The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part II

In Part I, we examined the recent moves by both AT&T and Verizon to gobble up as much desirable bandwidth as possible for their insatiable LTE deployments. In Part II, we’ll see that insatiable is no understatement and what’s likely to happen as we get strapped for 4G bandwidth

UHF and microwave bandwidth deals are trading briskly, but soon all the sales that can be made will be. Lucrative prices will lure those who are holding bandwidth from previous spectrum auctions into selling it to larger players who are in full 4G deployment mode. When it’s all gone, then what?

By the time 4G LTE has spread across the nation, user demand will catch up with channel capacity. At that point, bandwidth rationing will occur. You won’t get access in a particular location until someone else moves away from the tower. Even HD video on demand and the online automobile may get stifled by too many users trying to access too few transmissions. Internet based application development that thrives on ever higher performance devices and unlimited bandwidth will grind to a halt. Technology will be stuck in place for the foreseeable future.

That’s the nightmare that both technologists and regulators will scramble to avoid. It’s happening already. The successful spectrum auctions to date have whetted the appetite of government officials, who see a way to generate revenue for the Treasury without disgruntled constituents howling about having to fork it over. The business community loves this capitalistic approach. Big telecom carriers are happy to bid up the prices for each precious channel because they know that the return on their investment will be many times over.

Look for more spectrum auctions in the next decade. The FCC is reported to be scouring every nook and cranny of channel assignments to find pieces that can be sold off at billion dollar rates. I expect that the days of over the air TV broadcasting are numbered. One suggestion being floated is for TV stations to combine their broadcasts on a single broadcast channel using the multi-program capability of the digital TV system. The incentive will be that the station owners can share in the revenue generated by selling off their licenses.

Actually, to say that over the air television is dying is not the case at all. What’s likely to happen is a technology shift away from high power broadcasts using TV industry specific standards to video programming delivered via mobile broadband. Some will raise the alarm that our legacy of free for everyone TV programing is being destroyed. The truth is the most people don’t watch over the air signals exclusively anymore. They have Cable or Satellite that offers the few local outlets plus dozens more non-aired channels. This is one reason why the transition from analog to digital went so smoothly. The set top boxes have no problem feeding either analog or digital sets equally well.

There are a couple of new trends working to make the arguments for continued over the air (OTA) broadcasting moot. Viewership on both Cable and Satellite is dropping, not as a reversion to OTA, but as a migration to the Internet for television content. Self-proclaimed “cable cutters” drop their subscription services in favor of downloading their favorite shows from network Web sites or from video subscription services such as Netflix.

The other trend is technological. The TV and the computer are merging. At the same time that cable cutters are downloading episodes of last week’s sitcom to their laptop computers or smartphones, other viewers are accessing Internet content on their living room TVs. Right now, that’s via content aggregators like Netflix and YouTube. Eventually, though, flat screen TVs will be able to access any Internet content from any site. What’s missing is a comprehensive guide that makes it easy to find, schedule and time-shift record the shows you want. Apple’s rumored Siri-based TV might be the solution. When programs on your local TV station, Cable, Satellite and the Internet are equally accessible, then OTA is just one more option on the scheduling screen. The majority of OTA viewership will eventually be via built-in WiFi or LTE broadband wireless rather than DTV transmissions.

It seems just a matter of time, perhaps within the next decade or even two, that UHF broadcast transmitters will start being shut down and the towers sold for scrap. In their place will be hundreds or even thousands of other shorter towers with cellular antennas and base stations creating LTE cells. Local stations will consolidate as a cost savings measure and the opportunity to sell their frequency license assets for considerable profit. Large urban stations with enormous OTA audiences will the last to go, eventually operating as “nightlight” services until viewership shrinks to insignificance. What might happen is multiple frequency consolidation initiatives, like the vacating of half the UHF band during the last spectrum auction. OTA stations will be corralled into a smaller and smaller broadcast band to clear more spectrum for sale.

In Part III, we’ll continue our look at how the 4G wireless bandwidth crunch will be mitigated by making more efficient use of available spectrum.

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700 MHz Groundhogs Look For DTV Shadow

Groundhog's Day is the traditional time for reading the shadows of things to come. This year is no different, as a shivering continent holds its icy breath in anticipation of a warm weather bailout courtesy of Punxsutawney Phil. But there's another shadow on the horizon being eagerly watched by the telecom industry. That's the looming decision on user rights to the 700 MHz UHF TV band. If it goes one way, DTV or digital television will soon be here. If it goes the other, we'll have another 16 weeks of ATV or analog television.

