The Grand 5G TV Frequency Reshuffle

From now until July, TV broadcasters in the U. S. are in the final phases of a grand reshuffle of broadcast frequencies that has been going on for several years.  Unless you happen to watch TV the old-fashioned way—by getting a signal from a rooftop or indoor VHF/UHF antenna directly from the terrestrial broadcast transmitter—you probably haven't even noticed.  But this is the tail end of a process that began back in 2012, when the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) auctioned off a slather of frequencies in the 600-700 MHz range to be used as a part of the new 5G mobile-phone plan.

You may not think of the radio spectrum this way (if at all), but it is a limited natural resource, like fresh water or land.  As humanity has learned how to exploit it in increasingly effective ways, the value of various parts of it has fluctuated, mostly upward, but not always.  For the first seventy years or so of the FCC's existence, the agency treated the spectrum like the federal government treated federal land:  if you qualified, you could just get some of it for free, and then it was yours to use or sell just like any other private property. 

This wasn't always the best or the fairest way to do things.  Back in the 1920s, when it wasn't clear that radio would amount to much more than some hobbyists annoying their neighbors with loud spark-gap transmitters, it seemed like a reasonable approach.  But by the 1950s, when radio and then television frequencies were valued on the private market in the millions of dollars, politicians began to pull strings and the whole thing got very complicated.  For example, how much of a coincidence was it that the application for a new TV station that then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to build in Austin in the early 1950s was the only application filed in that city?  None at all, because everybody else knew that LBJ was so connected in Washington that filing a competing application would be a waste of time.  So LBJ's family became the proud owners of  the first TV station in Austin in 1952, and the next TV station there didn't open until 1965.

Eventually, laws were passed so that the FCC could actually hold auctions to allocate new spectrum frequencies.  This change acknowledged that the radio spectrum had value, and probably a better way to allocate it than political influence was to sell it to the highest bidder. 

And of course, technology wasn't standing still during this time, either.  When the first UHF TV band was opened in 1952, it was viewed as the most wasted part of the "vast wasteland" of TV, in the words of a cynical FCC commissioner.  Originally it covered the entire frequency range from 470 MHz to 890 MHz, with channel numbers designated 14 through 83. Because a TV channel then occupied about 6 MHz, in principle there was room for almost 70 channels in the UHF band.  But for many years, that promise went largely unfulfilled for technical reasons.

It was a considerable challenge to early consumer-TV makers to build a UHF tuner, which is the "front-end" part of the TV that takes the signal from the antenna and converts it down to a reasonably low frequency to be demodulated and used.  Those old UHF tuners were fussy, handmade devices that you tuned with a continuously-rotating knob, like a radio dial.  And they were very subject to interference from other UHF stations.  Because of these problems, the FCC handed out a whole lot fewer UHF frequencies than it looked like at first glance you could fit in that huge range, because if the spectrum got anywhere close to crowded, all the UHF tuners would start picking up the wrong signals and everything would go to pot.  Also, UHF signals didn't carry as far as the lower VHF frequencies (channels 2-13), so a lot of early UHF stations were local low-budget affairs that couldn't afford anything better.

Technical times changed, as they always do, and around 2000 the TV industry made its move to digital broadcasting.  This change, plus advances in tuner design, rendered the old super-cautious FCC allocations pointless.  And with the advent of cable TV, the importance of over-the-air broadcasting began to wane, and once tuning your TV became a job for a computer, the channel numbers no longer had to be irrevocably fixed to particular frequencies, as they had to be with electromechanical tuners. 

Fast-forward to 2012.  The new 5G mobile phone service plan includes the use of a 600-700 MHz band that will allow base-quality service over a much wider area than the current higher-frequency mobile phone cells permit.  The problem was, there were still a lot of TV stations in that frequency range, hanging on to their old UHF TV allocations.  The FCC made them a deal:  if you let us auction off your frequency for 5G, we'll either share some of the profits with you and you can take the money and go off the air, or move to another frequency.  Either way, we've got to clear this band for 5G.  Kind of a spectrum-allocation eminent-domain action, as it were.  Some stations took the money and quit.  Others have been shifting up and down the frequency spectrum in a ten-phase process that will be completed by July of 2020.  While this can be a big deal for the broadcasters, involving costly new transmitters and transmitting antennas, the most that even off-the-air consumers will notice is that a station may go blank, but all you have to do is "rescan" your digital TV, and it will automatically hunt for the new frequency and find it for you.

