Trip

What is a CMO?

I was wondering that very thing.  The article just starts using the acronym without ever defining it for those of us who aren't corporate executives.

- Trip

Would not being Network Vision compliant keep them from opening up the LTE on a short-term basis until they can get everything else upgraded?  Seems like it's better to have LTE working at some level, even at a less than ideal speed on B25 only, as opposed to the nearly unusable 3G currently available to Sprint customers (at least in the areas I visit).

- Trip

I really, really, really, REALLY hope this comes true.  Shentel's coverage puts the other carriers to shame (at least in the VA/MD/WV parts, haven't checked PA) and would presumably be just as outstanding in the rest once they got the nTelos network up to snuff in a few years.

So pleased.  So, very, pleased.  Please come true.

EDIT:  Also, in the overlap areas that I've seen, Shentel is already on nearly every tower nTelos is on, and many more, so I assume they'd just be shutting off the nTelos gear in those areas.  Much neater than the patch-up they'll be doing elsewhere.

- Trip

The bigger issue is that nTelos itself, at this point, hasn't shown any direct evidence of lighting up anything for Sprint customers other than the existing 1X or EVDO roaming they've had for years.  Tracking roll-out progress on something that isn't rolling out yet seems a bit premature.

But my own SCP log is probably a good starting point for anyone who might want to do some tracking.  I'll be glad to send the spreadsheet from it to anyone who wants it.

- Trip

I know 22447 is still used in Culpeper for 1X 800, as I see it when I pass through that area.

- Trip

Looks familiar, but I don't have it in my log.

- Trip

I'm going to have to try to check on my phone later, but that SID matches the Sprint Culpeper area SID.  I feel like that BSID looks familiar too.

- Trip

Regarding the earlier discussion of 3G speeds, in the DC area, 3G speeds are very usable outside of Metro tunnels.  I dropped US Cellular (roaming on Verizon) because the Verizon 3G that US Cellular would roam on was essentially unusable.  By comparison, Sprint 3G never leaves me disappointed above ground. 

- Trip

In a followup to the FCC decision I posted about Arizona public safety a few weeks ago, here's the FCC dismissing a petition for reconsideration:  http://bit.ly/1bXL4wk

- Trip

I looked at the Shentel region in MD, WV, and VA this morning, and I didn't see many remaining Nextel towers that would really add much to Shentel's coverage in the area.  Maybe 2 or 3 tops.  Shentel just has so many towers in the region that it is either on the same tower that Nextel used to be on or on a different one within a stone's throw in almost every case.

- Trip

I enabled the free international roaming on my plan and my work may be sending me to Mexico City this month.  If they do, I'll post a report.  (Last time, I left my phone in airplane mode the entire time I was there.)

- Trip

Arysyn, on 01 May 2015 - 6:37 PM, said:

I'm thinking if somehow all of the television stations stopped using airwaves for antennae use, rather depended on broadcasting over the internet, then they wouldn't need spectrum, is this correct? The reason I'm considering this, which I also understand that not only would this be about antennae broadcast, but also satellite broadcast which uses spectrum, and I'm trying to imagine the possibility of this changing, so that all television broadcasts would be internet based, with the result of not needing spectrum, except for the wireless internet providers using spectrum to get the data in/out.

To answer your first question, local TV stations broadcast on VHF or UHF channels covering a local area. This includes your local ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/PBS/CW/Univision/Telemundo/etc. As you suggest, satellite also uses spectrum but at much higher frequencies. Dish/DirecTV use frequencies at 12 GHz or so, generally, though there are other bands as well, and that's above the desired range of wireless companies because it really doesn't penetrate buildings well. I will point out the military also uses a lot of satellite spectrum and so that spectrum will not be going away any time soon.

Quote

However, clearing all the spectrum over airwaves from broadcasters and non-internet use of sending/receiving television signal, would free up this spectrum to give to wireless data providers, such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, to use in broadcasting wirelessly. If this were so, the FCC ought to have much more spectrum to sell to these companies by requiring television broadcasts be based only by internet transmission.

 

I realize there already are providers doing this, though there still remains over the air broadcasting, which since no longer is such a necessity in the consumer marketplace, I'm left wondering why there isn't a stronger movement pushing for greater acceleration over to the internet for these broadcasts. Then again, I also want to make sure I'm understanding this spectrum issue in that broadcasters don't need spectrum anymore, if they stop sending over the air broadcasts, moving over completely to the internet.

So, a few points.