"Who cares," you say? Lots of people care about this decision. Probably a lot more than really think that dragging a groggy rodent out of bed is actually going to stop their teeth from chattering. On the one side are those who's TV sets are going to become nothing more than hiss generators when the analog television transmitters are shut down for good. On the other side are the new owners of those TV frequencies who bought and paid for the right to re-purpose them in a recent government auction. Somewhere in the middle are the television stations themselves who resent having to pay the electric bill for both an analog and a digital TV transmitter, but have taken their time upgrading to HDTV local programming.

What's behind this conundrum is an unprecedented massive repurposing of the broadcast spectrum. Analog TV, which was first demonstrated during the Hoover administration and rapidly deployed after the Second World War, is being frog-marched off its traditional VHF and UHF channels in favor of digital TV and other applications such as cell phones and wireless broadband Internet service.

What's so unprecedented about this is that technology improvements have always had to work with existing communications services on the public airwaves, not evict them. AM radio started up in 1920 and is still with us. The band has been expanded and stereo was introduced. There's even digital radio called HD radio. But your old crystal set will still pick up the first U.S. broadcaster, KDKA, at 1020 on the dial near Pittsburgh and farther away after dark. When FM came along, new radios had to pick up both AM and FM channels. Most still do. When the VHF TV channels filled up, new TV sets had to receive both VHF and UHF. They still do. Color came to television only after some clever engineers figured out how to squeeze in the color signal so that B&W receivers ignored it and color sets automatically displayed full color pictures. They still do.

This time it's different. Only a couple of years have elapsed since TV receivers were mandated to pick up both analog and digital signals. That would be well and good if the analog channels were going to keep broadcasting. Then it wouldn't matter that your old TV set lived forever. You'd still be able to watch your programs and could upgrade with a converter or new HDTV set when you felt like it and had the money available. But pulling the rug out on analog TV owners by pulling the plug on their analog signals forces people to either toss out perfectly good television sets, buy a converter set for each, or add to their collection with new digital TVs.

The government meant to ease the pain by providing coupons in the form of single use "gift" cards to offset the cost of buying converters. But underfunding and slow response by consumers in understanding that "the end is near" means that today there are several million people on a waiting list for the coupons that may never come. You have six TVs scattered around your house because television sets are relatively cheap? Too bad. You only get coupons to upgrade two of them, if coupons ever become available again.

The other problem is that digital TV reception is more finicky than analog. Analog can be weak, but watchable, and you can tinker with your antenna to get the best reception. Digital is either there or not. If your antenna isn't set just right, you'll be climbing on the snowy roof in freezing February to make adjustments. Who's bright idea was it to do this transition in the middle of winter?

Delaying the demise of analog TV until June 12 coupled with sending out millions more converter coupons seems like a good way to create a second chance to do it right the first time. Consumers get a "last call" to buy converters, upgrade to HDTV sets, or order alternative delivery services such as satellite or cable. Dish Network or DirecTV installers will be able to put a dish on your roof without risking an icy fall. Cable TV installers will be able to trench cable in the unfrozen soil of your back yard. You can tweak your antenna or have a new one (with a rotor) installed in the warmth of the spring sun.

So who's opposed to this seemingly sensible digital TV delay? Qualcomm, for one, is hopping mad that they won UHF channel 55 in the auction and have installed 100 new transmitters around the country to provide 15 channels of their MediaFLO mobile video programming to wireless subscribers. Not being able to flip the switches of those transmitters to ON until summer means no way to add paying subscribers, and that's an immediate loss of planned revenue.

AT&T and Verizon also have digital dogs in this fight. Theirs are called LTE or Long Term Evolution, a cellular broadband standard that can bring 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps Internet connections to smartphones, laptop computers and even residential and small office desktops. But this technology is, indeed, something of a long term evolution from the HSUPA and EVDO broadband networks they have deployed to date for cellphones and aircards. Both carriers have said that a short delay won't significantly impact their buildout plans that were planned for later this year and beyond.

TV broadcasters would like to stop feeding gross numbers of kilowatts to their aging analog transmitters to reduce their power bills. That's understandable. Some stations are also caught in a TV channel version of musical chairs. They've got low power digital transmitters propped up to get in the digital game on a borrowed channel. But they can't get their full power digital transmitters on the air until the analog transmitter vacates their permanent channel. Stations that took the option of switching channels for digital service don't have that particular problem.

There are also the slippery-slopers who fear that once you delay a schedule you may never make the change at all. The transition date will just slip away 3 months at a time. Well, you can't say it absolutely won't happen. But once the majority of consumers are satisfied, it seems likely the government will exercise its eminent domain powers to get the switch over and done with.