To a geezer like me, who grew up having to get up off the chair and twiddle with the fine-tune control on the TV tuner every so often, it all seems too easy.  And there's something odd about the fluid shifting going on behind the scenes.  Back when a channel allocation was something to be proud of, stations often incorporated their channel number in their logo.  For example, in Fort Worth, the local independent station was Channel 11, and their logo featured the two numeral 1's as two nattily-dressed guys in little white suits, complete with handkerchiefs in their breast pockets (I may be imagining the handkerchief part, but you get the idea). 

No longer.  It's all as invisible as sewer pipes now, and about as interesting to the average consumer.  But in case you were wondering where your off-the-air station went, this may be part of the explanation.

Sources:  Not being a watcher of TV any longer myself, I learned about this process from an article in the San Jose Mercury-News at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/30/heres-why-you-might-need-to-rescan-your-tv-right-now/.  I also referred to articles from Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/5g-is-forcing-hundreds-of-tv-channels-to-change-how-the-1837111135 and Venturebeat at https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/10/the-definitive-guide-to-5g-low-mid-and-high-band-speeds/

and the Wikipedia article on UHF TV broadcasting.  The FCC has a handy map on which you can look up your local TV stations and see what's going on with their channel moves, if any, at https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps.  And I got the short version of the KLBJ story from Slate, which summarizes LBJ biographer Robert Caro's extensive research on the matter at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/07/how-lady-bird-and-lyndon-baines-johnson-came-by-their-millions.html. 

A Tech Fix for Texting While Driving

By now, almost everybody with a cellphone and a car knows that it's a bad idea to text while you're driving.  But people still do it, and some of those people die in text-related car crashes and take innocent victims with them.  What if technology existed that simply prevented people from texting from a moving car at all?  Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Scott Tibbetts thought so.  Tibbets and his company Katasi were profiled in a recent New York Times article for developing a promising technology that would simply block texting from any phone that was in a moving car.  While there are several technological solutions to this problem that are already on the market, they all have various problems. 

Some text-blocking apps work by using the phone's GPS to figure out if the phone is moving faster than walking speed.  If it is, the software concludes that you're driving, and blocks texts.  This one turns out to be a battery hog, because the GPS system has to run all the time.  It also might present problems for train and bus passengers.  Another system uses the car's speed sensor and links it to the phone with a Bluetooth wireless connection.  But it costs over a hundred bucks, and there aren't that many people who are both concerned enough about texting while driving to buy it, and also willing to shell out that much money for something they could do for free with a little more willpower, perhaps. 

Mr. Tibbetts' solution is cleverer than these.  It involves connecting a wireless box to the car's OBD-II port—the on-board diagnostics socket that the auto technicians use to figure out what the "service engine" light means.  When the car's moving fast enough to be dangerous, the wireless box sends that information to the cellphone network, which then asks the phone—once—where it is.  Then, if the network is using the software developed by Mr. Tibbetts' firm Katasi, the software uses the location data to figure out things like who is driving the car.  You don't want a whole family's text service blocked just because Mom is driving to the grocery store, for instance.  That way, the GPS battery-drain problem is minimized, and the computational heavy lifting is done in the cloud, so to speak, rather than by the phone.

Mr. Tibbetts, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, has persuaded both an insurance company and a cellphone provider (Sprint) to cooperate in test trials, which have worked fine.  But it appears that the largest player, Sprint, has gotten cold feet lately, and has stalled further tests.  In the Times interview, Wayne Ward, vice-president for business and product development at Sprint, expressed concerns about product liability.  Currently, if a driver texts while driving and gets in a wreck, it's the driver's fault.  Mr. Ward asks what might happen if Sprint sells the Katasi system that claims to prevent such accidents, and then some glitch happens and somebody sneaks through a text and crashes anyway?  Why, Sprint could be sued!

