# FCC Taking Airwave Spectrum and Giving to Broadband Internet- your opinion? (article)



## wokofshame (Apr 24, 2011)

Your opinions? Seems like sending internet over the air is kind of inefficient. Well 1st off it seems the idea of owning frequencies is fucked.
I do like the part at the end though where the Fox news guy is bitching. The internet is a much free-er medium than big-money controlled TV stations.
Any thoughts?

The New York Times, Thursday, April 21, 2011

F.C.C. Questioned on Its Far-Reaching Plan to Expand Broadband AccessBy MATT RICHTEL and BRIAN STELTER
Federal regulators on Tuesday made public the details of their ambitious policy to encourage the spread of high-speed Internet access. But their 376-page proposal, the National Broadband Plan, was met with a chorus of questions, even from the staunchest advocates of its goals. 
The policy aims to â€œharness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues,â€ Julius Genachowski said. 
Telecommunications companies praised the intent but worried that new regulations might impede rather than encourage their progress in expanding Internet access. Industry analysts said the plan was both too ambitious and not detailed enough, and consumer advocates doubted it alone would lead to more affordable broadband service at adequate speeds. 

The criticisms were largely tempered by a strong embrace of what is by far the most aggressive effort to date by regulators to encourage widespread adoption of broadband at much higher speeds than most Americans have today. 

The plan, put forth by the Federal Communications Commission, also proposes to allot more wireless spectrum for mobile devices, redirect some subsidies toward broadband access, develop a nationwide network for emergency first responders and create a â€œdigital literacy corpsâ€ to train new users. 

â€œThey should be commended for the documentâ€™s remarkable breadth,â€ said Craig Moffett, a telecommunications industry analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, but he added that such scope could also be a liability. The plan â€œsets up a hundred different battles over funding and spectrum and even set-top box design, and each on its own would represent an ambitious agenda.â€ 

He added, â€œThe risk is that the planâ€™s very scope will limit its real-world impact.â€ 

For its part, the F.C.C. on Tuesday characterized its Congressionally mandated plan as a much-needed step for keeping the nation competitive. The policies echo a generations-old effort to provide every home with a telephone, itself once seen as a communications tool central to economic and social development. 

The broadband proposal, which the agency sent to Congress on Tuesday, â€œis necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues,â€ the agency chairman, Julius Genachowski, said in a statement. 

President Obama said the plan recalled the way â€œpast generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the transcontinental railroad and the Interstate highways.â€ 

For most Americans who already have broadband access the most important part of the 10-year plan may involve speed. The F.C.C. hopes that by 2020 at least 100 million households will have access to broadband capable of running 100 megabits a second, and for community institutions like schools and hospitals to have access at 10 times that speed. 

The average at-home connection is three to four megabits a second now, speeds seen as ultimately unable to deliver increasingly rich multimedia content. But industry analysts say that the governmentâ€™s ability to influence access speeds is limited. 

Some aspects will take years to put into place and require Congressional action. Notably, legislators would have to allow some proceeds from the spectrum auctions to be diverted to broadcasters. The F.C.C. hopes to use that spectrum to lead to the creation of wireless Internet access, to enhance competition and keep consumer costs in check. 

But some television station owners are wary of the auction plans. That is one of the little battles that seems likely to emerge involving deep-pocketed advocates, industry analysts said. 

One F.C.C. commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, said in a statement that she was â€œvery concernedâ€ about the tradeoff. â€œIt is unclear at this point whether the Internet can currently replace these trusted sources,â€ she said. 

And some analysts said that even if the spectrum ultimately became available, it might create wireless access but fail to create competition for the much higher-speed Net access. Wireless access is roughly one-twentieth of the speed of the envisioned 100-megabit lines, said Dave Burstein, editor of DSL Prime, an industry newsletter. 

â€œThey talk, talk, talk about affordability, but when you look at the plan, most peoplesâ€™ prices are going to go up,â€ Mr. Burstein said. It typically costs $100 a month for Net access at speeds of 50 megabits to 100 megabits. 

Mr. Burstein said those prices were double the cost in places like France and England and yet the plan, he added, does little to bring those down. 

He also asserted that the goal of getting high-speed access to 100 million homes was already within reach. About 50 million homes have access to broadband service of 50 to 100 megabits, and the cable industry says 100 million homes will have such access within five years. 

Chief among its goals, the F.C.C. wants future broadband investment to be focused on the areas where gaps in service remain. It will direct this investment in part through the Universal Service Fund, a program for telephone and Internet access, costing $8 billion annually, paid through a phone bill surcharge. Over time, the subsidies for Internet will increase and those for phone will dissipate, with the knowledge that people can make online calls. 

â€œSome of the details are lacking, particularly on Universal Service Fund reform,â€ said Dan Mitchell, a vice president for the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, a group that represents rural providers and worries that the proposals to change phone carrier costs will curtail the providersâ€™ abilities to expand infrastructure. 

â€œBroadly, theyâ€™re stating the right things,â€ he added. â€œBut the devil is always in the details.â€
In Mr. Genachowskiâ€™s favor are estimates that incentive auctions will generate $24 billion or more for the Treasury. He argues that the reallocation of spectrum to wireless broadband â€œwill generate benefits to our economy and society an order of magnitude 10 times that amount.â€œ 

But there has been little public discussion about how much of the proceeds broadcasters would receive, an omission that has left station owners wary. 

There is plenty of evidence of growing demand for wireless broadband. Just one year ago, the commission projected that mobile data traffic would increase 35-fold over the next five years â€” an estimate that was quickly rendered obsolete with the introduction of the iPad. 

That a new technology could become so popular so quickly demonstrates the need for additional spectrum, Mr. Genachowski says, because those technologies can spur new ways to address â€œmajor national challenges like education, health care, energy, transportation and public safety.â€œ The F.C.C. could, of course, simply move to take spectrum back from broadcasters when their licenses expire, but that would probably result in lengthy court battles. The F.C.C. wants broadcasting spectrum because those wavelengths are particularly hearty â€” they travel well through buildings, an advantage for mobile smartphones. 

But Mr. Genachowski says the F.C.C. feels that it cannot simply grab spectrum and believes that buyers would pay more for uninterrupted airwaves. So it is asking broadcasters to either turn over their spectrum for cash and go out of business, or voluntarily move to another frequency, freeing chunks of space. For technical reasons, the move would not necessarily force stations to change their familiar channel number. 

â€œNo broadcaster will be forced to offer up spectrum for auction,â€œ Mr. Genachowski said. But â€œvoluntary canâ€™t mean undermining the potential effectiveness of an auction by giving every broadcaster a new and unprecedented right to keep their exact channel location.â€œ 

Translation: The F.C.C. might forcibly move some stations if it does not get enough volunteers. It also has proposed assessing â€œspectrum feesâ€ on broadcasters, which in most cases now receive their licenses for free. 

Broadcasters say they are being shortchanged, because broadcastingâ€™s model of transmitting from one station to millions of viewers is more efficient than one-to-one wireless communication. â€œWe understand broadband is important, but we think broadcasting is important, too,â€œ said Alan Frank, president of Post-Newsweek Stations, a division of the Washington Post Company that owns six stations. 

Other owners are more blunt. â€œIâ€™ve never heard so much nonsense in my life,â€œ said Charles Glover, chairman and chief executive of Telos Digital Television Networks, which owns the Fox station in Portland, Me. 

â€œThis is an actual cash grab from all of these people who have dedicated our lives to build these systems.â€ By taking spectrum, Mr. Glover said, â€œyou are about to start a train wreck that we will not be able to come back from.â€


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