Entries tagged as ‘fcc’
Like many people with limited technical acumen, I am labeled as the “tech guy” whenever I go home for the holidays. This Christmas break I was destined to spend some time setting up the digital-to-analog television signal converter for my parents.
My parents live in rural Northern Illinois, about 90 miles or so west of Chicago. The majority of their television channels come out of the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River with a smattering of stations coming in from other markets, mostly Rockford. The signal has never really been that good, with what I always considered a lot of visual interference and an audio signal that clearly had lost some of the range of audio signal.
I watched with interest the trial balloon for the digital TV signal transition the FCC held in Wilmington, NC this past fall with interest. One of the interesting outcomes of the trial was that people on the fringe of the Wilmington television market found that they could not receive the digital TV signal over the air. With analog you begin to see a degradation of signal quality, and many people can receive degraded quality signals (such as my parents) and you just “learn to live with it” if you don’t want to spring for DirecTV or Dish. With digital the drop-off in quality is very steep and television with degraded signal reception simply becomes unwatchable.
Because of the experience of people in the rural areas around Wilmington I was very skeptical that my parent’s would be able to receive a digital signal from their analog television stations. We agreed that they would need to see about this so that my parents could finally spring for satellite if they weren’t going to be able to receive their digital signal. As an aside, I fully expect that DirecTV and Dish will see a considerable uptick in new subscriptions from rural subscribers in the first months of 2009 as people either transition direct to satellite or find after the analog turn-off that they have no over-the-air television signal.
I’m surprised and happy to report that my parents’ are able to receive the digital signal from their Quad Cities stations (CBS affiliate WHBF, NBC affiliate KWQC, ABC affiliate WQAD and Fox affiliate KLJB). My parents were amazed by the improved picture and sound quality. They’ve also go new channels offered by their traditional stations such as local weather channels, classic TV channels and alternate programming schedules. They’re also able to receive new channels they were never able to receive before– PBS was always a crapshoot that depended on the weather. So they’ve gone from four channels to about 15 over-the-air channels and a much higher quality television experience. This has all been a very pleasant surprise.
Not everything is flowers and sunshine, though. Brace yourself for a few moments with August Rooney:
- The remote control for the Magnavox digital converter is definitely not designed with senior citizens in mind. It has tiny buttons with itty-bitty print. Why does it seem that remote control designers must all have some sort of grudge against their fellow man that remote controls are designed so poorly?
- The converter box also adds a layer of complexity to the act of turning on the TV. It drives me crazy that between receivers, tuners and components turning on a TV has become more complex than launching a space shuttle. Because of this issue and the ugly remote control I see gifts of unified remote controls in my parents’ future.
- My Mom still records shows with a VCR, and my efforts to convince her to get a TiVo have continually been rebuffed. The converter box adds additional layers of complexity to recording shows and greatly reduced the functionality of the VCR: she can’t record one channel and watch something else anymore or program the VCR to change channels to record different shows. Maybe/hopefully this will push Mom into the TiVo camp, and I’m actively seeking advice on the best choices for over-the-air DVRs with digital tuners.
Categories: Consumerism · TV · Technology
Tagged: digital tv, fcc
I must have been just busy enough with work and whatnot this week to miss this. This evening I caught an entry on Om Maliks blog a few days ago commenting on the double standard that the FCC is evidently applying between cable and incumbent telecom providers. Om refers to an article in the Wall Street Journal summarizing a request for information sent by the FCC to Comcast and Time Warner as part of the review of their pending acquisition of Adelphia.
From the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
The FCC’s information request also focuses on several delicate areas, including agreements for regional sports programming and “net neutrality” rights — essentially preventing companies from discriminating against Internet traffic. The latter request is notable because FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wasn’t particularly concerned about net neutrality in two recent Bell mergers.
The segment of the original FCC request to which I believe the Journal is referring is as follows:
Provide all Documents relating to deliberations and decisions to stop, limit, hinder, slow, or otherwise impede the transmission of information over the Companys Residential High-speed Internet infrastructure based on the software application, source, destination, or other characteristic of the traffic. Documents regarding unsolicited commercial e-mail and malicious software need not be produced.
I suppose on some level we should be relieved that the FCC is paying attention to the issue of network neutrality. There are still two outstanding issues, though:
- The Chairmans recent comments basically saying there was no need to apply requirements for network neutrality to incumbent local exchange (telephone) carriers indicate that the FCC really doesnt care about this issue or doesnt see a reason to care. Senior executives at AT&T and BellSouth have made it clear that they intend or at the very least desire to apply a tiered approach to Internet traffic. This situation clearly calls for some sort of guidance from the regulator.
- The language of the request itself focuses on the possibility that the cable companies might impede certain kinds of traffic. It doesnt address the potential for prioritizing certain kinds of traffic. Both are at issue, because it is entirely conceivable to prioritize certain kinds of Internet traffic to such an extent that other Internet traffic is de facto de-prioritized.
