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back to article FCC airwaves auction opens bidding

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has formally opened the bidding process on a spectrum auction that looks to raise billions in revenues and expand the coverage and quality of wireless broadband networks. The Commission on Tuesday kicked off the "clock phase" portion of the auction, in which telco providers submit …

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  1. Mike 16

    Promised?

    Didn't they also promise that the move to all-digital would not drastically decrease the radius of tolerable viewing? And, OK, maybe they never promised that they wouldn't allow the CableCos to interpret "Must Carry" to mean "Must carry some vaguely plausible rendition of over the air content, but hey, it's OK with us if you downsample 1080p to 480i, compress the crap out of it, and reduce the error correction. The actual resolution, although maybe not compression and error correction, can be an added-cost option", which is of course the way it turned out. (aka a "fee for not spitting in the soup")

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  2. kq6ly1

    new equipment

    TV Broadcasters are planning to change to ATSC 3.0 The new standard using a different modulation scheme allows 2 HD streams in 1 6mhz channel. The down side the broadcasters will be buying new hardware and the consumer will have to buy new hardware to receive these signals. Just another example of the government twisting the truth or not understanding the market

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    1. JeffyPoooh
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Re: new equipment

      "...6mhz channel..."

      What's a "mhz"?

      Is it anything similar to a megahertz (MHz)?

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: new equipment

      It remains to be seen whether ATSC 3.0 is adopted at all, given that it is NOT backwards compatible with current gen ATSC and thus every single TV and other device with an ATSC tuner in it would become obsolete.

      Anyway, there are already plenty of stations delivering two HD channels in a single 6 MHz RF channel. While ATSC 3.0 improves the bit rate from 19.2 Mbps to 26 Mbps or so, the main attraction is OFDM modulation to reduce multipath issues and support for far more efficient HEVC encoding and 4K (assuming 4K OTA broadcast ever actually arrives in the US....I'm kind of skeptical)

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  3. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Auctions of spectrum should be for long term, renewable leases only

    The idea of selling spectrum is bad policy. It should be leased.

    The lease duration can be quite long (fairly considering investment and return), just not infinite. Perhaps ten years (renewable of course), or maybe even 20 years if justified by the numbers. Certainly not more than 25 years ever, even in the most extreme case.

    Renewals should be generous (almost assumed), provided that the company has adequately served the 'Public Interest, Convenience and Necessity'. If not, then the barriers to automatic renewal can be raised in proportion to the public outrage.

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  4. Timo

    these are really just transfer payments

    While these look really great (make the operators pay for the spectrum), we all know that it will come around to the general public as higher service prices. These enormous companies don't have billions of dollars stuffed in the mattress somewhere.

    Other countries dole out spectrum by way of other methods but those also have problems. The law of unintended consequences is one of those things that is hard to get around.

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