellite wouldn't be limited geographically.

So it's not a technology problem. The problem is making these schemes cost effective enough to be self sustaining all across the country. Innovative companies are doing so, however, as that WISP search should prove.

I do NOT think the FCC needs to yank back a lot of TV frequency channels across the board, to solve the rural broadband problem. Where those frequencies are going to be helpful, they are already available. Where those TV frequencies would NOT help the broadband problem, i.e. in urban and suburban settings that really do require very small cells, those frequencies are much better used in braodcast.

Comment by fcc

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:29:57 PDT

Mr Manfredi.. Thank you for taking the time to share your many observations/insights.. Tho many of your points are dead on.. (like the reality of the near/far problem & the reality of physics--not to mention that I'm sure many of us heartily agree w/your Receiver Standards observations) ..taken as a whole, they may be missing the bigger picture here. (at least in my opinion)

The bigger picture is that a significant part of this discussion is not technology--but about creating a long-term sustainable Rural Broadband eco-system for our Country. (And how about this.. one that does NOT have to rely on being supported artificially by funds from USF / the Connect America fund. The continuing presence & growth of rural fixed wireless providers (WISP's) who serve millions of rural Americans proves this is possible)

FYI this type of thing did happen once before.. just look at why LPTV was created.. it was a way around not being able to cost justify a full power TV station--yet still be able to service rural needs. (..of course the sustainability of LPTV is another topic altogether)

To service rural broadband needs in the some long-term and sustainable way, (again besides solutions from USF reforms at the Commission) similar creative solutions have to be possible.

To be clear.. a "creative solution" is one that is: timely, innovative, has a reasonable cost, simple to implement, and fits the economic requirements du'jour.

A creative solution may also be possible if FCC broke down the silo's between industries a bit too. This could enable a "cross silo" approach. Again, what if cellular data was the uplink path and TV spectrum was the downlink?

This is the kind of "out of the box" thinking that the Commission needs to be able to do and also should be able to force on our silo'ed marketplace if the right outcomes are possible that do not damage existing business models.

Lastly, I wanted to state that I am not going to apologize for doing some dreaming here. IMO without dreams innovation never occurs.

Comment by albert.e.manfredi

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:19:18 PDT

By the way, fcc, just to be clear, IEEE 802.22 is not about repurposing TV stations into broadband providers. It is instead meant as a way to have broadband cellular service providers safely (presumably) share the TV spectrum with TV stations. So for example, if Channel 30 is used in your market, and Channel 31 is free, that would give a "white space device" the go-ahead to use Channel 31 for two-way broadband.

I think there are really tough problems to solve if you want to attempt this, very similar to the problems encountered when LightSquared tried using frequency channels adjacent to GPS. (They interfered with GPS receivers! Surprise!) But the main point is, using TV white spaces for broadband does NOT mean using TV transmitting stations for broadband.

The FCC recently tested a large number of actual TV receivers out in the marketplace. So they should know full well what these problems are. It has to do with actual measured selectivity of TV receivers. The ability to ignore relatively loud transmissions, from close-by white space devices, when an adjacent channel has a much weaker signal from a much more distant TV transmitter. What can easily happen is, your neighbor next door starts transmitting from his white space device, and his signal drowns out the TV station you are trying to watch, on the adjacent channel (and, it turns out, not JUST on the adjacent channel).

I think that if the FCC had any ideas along these lines, it was their responsibility to impose certain minimum TV receiver performance standards on the TV industry. But they did not do so.

Comment by albert.e.manfredi

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:57:36 PDT

I'm sorry, fcc, but I'm not even talking about "gory details." I'm talking about an understanding of the basics, before making fantastic, unsubstantiated claims. Which unsubstantiated claims, by the way, have a way of distracting the clueless, and slowing progress down as a result. Remember that many so-called "decision makers" are technical illiterates. So when they hear magical promises, then comes a tedious process of having to disabuse them of their misunderstandings.

IEEE 802.22 doesn't violate any laws of physics. The simple fact is, a big stick TV station, as they all tend to be, CAN be repurposed to provide some kind of link for broadband. But if you pretend to keep the big stick architecure of that station "as is," then you are enormously limited in the broadband service you can provide.

For example, if you pretend to provide the same coverage for broadband service that the TV station was previously providing for broadcast, you might be able to provide the broadband downlink for, oh, maybe 5 or 6 farmhouses out in the distant boonies. That's about it. And then you have to install the uplink structure, which you allude to in your post, which right there means this is no simple repurposing. Of course, this can be done, but I doubt you'll wow anyone with the scaling. (But I agree that this use of white spaces could potentially make sense, in special cases like very rural locations, if the users are willing to pay the freight.)

And this should not be a big surprise. The best solution for one problem is not usually the best solution for a different problem.

TV and radio stations are amazingly efficient users of spectrum and of other resources, if you are talking about BROADCAST. Meaning, one-to-all. This archtecture is quite inefficient if you are talking about providing individualized two-way links, to every user. For that, you have to shorten the RF link as much as possible, and leverage entirely off a "backhaul network" (which is usually a network of fiber optic cabling, and not something the TV station would have owned).

So, to provide broadband service that actually scales to thousands and millions of people, those single towers the broadcasters depend on simply will not do the trick. If this problem were so trivially simple to solve, it would have been solved by now.