Are TV antennas making a comeback? It may be hard to believe, but according to Joe Milicia of the Associated Press, there’s a mini-boom going on in the antenna business. And it’s not just technophobes who are buying them. 
According to Milicia: “…some consumers are spending thousands of dollars on LCD or plasma TVs and hooking them up to $50 antennas that don’t look much different from what grandpa had on top of his black-and-white picture tube.”
According to the head of an antenna company: “Eighty-year-old technology is being redesigned and rejiggered to deliver the best picture quality. It’s an interesting irony.” The reason is that quite a few people believe HD signals are actually better over-the-air, and with digital technology snow and other interference is less of a problem. “Over-the-air everything is perfect,” said one consumer.
It’s a controversial point, to say the very least. And it hard to imagine the general public returning to the world of over-the-air. Most people, one researcher is quoted as saying, don’t even know they can get HD over-the-air. And many — as Gary Shapiro has pointed out — just don’t care. Still, if there is even a short-term boom in antennas, this is a rare bit of good news for the beleagured broadcast industry.
Perhaps rotary-dial phones will come back next…
Lots going on this week on the wireless Net neutrality front. You will recall that a couple of weeks ago several of us here were blasting the new paper by Tim Wu and the petition by Skype asking the FCC to impose Carterfone-like regulatory mandates on the wireless industry. This new battle is now just known as “the wireless Net neutrality fight” here in Washington. And this week some important studies have been released opposing it by the CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, and economists from the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Phoenix Center. I don’t have time to summarize them, but here are the links to each major report if you are interested:
(1) Filing of CTIA – The Wireless Association In the Matter of Skype Communications Petition to Confirm A Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks (April 30, 2007).
(2) Robert W. Hahn, Robert E. Litan, and Hal J. Singer, “The Economics of ‘Wireless Net Neutrality,'” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, AEI-Brookings Joint Center Working Paper No. RP07-10, (April 2007).
(3) George S. Ford, Thomas M. Koutsky and Lawrence J. Spiwak, “Wireless Net Neutrality: From Carterfone to Cable Boxes,” PHOENIX CENTER POLICY BULLETIN No. 17 (April 2007).
Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle today announced a citywide wireless service coverage initiative to ensure all major cellular phone companies are able to provide full coverage through Anaheim’s 50 square miles. This is in contrast to other cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that prefer to stifle competoition by only granting city-wide access to a small number of providers like Earthlink or Google.
“It’s only fitting that the United States’ largest municipal Wi-Fi city would have complete and total coverage for all wireless devices, including cellular telephones,” said Mayor Pringle. “For 150 years in Anaheim, we have championed creativity, innovation and imagination – the same ideals that technology companies embody.”
Good for them. It’s time for leaders in other cities to do the same.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, James Gattuso, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- More states governments defy congress and reject REAL ID
- Won’t someone please think of the children?!
- the FTC’s new report on marketing violence to children
- the Child Online Protection Act
- and the .xxx domain is rejected
- How the net neutrality debate is bleeding into spectrum auctions and other quick bits
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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WASHINGTON, April 11, 2007 – The wireless industry association CTIA has retained an economic consulting firm run by the former boss of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to poke holes in proposals modifying a forthcoming auction of radio frequencies.
Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises is run by Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a Republican FCC Commissioner from 1997-2001. Martin worked as a telecommunications attorney for Furchtgott-Roth from 1997 to 1999.
Some technology companies and non-profit advocacy groups have been coalescing around a proposal released in February by a new venture called Frontline Wireless. It would create a new wireless zone for public safety communications.
But CTIA and its major members – particularly Verizon and AT&T – have come out strongly against the Frontline proposal. On April 5, CTIA CEO Steve Largent, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said in a letter to Martin that there were “issues involving the legality of the proposal.”
The wireless companies are also upset that seriously entertaining the Frontline proposal, which appears to be gaining momentum at the FCC, would delay the agency’s planned auction of spectrum frequencies in January 2008. “It is unclear how a resolution of the issues raised by the Frontline proposal could occur in time for an auction,” said Largent.
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TLF’s Adam Thierer yesterday posted about the “Other America” — the part that just doesn’t give a hoot about broadband. But get ready for another shocker: there are also some that don’t care about over-the-air television.
This was pointed out by the ever-quotable Gary Shapiro — chief of the Consumers Electronics Association — at a DC policy forum yesterday. Citing a CEA survey on how people will handle the DTV transition, he argued that consumers would make informed decisions about the DTV transition, with some buying new sets, some getting converter boxes.
“Others”, he added, “frankly, don’t care. You know, not everyone really wants free over-the-air broadcasting in their home,” Shapiro said. Its not just that 85 percent of viewers have cable or satellite service. Quite a few are quite happy with video games and DVDs, he explained. (according to Communications Daily).
Leave it to Shapiro to point out that the Emperor has no rabbit ears. In Washington circles, over-the-air TV is treated like a basic human need, like air itself. For weeks now, policymakers have been in a tizzy over the potential public reaction when analog signals are turned off in February 2009. (With the NAB even fretting over “disenfranchised” television sets.)
Certainly some people will care when the transition takes place — but the reaction will likely be less than the DC echo-chamber expects.
“There is fear-mongering going on and, frankly, this has become a political issue,” Shapiro said. “It is easy to go to government and say, ‘We need more money for something’. But the question is, is it really needed?”