Pardon me, but it appears that there's more going on here than meets the eye.  Any time a small independent company comes up to a big firm and offers the big guy new technology, the not-invented-here problem can raise its ugly head.  Short of buying the small upstart outright (which happens a lot, by the way), if the big firm adapts the small company's technology, they will be on the hook for royalty payments or other forms of obligation that big companies don't want to be tied down to.  And there's also the simple pride factor expressed by the phrase "not invented here"—if we didn't think of it first, it can't be that good. 

Besides, it's not clear who would make enough money to offset the expenses of the added hardware and software—and lawyers' fees, if Mr. Ward's fears turned out to be correct.  The existing GPS-based solutions for text blocking in cars aren't exactly selling like hotcakes, even after all but five states have adopted no-texting-while-driving laws of one form or another. 

One could imagine a legal solution:  make something like the Katasi text-blocking system mandatory by government fiat.  Nobody has seriously put forward that idea yet.  But it might happen.  There was a time when ordinary window glass was used in automobiles, with the result that otherwise minor wrecks turned deadly when razor-sharp knives of glass flew around and sliced—well, enough said.  But when the technology of laminating glass with a plastic inner layer was developed around 1920 to keep the shattered pieces together, auto companies adopted it, partly motivated by fear of lawsuits.  Eventually, most countries made it a legal requirement for all glass in automobiles to be laminated or safety glass, but it looks like the firms were ahead of the government in that case.

Safety glass is a different kind of thing than automatic text-blocking.  An auto company could start using safety glass and just raise the car's price incrementally, and hardly any customers would notice the change.  But as soon as you stop a person from doing something that they're used to doing, like texting while driving, you create a sharp negative impression.  And that's something that cellphone providers are reluctant to do as long as there are competitors ready to take business away.

My hat is off to Mr. Tibbetts, who put five years and millions of dollars into developing a clever technological fix for a significant problem.  But as many engineers turned entrepreneurs have learned, building the better mousetrap­—or text trap—is only part of the problem.  Convincing people to buy it and use it is often harder than coming up with the invention itself.  If everybody used something like the Katasi system on their cellphones, we would all be safer, no question about that.  We would also lose a little freedom of judgment which we can now exercise, which is whether to text while driving.  Perhaps some telecomm industry leaders will get together and agree to adopt Katasi, or something like it, but such inter-company cooperation for a non-financial thing like safety is a rarity.  It could happen, though.  I bet Mr. Tibbetts, for one, hopes that it will. 

Sources:  The New York Times article "Trying to Hit the Brake on Texting While Driving" by Matt Richtel, appeared in the online edition on Sept. 13, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/business/trying-to-hit-the-brake-on-texting-while-driving.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on on-board diagnostics, windshields, and safety glass. 

Under the Cloud

The business world is almost as fad-ridden as the education world, and one of the hot words in the last few years is "cloud" as in "I'll get it from the cloud," or "We put all our data on the cloud."  In this sense, the word means a set of Internet servers where your important data is archived so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection.  The concept is increasingly vital to commercial and institutional users worldwide, and makes sense in that context.  But as Scientific American columnist David Pogue warns in the February issue, Apple and Microsoft are taking not-so-subtle steps to force many individual users of their products onto the cloud.  And I doubt that anyone reading this column can avoid using Apple and Microsoft products without a lot of inconvenience. 

The situation, as I understand it, is basically this:  suppose you have data that needs continual updating on your portable gizmo (which can be an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, one of those Android things, or you name it), and you'd also like the same version of the same data on your laptop.  In the old days, whenever you made changes on your calendar, for example, you would then physically plug your portable device through a USB cable or whatnot into your laptop and tell it to sync.  That way, your laptop calendar would agree with your handheld thingy's calendar and vice versa, and you wouldn't find yourself at Aunt Mimi's when you were supposed to be having your teeth cleaned.  So far, so good.

Then the number of handheld devices proliferated, and so did their operating systems, and so did the ways you can have laptops and towers talk with portable systems (wireless, IR, Bluetooth, etc.), and at least according to the manufacturers and their unofficial representatives, it just got to be too hard to come up with proprietary software to sync absolutely every portable thingamajig with each operating system for all the popular computers.  So they just said forget it:  the real data will sit on the cloud, where we can keep track of it, and then all we have to do is make sure that every piece of hardware (portable or not) can keep in touch with the cloud.  And that solved the problem. . . .