First, this is already being done on a free market style basis; this auction is what I was hired for by the FCC. There's a thread somewhere on here about the 600 MHz auction, and you can read a short 1-paragraph summary of the FCC Incentive Auction here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom#FCC_Incentive_Auctions

Also more information here: https://www.fcc.gov/incentiveauctions

Second, in your scenario, who pays for the 30 million people who do not have cable TV to have cable TV or Internet service able to handle TV service? What about the millions more on satellite who go from 3 competitive choices in TV service to 1? What about in rural areas where fast Internet or even cell service of any kind may not be available, do those people just go back to the 1800s with no services at all? In an emergency where the local cable and local cell towers go out (think earthquakes, hurricanes, etc), where do people go without over-the-air TV to fall back on? Are you the politician who would go on TV and say, "yep, we're taking away the TV and emergency information from the poor, but not to worry, you can spend $80/mo or more you don't have on a phone instead!" And piss off the local TV stations that will make or break your campaign?

In my opinion, broadcast TV is the most efficient visual distribution system ever seen on Earth. It scales infinitely since it's not a one-to-one link, can be pulled out of the air for free with minimal equipment and effort, and due to there being at least some diversity of transmit locations and the relatively low expense involved in making a single facility per station redundant rather than hundreds or thousands of cell sites, it's extremely dependable in emergencies.

And don't forget, as people cut the cord with cable, over-the-air usage is going up. Do you think it's a good idea to kill off a growing industry, especially when it killing it mainly serves to benefit the cable monopoly that everyone hates?

I also didn't hear you address the million(s) of people who depend on satellite Internet.  Would you cut them off?  They deal with very, very low data caps, would they not be able to get TV over the internet after a few hours of usage each month?

Just things to think about. And welcome to the forum, by the way.

- Trip

Who needs a filter?  Once the cable company goes all digital and removes the analog channels, they are allowed to encrypt every channel on the system (including locals) so no filter is required.

- Trip

If I were to guess, T-Mobile is probably just going to cover the interstates and have token coverage to keep roaming costs down without pushing hard to actually gain customers in the state.  West Virginia, I'm learning, is a really tough state to cover, with both AT&T and Verizon having huge coverage holes in the state--some areas having no service at all--and I can imagine T-Mobile not wanting to get stuck trying to fight a losing battle.

- Trip

Good evening, all.  I accepted Robert's invitation to join the family here because I love everything that this site stands for and am glad to contribute what I can. 

- Trip

Here at my desk at work, I usually sit on B26 or Clear B41 from a site at least 6 blocks away.  The one right across the street is very weak and around the corner from where my office is.

Suddenly, this morning, I connected to a new B25 site.  I'm guessing it's either this building or the one next door (which was "B25 Accepted" a long time ago but I have never seen live).  It's still preferring B41 from the more distant site when it can see it, which is the correct choice in my mind, but when that's too weak, I'm holding B25 now at something like -80 instead of falling to 3G from the building's DAS.

- Trip

http://bit.ly/1HKvlgg

- Trip

Good old digital sideband bleeeover.

 

 

For many in the DX'ing hobby community, IBOC is their biggest enemy.

I'm not even referring to DX.  Washington DC is entirely within the WWMX contour, but you can't hear it in DC because of the WJFK IBOC.

- Trip

I haven't experience bleeding, can give a station suffering from interference in DC?

In DC, with a good receiver, WWMX 106.5 in Baltimore should be receivable.  When WJFK turns off the IBOC for a sports game, it can be heard very clearly.  As soon as WJFK turns the IBOC back on, WWMX gets crushed under the noise.

Similarly, see WWWT on 107.7 and WLZL on 107.9, who in my neck of the woods anyway, have a nice battle over which one is usable on any given day (not that I listen to either one).

- Trip

Was this the best solution technically?

Why not use DAB, same as euros?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Depends on what problem you're trying to solve.  US radio stations liked IBOC because they held the patents and it prevented new competitors from being licensed.  DAB needed new frequencies.  Most of Europe cleared what is the upper-VHF TV band in the US (174-216 MHz) in going color or going digital, and so they used that frequency for digital radio.  In Canada, they used L-band which is reserved in the US for military uses and is of such a high frequency that in many of the rough terrain parts of the country it wouldn't work very well.

I haven't seen it first-hand, but everything I've read is that FMeXtra was probably the best option.  To heavily simplify, you'd basically replace the stereo part of an FM transmission with a digital carrier, so there would be no adjacent sidebands.  You'd give up the stereo in favor of mono on the analog side but have digital audio essentially anywhere you currently have stereo with similar throughput to IBOC.

