Sunday, August 31, 2008
White Space Fight Escalates
Stage-directions: "A longtime issue facing the live production industry, the white spaces debate has hit full force in a string of events that appear strangely coincidental amid recent FCC field-testing at live events — all of which have failed conclusively. The consortium of tech companies (Yahoo!, HP, Motorola, Google), fervent about opening up the spectrum for wireless Internet use, continue to escalate its fight. At the forefront of efforts, Google has fired back with a new campaign and Web site, Free the Airwaves, to garner public support for open use of the tiny spectrum."
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6 comments:
Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about audio equipment and its frequencies, but it seems to me that a potential fix for this problem could be industry standardization and/or government regulation (other than banning wireless mics). Couldn't the wireless industries agree to split up the "white space" amongst themselves? Say, wireless mics on this frequency, wireless internet on another, and so on. If the industries can't do this, it seems that the FCC could assign frequencies. Somebody feel free to correct me if I'm way off base here...
I find in today's society there is too much pressure on making money. What's more important is life, and the magnitude that you live that life too. Yes there should be regulation, but with this ever changing and growing technology life is becoming more open. Likewise old stands put in place to make people money should be gradually shifted to make the world a more open community. As far as the wireless goes, I was actually on the exact same wave length as sam. If there is regulation put into place with safety rather than money in mind it feels like all the problems would be solved.
Wirelees mics today are heavily used in many applications. Selling off this white space can truly harm our industry and many others. Many places may need to purchase new mics that are not affected by these sales. The mics could easily add up to thousands of dollars, and all the old mics will be in the garbage. It would be better to keep the frequencies open to the public to save troubles with getting new mics.
Let me start out by saying that I am by no means an expert in this field, however I do have some information that people might find interesting. Because of this “white space” issues and many other regulations that are restricting wireless frequencies, the world of technology is fighting back. There are now technologies that allow, for instance, a wireless mic used in the theatre to require a fraction of what was originally needed to operate. Or, now more units can be operated using the same set of frequencies. It seems to me that if technology could do this for wireless mic, the same could be done for all the other applications of the wireless frequency spectrum that we currently have access to. [Or at least this will prolong the time that we are still able to function without much interference or worse, safety risks].
What people are not mentioning is that there is a larger sector involved that the theatrical one. Aside from concerts, there is every TV news station, every sporting event. The biggest sporting event being the Super Bowl. This is one of the most profitable events for many industries every year. I think I some one made that more public knowledge, then this would not be such an up hill battle
Certainly the white space debate is a big issue with no simple answer, but I think the article is going a bit overboard saying the legislation will cause substantive safety risks. If rigging equipment and safety-critical machinery is using wireless signal, this already violates all best practices of show control. If it depends on wireless, it could be interrupted by lightning, moving metal scenery, or any other sources of RFI. If it must be wireless and safety depends on it, it should already handle interference gracefully. White space legislation will not change this.
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