But if you were used to firing up your old laptop and plugging it into your BlackBerry that you've had since 2003, and you are dead-set against keeping your data in a place that you know not where and you know not when it might go down, you are now out in the cold and under the cloud, so to speak.  According to Mr. Pogue, the latest operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft either don't allow you to do hard-wired transfers without involving the cloud, or make it so hard to do that you almost have to get a networking certificate from Microsoft to know how to do it. A discussion thread on an Apple forum on exactly this topic has been going on since last October, and has accumulated 150 pages of comments.  So there are more than a few people upset about this.

Call me Amish, but it doesn't affect me because my form of a BlackBerry is a three-by-five card.  Or rather, many three-by-five cards.  I suppose if you took all the three-by-five cards I've used in the last decade and piled them up, they would make a stack high enough to fall over and form the kind of mess my desk looks like some days.  In fact, that may be why. . . anyway, somehow I have survived thirty years of an occasionally intense professional life with nothing more advanced than a laptop or two and a mobile phone that you still have to use the numeric keypad for to send a text.  It's so annoying to do it that way that I hardly ever send texts, which is all right by me. 

But seriously, this specific issue is an example of a more general trend that organizations are following: a move toward exerting increasing control of any computer that is connected to one of their networks.  For example, I spend some time at the University of Texas at Austin.  If I was using a University-provided laptop (which I'm not, as it turns out), I would now have to make sure that all the data on it was encrypted in accordance with a University-provided type of encryption software so that if it happens to get stolen, the thieves can't run off with University data.  That makes sense from a liability and security point of view—I have blogged on numerous scandals and crimes that happened when someone took home a laptop full of supposedly secure data—but it represents another intrusion, if you will, into a space that was formerly rather private. 

Of course, if the University owns the laptop, they get to say what you can and can't do with it.  Privately owned computers connected to privately rented networks are another matter, but then you still have to deal with Apple or Microsoft, and their pressure to keep your stuff on the cloud will prove irresistible.  The Star Trek Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, liked to say "resistance is futile," but that was only a TV show.   

Personally, I don't see any real harm in letting Microsoft know the details of my next dental appointment.  And yes, those massive servers go down from time to time, but then so does your laptop.  I admit that I would feel a certain kind of existential queasiness in entrusting the only record of my professional schedule to some ethereal system that is everywhere and nowhere, rather than having it in a tangible, solid form on pieces of paper in my appointment calendar in my briefcase.  (Yes, I do that the old-fashioned way too.)  Maybe people living in the 1850s felt the same way about the newfangled electromagnetic telegrams, and didn't really trust them on an instinctive level as much as they would trust a letter written by the hand of a friend they knew.  But they got used to trusting telegrams, and I suppose we will get used to trusting the cloud, as long as our trust is not abused. 

Sources:  The online version of David Pogue's article "The Curse of the Cloud" can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-forced-to-use-cloud-services-but-at-what-cost/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on BlackBerry and Borg (Star Trek). 

Privacy in Public: Mobile Phones and Personal Spaces

The other evening I was waiting in line in a cafeteria, and the woman ahead of me, who was rather short, was reading her phone.  A few years ago, the phrase "reading her phone" would have ranked as nonsense, but nowadays when most mobile phones seem to do everything a desktop computer used to do, only faster, reading your phone has become a humdrum, routine part of life.  Anyway, she was flipping through what looked like either twitters or Facebook comments, and I, being a compulsive reader of anything in my field of vision, began to read along with her.  The content was nothing remarkable—little notes from friends about what other friends were doing, pictures of small children (grandchildren?), comments about an upcoming wedding—I frankly forgot nearly all of what I saw a few minutes after I saw it.  What stuck with me was a question:  what exactly was I doing in reading that lady's phone over her shoulder?  What would you call it?  And does the fact that you can do something like that have any larger implications?

