Breaking Up The Bandwidth

Last week the FCC started auctioning off the bandwidth currently used by broadcast television stations.Text stolen from DJCline.com. It is sad to see Marshall McLuhan’s Great Wasteland carved up like an Oklahoma land rush. I’d always thought that the airwaves belonged to the public and should remain so. I hope that putting up corporate fences around various wavelengths leads to useful innovations for all.

This part of the spectrum will now be used for new wireless services. Google made some motions toward bidding for parts of it to ensure that it would be available or open to the public, but Verizon got a fair share of it.

All this talk about old TVs going dark drew me to several books about the history of television, which I’ll review for you. Basically it took twenty years to invent, develop and deploy television. This seems to be an almost generational rule for making money from any technology from radio to cell phones. The biggest barriers are human or regulatory. Getting enough content gets easier. Getting high quality content gets harder. All of this is worth studying as we see another generation of pioneers tame another wireless frontier.

Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.

Posted by dj in Blumbers, Commentary [1,181 Views]