At this writing, the weather prognosticating groundhogs are prepping for their big announcements on the arrival of Spring. Our Congressional leaders are prepping for another vote on the DTV transition delay and will have their own announcement, likely this week. No matter how any of these predictions come out, chances are that someone's going to be getting a cold shoulder long before the tulips bloom.

The Dark Side of Spectrum Renewal

Fifty years ago, the federal government was avidly supporting a process called urban renewal. The idea was that some areas in major cities were just too far gone to be refurbished. Instead, whole city blocks were demolished and rebuilt as housing projects or re-purposed to support new highways out to the suburbs.

Today, we're seeing a parallel approach to radio frequency spectrum allocation. In this case, portions of the RF spectrum are considered too valuable to be used for what are considered to be out-of-date technologies. Most notable are the upcoming shutdowns of over the air analog television broadcasting and analog cell phone service.

What's driving this "spectrum renewal"? It's not lack of use or demand by the public. Just the opposite is true. Hundreds of millions of analog TV sets built over the last 60 years are running just fine, to the delight of their owners. Sure, everybody wants a shiny new HDTV set so they can see the grain of the football or the individual hairs in the lion's mane on their own big-screen. But how many of us can afford to instantly replace a collection of a half-dozen sets acquired over the years and deployed throughout the house?

The AMPS mobile phone system is in a similar pickle. Sure, all the cool new cell phones and Blackberries are 100% digital. But there may be as many as a million mobiles still using the original analog cells on the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel networks. AMPS is at the heart of about 500,000 OnStar equipped cars sold since 2003. It's also used by as many as 400,000 home security alarm systems. When the service is shut down on February 18, 2008 many of these users will be left in the lurch as their systems are too "old" to be upgraded.

So if the public isn't clamoring to get rid of these technologies, then why is it happening? The answer is fierce competition for a scarce resource.

It wasn't always this way. When FM radio was developed it was in addition to the already popular AM service. Radios were mandated to receive both bands. Over the years, FM listenership has grown and AM's has declined. But both are still in service. When UHF television channels were opened, nobody demanded that the VHF channels be turned off. New sets had UHF tuners in addition to the familiar VHF tuners. Even color television was mandated to be backward compatible with the millions of black and white sets already in use, so that no TVs would become virtual snow globes.

They will after February 17, 2009. Hundreds of millions of analog TVs that work just fine today will receive no over the air signals after that date. Some will live on, with signals provided for awhile by Cable TV systems, Satellite receivers or ATSC converter boxes. Many more will take their toxic chemicals with them to an early grave in the city landfills.

The problem with enabling new technology is oddly similar to dealing with decaying factories, now moved to China, or run down residential areas long abandoned to the poorest of the poor. Will Rogers once quipped: "Invest in land. They ain't making any more of the stuff." Today he might say the same thing about spectrum.

The radio frequency spectrum encompasses everything from power line radiation to radio, TV and cell phone channels, satellite transmissions, heat, light and out to Gamma rays. Back when our technology could only use small parts of this spectrum, you could locate new services on undeveloped frequencies. But unused frequencies are hard to find now. Worse, everybody wants the prime real estate areas of the spectrum. Those are the frequencies that offer large amounts of bandwidth to accommodate voice, data and video services, and also have good propagation characteristics. That means covering large areas and easily penetrating buildings. Generally, the higher you go in frequency, especially in the coveted microwave bands, the easier it is for buildings, tree leaves, and rain storms to block the signal.

There's a sweet spot in the spectrum covering the UHF TV and cellular bands around 700 to 900 MHz that offers an especially good combination of high bandwidth and excellent propagation. Squatter's rights would say that AMPS mobile should stay right where it is and digital TV signals should be an addition to the analog broadcasts already established. But demand for more cell phones, more public service radio channels and wide area wireless broadband services that have no place to locate in the spectrum creates a competitive pressure to tear down the old technologies and replace them with new ones.

Urban renewal programs got a black eye for destroying established neighborhood cultures, tossing people out into the streets and favoring those with wealth and connections. Spectrum renewal has an equally dark side to it. The billions of dollars that the FCC is collecting from spectrum auctions has certainly hastened the demise of analog television. BPL or Broadband Over Power Line radiation threatens to poison the short wave bands for ham radio operators and short wave listeners. All analog radio services seem likely to get the ax at some future date. In fact, if the Internet Protocol networking becomes ubiquitous, any non-IP services could meet their demise.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In the long run it's a necessary thing, as long as we want more and better mobile services. The real and perhaps unmet challenge is to minimize the pain and disruption as new technologies displace and replace the ones we've become accustomed to.