On AM, which I forgot to mention earlier, IBOC basically just narrows the FM version and slaps it on the sides of the AM signal.  It works about as poorly as you might expect.  But unlike IBOC on FM, the bleed over is a lot worse, usually taking up two or three adjacent frequencies on each side, ruining the band at night.  They're talking about going all-digital on AM to try to help revitalize the band.  Of course, if you're going to do that, you might as well use DRM, which is used on shortwave with supposedly great results.  I have not seen DRM first-hand either, though I would definitely like to.

- Trip

I live in an area that has no good local AM or FM stations, a permanent subscription was the best choice for my sanity.

In the DC area, the radio is really awful (though WIYY in Baltimore has gotten a LOT better lately).  Whenever I go to the beach, I spend the entire time on WZBH in Georgetown, quite possibly one of my favorite radio stations anywhere.  I'm really hoping the new ownership doesn't ruin it.

Regarding "HD Radio," transitioning over to it full time would probably accomplish nothing except killing off radio for good.  It works poorly and doesn't live up to any of its promises, really.  The "HD Radio" name originally didn't mean anything; they came up with it to ride on the hype of HDTV.  (Only later did people figure out it could mean "Hybrid Digital.")  It was called "IBOC" before then, meaning "In Band On Channel" but in reality, it was more like "In Band Adjacent Channel."  For a station on 107.7, for example, the analog signal consumes roughly 200 kHz from 107.6 to 107.8.  The HD sidebands each eat another 200 kHz from 107.5 to 107.6 and from 107.8 to 107.9, meaning that if you have an adjacent channel FM, that station gets stepped on.  (In the DC area, there are quite a few of these.) 

In the event the analog is turned off, the IBOC spec essentially calls for the now-freed 200 kHz in the middle to become a secondary and much weaker expansion of the digital signal.  As best I can tell, the IBOC spec contains no way to take what are currently the two 100 kHz sidebands and turn them into a single 200 kHz carrier in the middle of the channel if the analog was killed off.

Ibiquity claimed the system would operate successfully at -20dBc (1% of analog), but in practice, that turned out to be way too weak.  They sought a power increase to -10 dBc (10% of analog) but that would have caused so much interference that the FCC only granted a power increase to -14 dBc (4% of analog) with a complex waiver process to go up to -10 dBc.  Of course, it means that they will have to rebuild and install new transmitters and other gear to make it happen--practically starting over from scratch to get that relatively small increase in power.

On top of all that, the delay on the transmit side is a huge issue.  One of the few places where radio seems to continue to be in decent shape is with sports broadcasts.  Well, if you're broadcasting live sports in-market, you have to turn the IBOC off because the delay is so bad that in a baseball game, by the time you heard the audio of the ball being hit on the radio, the play would be over.  A lot of people bring radios to sporting events to listen to the live broadcast while it's going on, and because you have to delay the analog audio to match the delay of the IBOC, you have to turn the IBOC off and kill the delay if you want it to be usable in that case. 

Can you tell I don't like it much?

- Trip

This also confirms what I have seen in one other report, that the nTelos site identification codes are two letters for the town plus three numbers, which is what you should look for if you go to look at a site. This is no guarantee that it will be there, but you often see the carrier's number, but the carrier's name is only mentioned in some cases. Electric meters sometimes have the names listed as well. Then you will be certain about your possible site.

That's definitely the case, as best I can tell.  I've seen numbers matching that pattern for nTelos in FAA registrations all over their coverage area. 

(AT&T uses a similar scheme, but also uses an integer number, depending on what information I'm looking at.  I'm not entirely sure why there appear to be two different ID numbers for each tower site with AT&T.)

I believe this is the nTelos pole you are refering to. This was taken at the kroger across the street from kmart/whole foods

That's definitely what it would look like.

- Trip

The numbers aren't necessarily specific depending on what you search for and whatnot.  The location named "The Meadows" covers all three of the specific towers I pointed out.

- Trip

In my research on that tower, I concluded that Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular were the companies on it.  AT&T and Nextel were on a nearby utility pole (behind the recycling center) but the two were so close together that AT&T and T-Mobile could have been reversed.  nTelos was on a different utility pole near the off-ramp from US-250 East onto Grove Road.

My guess is that it's US Cellular.

- Trip

Better service in the stations, which does NOT require any track closings, would be an amazing start.  Wish they could at least do that much!

My phone only works about 1/3 of the time when I'm waiting for a train at L'enfant, the transfer point where five of six Metro lines meet.  That is not acceptable, by any stretch of the imagination.  Last time I was there, Farragut North had no service at all!

Getting LTE into the stations, or even just properly functioning 3G, would be a vast improvement over right now.

- Trip