>I looked it up, less then 2000 people work for the FCC. > The number has been going down for a while.Most seem to deal with legal > issues...
A sprinkling of good news may be on the horizon: Two Congressional bills are being introduced, each termed the "FCC Commissioners' Technical Resource Enhancement Act." If one of the bills is passed, the Act will allow each Commissioner the opportunity to appoint an electrical engineer or computer scientist to liaise between the Commission leadership and OET. This is just the beginning of something long overdue at the Commission: the re-appointment of real engineers to facilitate engineering matters rather than a cadre of attorneys who generally choose easily-attained baccalaureate degrees in political science rather than pursue tough degrees in engineering and/or the sciences. I am an attorney, electrical engineer, and computer science major, so my biases against my primary profession are justified. > My company has stopped the fios builds and will likely switch to wireless. > You can get something like 340Mbps over wireless now. > That is a lot of bandwidth, with almost no infrastructure, no cables on > poles, no fiber, no high power broadcasting. The inevitable will slowly occur over time. The current broadband wire-line models are no longer cost-efficient to deploy and it makes little sense to simultaneously distribute 500+ digitally encoded video signals to each household when any household likely will not be watching more than a couple programs at any given moment. Narrow-casted wireless on micro-networks will eventually rule the content and communications world. The Achilles heel in the world of today's AM/FM/TV broadcasting environment is the lack of an interactive back-channel from the consumer to the station -- except through alternate media like the web -- and that just drives people away from the core broadcasting medium. Broadcasting needs its own interactive service and that will come when all the high-power RF is shut down and content streams through robust wireless networks. Content delivery has always been, and will continue to be "king," only the delivery method will change. I rarely have a liberalism moment, but this is an area where I strongly believe the federal government could/should step up to the plate and subsidize the entire cost a national broadband plan -- to an even greater extent than recently announced by the FCC earlier this week. Looking at the big picture, deployment and maintenance of a national wide-bandwidth wireless network is inexpensive to the government when you compare that cost against pre-existing retirement entitlements for the nation's largest employer, national health care benefits, and the national defense budget. Turn it over to private enterprise, let it compete against the existing wire-line services, and let the laws of "survival of the fittest" take over. Paul, W9AC ______________________________________________________________ Our Main Website: http://www.amfone.net AMRadio mailing list Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/amradio@mailman.qth.net/ List Rules (must read!): http://w5ami.net/amradiofaq.html List Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/amradio Post: AMRadio@mailman.qth.net To unsubscribe, send an email to amradio-requ...@mailman.qth.net with the word unsubscribe in the message body. This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
