[PATV] Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - Extra Credits Season 4, Ep. 15: Spectrum Crunch

Geth

Extra Credits Season 4, Ep. 15: Spectrum Crunch
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/spectrum-crunch

This week, we discuss a major bandwidth problem we're about to run into.

Come discuss this topic in the forums!

RMS Oceanic

A fascinating episode.

Would improving the cabled broadband infrastructure so there are more short range wireless endpoints be any good?

YaYa

wait

this is the scariest thing I've ever heard! why aren't we screaming our lungs out about this?!

RMS Oceanic

Probably because it's a big complicated technical issue.

Screaming won't sort anything out just yet. Best to stick to brainstorming.

amybdenum

So this only impacts wireless systems right? There's no maximum capacity for optic fibre and local exchanges.

Time to invest in undersea cable!

Illessa

amybdenum wrote: »

So this only impacts wireless systems right? There's no maximum capacity for optic fibre and local exchanges.

Time to invest in undersea cable!

Well, it's somewhat less imminent, but it's definitely still an issue - that's why traffic shaping exists. There are far more options for fixing it since it's about quality and quantity of infrastructure rather than the scarcity of a medium. But upgrading the telecommunications backbone is disruptive and expensive, so it's quite possible that the exponential demand could seriously outstrip the speed of improvement (it's been a topic of occasional news scare stories here in the UK for a few years now).

jackal

You'll have my OTA TV spectrum when you pry it from my cold dead hands. People who have never had OTA TV, or have not had it since the digital change over don't seem to realize that it isn't fuzzy barely watchable TV for poors anymore. It now has a higher quality picture than cable HD channels. Cable companies have limited bandwith on their lines so to fit "more hd channels than the competitor" they compress the channels to the point where they are only technically HD. At that point the higher resolution is just giving you a sharper picture of compression artifacts. OTA channels have enough bandwidth for a full quality HD station and an SD substation. In theory you could also fit 4 or more SD substations in if you don't broadcast any of them in HD. Only PBS does that and only during the day when they don't have any HD programming. When something is in OTA HD it is in real HD because there's really no advantage to skimping on bandwidth.

OTA gets treated like an anachronism, but cable TV is the anachronism. With OTA I get the programming for free, and it is paid for with commercials. That still makes sense. With Cable you pay a lot for accessing to the programming, and the programming itself is mostly paid for by commercials with only a few cents if anything coming from the cable company (except for ESPN which gets something like four dollars per user month). It doesn't make sense to pay for "access" to television channels when most of us are also paying for high bandwidth internet. Bits are bits and it doesn't make sense to pay $60 a month for internet bits and then another $60 for tv bits.

Tleilaxu

YaYa wrote: »

wait

this is the scariest thing I've ever heard! why aren't we screaming our lungs out about this?!

RMS Oceanic wrote: »

Probably because it's a big complicated technical issue.

Partially. There is no reason to panic on the technical side at all. Growth in the actual technical bandwidth available is not stopping, and it doesn't rely on the use of new spectrum. (The easiest example you're familiar with is WiFi: 802.11b gave you 11Mbps, then g gave you 54Mbps, and they both use the same 2.4GHz channels.)

Here's where it gets tricky:
Cell phones, television, etc... either can't upgrade their use of a particular band due to legacy support (imagine if everybody with an older phone suddenly couldn't use it, even to dial 911.)
Or, they won't upgrade due to the capital costs of doing so. AT&T's poor service is not due to a lack of spectrum, it's because they like to be cheap bastards. This is further compounded by local laws regarding tower placement and urban blight in some areas of the country.

And here's why we should be screaming:
Squatters.
Fuck squatters, and fuck DC politics.

mekman 2

Why am I learning about this now? I wish I bought those magic beans of air space years ago, now it's worth millions and if I wait trillions... I wonder if colors can be hoarded as well. You never know, light is radiation as well.

Tube

sorry chaps, duplicate thread