[opendtv] Re: Spectrum is too valuable

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 06:58:18 -0500

On Nov 4, 2015, at 8:56 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


You never said, time and again, that spectrum was "too valuable" to leave it
to OTA broadcasters?

Not sure what all I may have said here over the past twenty years. I probably
did suggest that the spectrum is valuable and that it is underutilized by
broadcasters, who pay next to nothing for it. I have certainly said that
broadcasters waste huge amounts of spectrum because of the need for so much
white space to protect the channels that are used.

I believe the spectrum should be managed and put to its best economic use, and
that much more spectrum should be made available for unlicensed use. I don't
thing creating another service run by an oligopoly willing to pay billions for
spectrum, which they then charge monopoly prices to use, is the best economic
use either. That's just another tax.

You can't fool mother nature, Craig. The amount of spectrum dedicated to
one-way broadcast MPEG-2 TS, in a cable system, can instead be used for 2-way
IP broadband, every bit as much as this applies to OTA spectrum.

That spectrum can be used for any economically viable service. It is not public
spectrum; the cable companies spent hundreds of billions to build it. For now,
the cable systems are managing this resource to offer multiple services that
consumers are paying for. If there was real competition there might be an
incentive to recover some of this spectrum for broadband. But the revenues
currently derived from TV services (and the investment in the end-to-end MPEG-2
infrastructure) dictate its current use.

Keep in mind that you cannot buy an equivalent service via ANY OTT provider.
This will change - hopefully in the coming year - and when I does, it is likely
to impact the best economic use of this PRIVATE spectrum.

That's why the cable companies themselves have an incentive to change the way
they do business, and to retire the broadcast streams. Yes, they have this
huge installed base of obsolete STBs which depend on MPEG-2 TS broadcast
streams, but they also have cable and fiber installed in all these
neighborhoods. The more they retain the old broadcast MPEG-2 TS, the more PON
physical restructuring work they have to do, to offer increasing bit rates to
their customers.

Sorry Bert, but Mother Nature disagrees with you. The MPEG-2 TS streams are a
broadcast service delivered to each home passed. Broadband is a two-way unicast
service; we can debate how many homes on a PON might try to view the same
streams via some form of multicasting, but if nobody is watching linear TV the
odds are that almost all bits will be UDP streams.

Many homes view multiple TV streams simultaneously, so to replace the MPEG-2 TS
streams you may need four or more UDP streams. To do that you need a sustained
25-50 Mbps depending on video quality. Now do the math.

The number of PONs required is dictated by the number of homes per PON using
25-50 Mbps simultaneously. Most, if not all cable systems, are far from
building out their infrastructure to support this level of IP services to every
home. Moving to Docsis 3.1 will help, but still is not sufficient in most
systems.

Regards
Craig


----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:

- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org

- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. opendtv
  3. Archive
  4. 11-2015