U.S. DTV Transition Not Going Very Well

[Jim Steele]

Sometimes, tried and true technology can't be beat

Absolutely true. Doesn't follow for digital television though.

 

[Ptrope]

Phuleze.. With the txt messages. Do you know the capex involved in rolling out a cellphone network. Stacking it with call centre people, giving away cell phone subsidies, training the engineering teams. True it cost nothing for txt messages but how do the txt messages get sent?? Well it is all the freaking expensive equipment that carriers need to pay for and upgrade their system.

Research before you criticize. From the New York Times:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: "Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t."

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high - spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment - storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping - and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. "Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume," he said. "It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

 

[Tom]

Once the transition does happen I wonder how long it will take for cell phone companies to finally implement the 4G network?

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

That's why I suggest that this has less to do with technological progress than with consumerism, requiring everyone to buy either a new TV or a converter box. Either way, an additional expenditure is an additional expenditure. Taking a formerly free service and requiring an additional $50 investment into it, particularly when it's requiring everyone to make that investment all at once (at least within the same 1 year timespan or thereabouts) seems incredibly suspicious to me.

What do you mean, 'formerly free'? The $50 is only a ONE TIME FEE. That's it. You pay it once, and that's it. After that, it's over. TV will still be free. $50 may seem like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket.

Why a sudden changeover that requires millions of viewers to simultaneously invest in new equipment that has worked perfectly fine for the last 50 years?

This is not a sudden anything. It's been well publicized for a long time. It's not a rush - not even close. We've known about it for MANY years - much longer than a single year. It's been at least four years - the regulation that set the date for the changeover has been in place since 2005. linky

The transition has been well publicized. I'm not arguing that anyone has been blindsided by this or that $50 will cripple anyone financially. All I'm arguing is that I can't think of any broadcast TV consumers who were asking for this transition. And it now sounds like the broadcasters aren't happy with it either. Why are millions of people being inconvenienced for something that is really only designed to benefit electronics manufacturers and cell phone companies?

 

[Scout101]

in theory, shouldn't the competition between cell companies benefit you as well? At the very least, a whole new bandwidth for faster, more reliable high-speed internet over cell phones. Should be able to be parlayed into a wireless broadband option as well, which is especially big in the same rural areas that are complaining about the TV changeover...

 

[Nick Ryder]

It would be brilliant if they could find a way to pump a high speed Net connection over the old TV waves, and all a person would need is a moderately expensive receiver that can plug into their USB port. Even if the speed was only say, equal to a 1.5 mb connection that would stick kick some major ass.