CEA/CTIA Spectrum Saving Plan Panned by TV Executives

As of summer, 11 applications were filed with the FCC Media Bureau to run such distributed systems, in which broadcasters use several antennas spaced throughout service areas instead of a single one (CD Aug 19 p3). Since then, one more request has been made, and the bureau has approved a total of five of the dozen applications it has received, a bureau spokeswoman said Wednesday. The FCC’s top staffer who’s reviewing TV spectrum has said the CEA/CTIA plan has merit: http://xrl.us/bgtxfv. DTS “could bring more efficiency and perhaps the FCC would consider pursuing it if the voluntary mechanism was not possible,” Phil Bellaria said.

The CEA would “like to see more specific proposals or engineering analysis to counter” what it and CTIA have proposed, said Vice President Brian Markwalter. “We've never said there was only one solution. We welcome further analysis from others.” Some broadcast officials said that information may have been filed at the FCC late Wednesday in responses to the National Broadband Plan. “There have been a few groups that have said it won’t work, unsurprisingly, on the broadcast side,” Markwalter said. “But there seem to be a few benefits for mobile and there seem to be benefits for spectrum recovery and it gets past the legacy device issue. So we're still hopeful that it will withstand some further engineering analysis and can result in some benefits for getting some additional spectrum available for both licensed and unlicensed operation.”

“While SFN may be used to fill in gaps, it certainly was never intended to be a complete substitute for high-tower distribution systems,” said President David Donovan of the Association for Maximum Service Television. “While we're delighted that CEA and CTIA agree that broadcasters need 6 MHz of spectrum and 19.39 Mbps and that that should not be changed, and welcome their proposal, there are some significant practical and technical problems. ... And it is not at all clear that CEA and CTIA have correctly calculated the costs of the technical issues that have to be dealt with.” Other broadcast officials said costs would be much more than what’s likely envisioned by the plan. It didn’t estimate costs, CTIA Vice President Christopher Guttman-McCabe noted.

“What we've suggested is that we can help financially facilitate this transition,” Guttman-McCabe said. “The ability or desire to collocate is sort of something that everyone shares” to potentially reduce broadcaster costs by letting them install DTS gear at existing cellsites, he said. “The relocation efforts, in a significant if not an entire way, get funded either by auction revenues or the auction winners themselves. What we set out to do was to address each of the concerns raised by the broadcasters.”

That switching to DTS could free up several hundred megahertz with reasonable costs is “somewhat of a red herring” and “poppycock,” said Mark Aitken, Sinclair Broadcast Group director of advanced technology. “Their capex costs are totally screwball” and “there is absolutely no provision for the operational costs of this proposal, which is likely to double the cost impact to broadcasters,” he added. “I am yet, and many, many, many are yet to be convinced that an equalizer can be built to handle the sort of echoes and delays and fast moving multipath” that would result from using multiple transmitters on the same frequency in a market so ATSC receivers won’t get overlapping signals. Others agreed.

“ATSC wasn’t designed for this; it was designed for the opposite architecture: High power-tall tower,” said broadcast lawyer John Hane of the Pillsbury law firm. “Perhaps over time and with great care and some significant expense it can be made to work in this way, in some markets. But in the most optimistic scenario you get a contrived system -- one trying to do things that go against its bone structure -- and that means significant tradeoffs in cost, performance and even spectrum efficiency. So if you mandate this and continue to mandate ATSC in the name of spectrum efficiency, in many ways you are going backward.”

LIN TV’s engineer has expressed cost and technical concerns on implementing DTS in an entire market, which also would use considerable staff resources, said Vice President Rebecca Duke. “That’s not to say we're dismissing it automatically out of the box, because we would like the opportunity to examine different architecture models,” she added. “We don’t want to be mandated to go to that system.” Merrill Weiss, who runs a small firm that does engineering for stations, “could see how you might do it technically, but economically it doesn’t work with the current costs of things,” he said. “The only way you could possibly make these things work on a large scale is if all the stations in a market went together. And even then with current costs and pricing for tower space and interconnects it would still be an impossible economic situation in most markets.”