I don't need a Ph. D. in moral philosophy (which I don't have anyway) to know that it was wrong to read somebody else's private messages, from whatever source derived.  Nowadays, of course, they may not really be private.  On Facebook and personal blogs and so on, people make public all sorts of matters that earlier generations would have buried deep inside a locked diary.  But the presumption is that the content of a person's own phone is, well, personal and private.  And it was not right for me to read her mail, so to speak.  I watched an old movie the other night which had a plot that turned on the theft of a letter—a theft that was noted by a landlady, who called the cops and brought the whole criminal scheme tumbling down thereby.  Stealing a letter is an overt, easily documented act.  But just looking over somebody's shoulder in a cafeteria line—who can tell what you're seeing? 

The closest word I can think of that means something like what I did is "eavesdropping,"  but that involves hearing, not seeing.  "Eyedropping" won't work—it sounds like what goes on in an opthalmologist's office.  "Spying" would cover it, but I didn't go to the cafeteria with the intention of snooping on somebody else's phone messages.  I just happened to be standing where, without any real effort or intention on my part, I was able to read private material.  The parallel between that and a situation where you are in a restaurant booth and can't help overhearing conversations in the next booth is pretty exact. 

Whatever it should be called, it's something that happens more and more often as people with portable electronic communications devices take over public spaces in subtle but significant ways.  What about those folks who have either an ear-mounted phone, or one of those little earbud-cord microphones that you have to look closely to see?  They're the same ones who conduct one-sided phone conversations in hallways or sidewalks at normal volume, so that at a distance they give every appearance of talking with an invisible companion, which leads one to doubt their sanity until you get close enough to see the electronics they're talking to.  We don't mind people having normal conversations in public when both parties are right there, so why should we mind if one of the participants happens to be at the other end of an electronic link?  I'm not sure, except that sometimes people talk about things over the phone that they wouldn't mention in a public place.  And if they're doing it over a mobile phone, they sometimes tend to forget their surroundings, and passersby end up privy to TMI (too much information).  This is just as discourteous as what I did to the lady in front of me in the cafeteria line, but it's discourtesy of a different type. 

The real problem, I think, is that the boundary between public and private is getting really fuzzy, and you can get into trouble if you mix up the two.  Saying, "I'd like to kill you!" out in a field where only you and your listener can hear you is one thing.  It may be a serious threat, or it may be nothing more than a joke between well-acquainted friends.  But saying the same thing on Facebook or another internet-mediated forum can land you in jail.

Here are two pieces of advice, one for users of technologies that tend to make the private public, and the other for bystanders who end up hearing or seeing something that the user didn't intend for you to hear or see.  For users, try to realize that while you may be focused just on your friends you are chatting with, the medium you are using is full of holes that leak information to casual passersby—people just browsing the sidewalk or the web, and even folks you may be trying to keep a secret from.  So use some discretion in what you look at or say.  If you wouldn't want to hear someone else saying what you're saying, don't say it, or at least wait for a more private circumstance than looking at your phone while waiting in line or talking through your earbud mike at a crowded bus stop.

And for bystanders, I would say that while sometimes you really can't help overhearing or "overseeing" someone's private information, you can help what you do with it.  If you can read somebody else's email over a shoulder, well, quit it.  If you can hear somebody's private conversation, maybe move to a chair where you can't.  And otherwise, try to be nice even to thoughtless or nasty people.  To some folks, old-fashioned courtesies such as beginning a letter with "Dear" look hypocritical:  if you aren't really dear to me, why should I address you that way?  But courtesy is the social lubricant that you don't wake up the next day with a hangover from.  It makes life easier and more pleasant for all of us, and while it has aspects of hypocrisy, I like to think of it as more like clean, well-tailored clothing that covers a less-than-presentable body.  And come to think of it, that's something else that is out of fashion, and maybe for the same reason.  But just as there is good taste in clothing, there is good taste in the use of mobile phones, and here's hoping more people use them more tastefully.

Sources:  After I wrote this blog, I found a website that makes most of my points and more, and with pictures.  It's "How to Practice Cell Phone Etiquette" at http://www.wikihow.com/Practice-Cell-Phone-Etiquette.  Highly recommended.