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Groove1670
Guest
Television spectrum auction. Big money?
Article credit: fybush.com
http://www.fybush.com/nerw-20151019/
Article credit: fybush.com
http://www.fybush.com/nerw-20151019/
It's not unlike the government destroying the railroad business while it was building the federal highway system.
The federal highway system (the Interstate Highway System) was created first and foremost as a national defense capability on which to move military assets from place to place in an expedited manner.
I don't understand why the broadcast industry is being negatively impacted to provide more spectrum for the mobile industry. Doesn't everyone over the age of 6 already have a mobile phone in this country?
The point is there are two different sets of rules. Broadcast companies can't buy the frequencies they use, while telecom companies can. Telecom is being allowed to grow at the expense of broadcast frequencies.
Over the past two decades the Commission has been evolving from a regulator of all things airwaves, to just another government revenue collector.
But if any railroad assets were destroyed by building the highway system it was passenger traffic. Except for the heavily traveled Northeast corridor (BosWash) passenger traffic has dwindled to a minimum and operates at the mercy of freight traffic. It was the development of cheap airline flights that mostly killed off long haul passenger rail traffic and cars killed off the short hauls.
I also share Big A's emergency and national disaster information concerns.
My local city has an emergency information plan: notices placed on bulletin boards located in certain neighborhoods. They're not counting on the cell system working in case of a major earthquake. They probably figure that local broadcasters will be on the air in some form.
Don't mean to propagate the off-topic; but many States and Counties around the U.S. have implemented and are encouraging the use of local public safety apps for smartphones.