Categories: CI · Technology
Tagged: fcc, net neutrality
From Reuters:
“I’m hesitant to adopt rules that would prevent anti-competitive behavior where there hasn’t been significant evidence of a problem,” [Fcc Chairman Kevin] Martin said at a conference luncheon by Comptel, a group representing competitive telephone carriers.
“That doesn’t mean people don’t have a lot of concern about potential problems, but there’s a significant difference between potential problems and problems that occur,” he said
Well, crap. While I can’t disagree with the rhetoric that potential problems and real problems are not the same thing, the recent comments from AT&T and BellSouth executives make it pretty to clear to me that there was a need for some sort of clarification on this subject from the FCC. This is not what I would have hopped the Chairman would articulate.
Hopefully Congress will clarify this situation better.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: fcc, net neutrality
The FCC has backed away from a requirement that Voice over IP providers will be required to switch off customers who have not acknowledged warnings from their providers as to the limitations of VoIP and 911/E-911. The Associated Press article is here. Evidently VoIP providers whose customer response rate is below 90 percent have until the end of October to get their acknowledgment numbers up.
This is a very surprising move, but Im glad to see the FCC take this step. The original requirements laid down looked to be very onerous. The cynic in me compared the requirement placed on VoIP providers to the lenience the wireless carriers have enjoyed with their own 911 requirements and the incumbents enjoyed for a long time with local number portability. That cynical guy thought that perhaps if one had the lobbying muscle of the RBOCs and wireless carriers your deadlines could be taken as mere suggestions, being moved again, again and again. Perhaps the performance of voice over Internet services when traditional land line and wireless phones failed in the wake of the London Underground and bus bombing and Hurricane Katrina made the FCC realize the mistake in mandating disconnection of customers. From the AP article:
“To have a system where you risk cutting customers off in such a short time frame? It’s unintended consequences,” Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire said in a speech last week at VON, a conference that revolves around Internet phone technology, which is also known as VoIP or Voice-over-Internet-Protocol.
“Cutting someone off from their voice service carries enormous risks,” Sununu said.
Amen, Senator. Perhaps I should check my cynicism a bit. At least for today. Maybe.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: fcc, VoIP
There’s a lot being written in the tech blogosphere today about a supposition from Jeff Krauss that the recent court decision asserting the FCC had no authority to impose a broadcast flag requirement on producers of HDTV equipment would actually hurt the Emergency Alert System. The credit for Mr. Krauss is “President of Telecommunications and Technology Policy.” I’m having a little bit of difficulty finding out what post, exactly he holds currently, though I did pick up this dated (1982!) biography in a quick Google search:
Dr. Jeffrey A. Krauss is Director, Regulatory Policies of M/A-COM Laboratories. He coordinates the development of M/A-COM corporate policy with respect to the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory and standards-setting organizations. Formerly, he was Assistant Chief of the FCC Office of Plans and Policy where his primary area of concentration was the policy impact of new technology. He received the Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1969 and has participated in numerous symposia and conferences.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same person, but if we are, he certainly sounds like somebody who might know of where he speaks on this topic. More research on his current post later, but we’ll give the man some credit for having the technical savvy to back up his opinion.
That said, I don’t really understand his reasoning, nor do I agree. From the outset I thought the proposed mandated approach to a broadcast flag sounded like something well outside of the FCC’s authority. Even Mr. Krauss’s examples of FCC mandate sare all examples of Congress granting the FCC specific authority:
The District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals said the FCC overstepped its jurisdiction. The FCC has full jurisdiction over broadcast television signals. But it has only limited jurisdiction over TV receivers. It can regulate the receivers RF emissions to prevent them from causing radio interference, just like personal computers and any other electronic device. It can require them to tune and demodulate analog and TV broadcasts, because of authority granted in the 1962 All Channel Receiver Act. It can require them to decode and display closed captions, because of authority granted in the 1990 Television Decoder Circuitry Act. It can require them to be equipped with V-chip program blocking capability, because of authority granted in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. It can regulate whether a TV set can be labeled cable-ready because of Sections 624A and 629 of the Communications Act, the Navigation Device sections.
So what this seems to say to me is that to impose the broadcast flag mandate on equipment makers the FCC would require the authority granted by Congress for that specific task. This seems like a reasonable exercise of legislative oversight to me. If the industry wants this flag so bad they should lobby for it.
An in-depth dissection of the argument can also be found here. I had some trouble loading this page and eventually had to resort to using the Google cache of the page.
The piece is also talked about on Engadget and Techdirt. My own comment (posted to Engadget) was whether or not the EAS was primarily the responsibility of broadcasters versus equipment manufacturers. I still stand by my initial questions on Engadget, though I’ll admit Mr. Krauss’s piece gave me some additional background into the Emergency Access System and the impacts it has had on manufacturers of cable boxes and cable companies.
That being said, I still think it’s a huge stretch to say that the implications of EAS requirements for equipment extends to the FCC the authority to require broadcast flags. The former was incorporated into a mandate for the FCC to determine what constitutes cable ready equipment. Mr. Krausss expansive argument reads like the Chewbacca defense.
Categories: Politics · Technology
Tagged: fcc
