Concerned Citizens

Last Wednesday Congress voted to delay digital TV until the summer to allow time for millions who have not made the switch time to either acquire a set top box or subscribe to a cable or dish service. To help with this delayed transition up to $650 million in financing has been added to the stimulus bill to help people acquire coupons. The problem is that this delay has ripple effects in many areas of the communications infrastructure including delays for higher speed mobile data capabilities.

Last year Google shook up the telecom world with word that it would potentially be bidding on some wireless spectrum to be offered by the FCC in the 700Mhz range. The spectrum would be made available as a result television moving from analog to digital signals. The spectrum is very attractive for wireless carriers since the lower bandwidth allows the signal to penetrate buildings and structures with little loss. Anyone who has tried to have a cellphone conversation inside a large building knows the challenges as you search for the best place with bars.

However Google wanted stipulations put on the auction to allow for any device to be allowed to operate on the spectrum without constraint by the carrier and that any application could be loaded on the device without having to be certified by the carrier. In the industry this is commonly known as an unlocked phone, typically very costly since the phone isn’t subsidized by the carrier. Google and Columbia University law professor Tim Wu cited the now infamous Carterphone case that involved allowing a two-way radio to be connected to the nation’s telephone network by a cradle device.

Google fought hard in 2007 and 2008 for the stipulations to be added to the auction and won. The carriers fought the addition but eventually caved and supported the requirements. When the dust settled on the auction AT&T and Verizon won and started making plans for the spectrum. Both have planned to roll their new LTE infrastructure, commonly known as 4g, into the spectrum as a greenfield for new high speed data networks. Preliminary plans had Verizon deploying the networks in late 2010 and 2011.

Having “any app, any phone” running on very high speed mobile networks with rates that rivaled WiFi offered a brand new world for consumers. Many technology companies have been working to position devices for this new world with new types of applications. I say devices since these are so much more than a phone. I could go into a lot of detail here but it really merits a posting of its own. Suffice it to say it would not be your father’s mobile world.

Everything was on track until the date for digital television switch drew near and the American public finally woke up realizing they had to make a change. This was a milestone that wasn’t going to move and they were asleep at the well as it approached. That’s when several groups decided to make it their cause and petitioned Congress to delay the date. The votes went back and forth but Congress did pass a delay to the middle of June.

Unfortunately this causes problems for television stations who had hoped to retire old equipment that consumes a lot of power (some estimates are around $10,000 a month in energy costs). It also puts a delay in the plans of the mobile carriers who had banked expansion of their networks on LTE. Now they have to figure out how to squeeze additional capacity out of their existing 3G and slower networks that are quickly becoming taxed by smartphone applications.

In the end we will get there and life will be good. But it does beg the question about how much we should babysit the American public when it comes to technology advances. Technology changes so quickly and support of aging infrastructure is costly. At some point you just have to “deprecate” the American public and tell them to move on.[poll id="5"]