It may be time to stop pushing that DTV panic button. And to put down that shovelful of money.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Cyren Call Chairman Morgan O’Brien and Frontline Wireless Chairman Janice Obuchowski each had a letter to the editor responding to my March 13th op-ed about first responder communications. I’d like to take up just a few sentences to respond.
O’Brien writes that I “audaciously misrepresent[ed]” Cyren Call’s proposal, but does not point out what that misrepresentation was. So, I can’t answer. Obuchoski, on the other hand, does point out a misstatement about Frontline’s plan. She writes,
[Brito] misstates that the plan would build “an interoperable network over spectrum purchased at auction; but Frontline wants the FCC to restrict that spectrum to public safety use.” Frontline will offer commercial service in the spectrum won at auction and provide public safety with pre-emptible access during emergencies to this commercial spectrum to provide additional capacity during peak periods of crisis when first responders’ communications requirements spike. This spectrum would remain in commercial use at all other times.
The thing is, I have always fully understood that the Frontline proposal would share he spectrum with public safety and commercial users. The error was introduced by a WSJ edit made after the last version of the op-ed that I approved the evening before it was published. (I don’t blame the WSJ; they were probably just editing for length or style.)
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Having smart readers is great! Check out the comments to my post on wireless commons, wherein TLF reader who actually know what they’re talking about elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of unlicensed spectrum and mesh networks. For example:
In general, the concept of spectrum commons is intuitively appealing. Unlicensed spectrum has already proven its value with the proliferation of WiFi and the spectrum commons approach dangles the possibility of extending the promise of unlicensed spectrum to a near utopian degree. This is always presented as an superior alternative to the sclerotic bureaucracy of the FCC making decisions on spectrum use. However, in the real world where people are actually building modems, radios and consumer devices, the regulatory context of the FCC provides more than just an economic model of how spectrum is used (i.e. spectrum as property with markets vs unlicensed or common spectrum). It also provides a technical context for engineers who design and build the technology. RF is pretty wacky stuff and although increasing computational power and antenna technologies are of critical importance and key enablers to new wireless architectures and protocols, they don’t eliminate the world of cavity filters, intermodulation distortion, adjacent channel interference, etc.
Ultimately, the either/or approach is problematic. Spectrum commons, like unlicensed spectrum before it, hold great promise and regulatory bodies should embrace it by making spectrum available. But it’s also 10 or 20 years away from being ready for primetime. There’s a lot of usable radio spectrum. The real answer is to embrace and enable multiple approaches and philosophies of spectrum usage.
More good stuff here.
So after a long hiatus I’ve finally gotten back to reading The Wealth of Networks, and am nearing completion. I continue to find Benkler’s treatment of “spectrum commons” frustrating. Here’s how he describes the issue on page 403:
As chapter 3 explains, by the time that legislatures in the United States and around the world had begun to accede to the wisdom of the economists’ [arguments for spectrum property rights], it had been rendered obsolete by technology. In particular, it had been rendered obsolete by the fact that the declining cost of computation and the increasing sophistication of communications protocols among end-user devices in a network made possible new, sharing-based solutions to the problem of how to allow users to communicate without wires. Instead of having a regulation-determined exclusive right to transmit, which may or may not be subject, to market reallocation, it is possible to have a market in smart radio equi9pment owned by individuals. These devices have the technical ability to share capacity and cooperate in the creation of wireless carriage capacity. These radios can, for example, cooperate by relaying each other’s messages or temporarily “lending” their antennae to help neighbors to help them decipher messages of senders, without anyone having exclusive use of the spectrum.
This rather surprised me, since I didn’t remember chapter 3 explaining any such thing. Looking back, I found a brief discussion of the economics of spectrum commons that (as I’ll explain below the fold) falls far short of justifying the stark claim that the need for spectrum commons “had been rendered obsolete” by technological developments by the late 1990s.
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Friend-of-a-friend Tom Lee offers another example of the evils of the unregulated cell phone market. Apparently, AT&T, Sprint, and Qwest are all blocking a free conference call service he uses, in order (Tom speculates) to twist his arm into switching to a paid conferencing service—the idea, presumably, to get them to sign up for one of those companies’ products.
Instead of punishing the companies that have screwed up, we’ll be forced to switch conferencing providers. Which, if the freeconference.com people are to be believed, is exactly what the networks are conspiring to accomplish.
Now compare the situation to my VoIP vendor. If I’m using an open protocol (and, since my home Asterisk server speaks SIP, I am), the decision to switch vendors is as simple as googling for a new provider, filling out a web form and altering a configuration file to match the credentials that will have been emailed to me. That’s how it ought to be: if Cingular starts screwing you over, forward your calls to the T-Mobile trial account you just set up — all it’d take is changing a few settings on your handset. If you like it, switch for good for whatever the current, reasonable number-portability fee is.
I find this a little bit puzzling because I would think that the FCC would already have some authority to deal with this sort of thing, since the PSTN is firmly under the commission’s control. I would think this would be a case where the FCC would have full authority to step in, as they did in the Madison River case, and tell them to knock it off. I wonder if one of the actions in the email is to call the relevant FCC commissioners’ offices.
But let me address Tom’s more general point about our collective skepticism about government regulation.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.