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Dying inside. This spectrum is essential for wireless microphones. The big corporate rental houses can buy new inventory, but many of the operators are churches

Dying inside. This spectrum is essential for wireless microphones. The big corporate rental houses can buy new inventory, but many of the operators are churches, schools, and nonprofit theaters who were able to purchase equipment only with grants, serious fundraising, and years of savings. You're robbing every nonprofit with a performance space of potentially $30k+ of essential equipment that is now worthless. I work at a campus venue with around $20k of Shure ULX in this frequency band. We just went through a round of budget cuts and if we have to stop operating this equipment, it will probably never be replaced. This means students can't do amplified musicals anymore. Even if it is for the greater good, please understand who you're fucking over here before you cheer it on.

Raphael 11y ago
So there will be a market for Wi-Fi microphones.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Like I said, the big corporate rental houses can buy new inventory. Schools, churches, and nonprofit/educational theater cannot.
- stretchwithme 11y ago
  Looking at what's on Amazon, this doesn't seem like an expensive problem to resolve. Most people already have all they need for a wifi microphones in their pockets, albeit probably not of the same quality as professional systems. The unfortunate thing is that their is no mechanism for selling the right to use this spectrum for all those who've made investments in such devices. It may be worth millions to discontinue their use of it and it may only be worth thousands to existing users, but no way for high value potential users to compensate the current users. Of course, if spectrum were treated like property or you had to pay to rent what you use, everybody could buy or rent what they need.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    I don't know what you're seeing on Amazon, but there is a lot of cheap crap out there that, unfortunately, doesn't work reliably enough or sound good enough to use in a performance setting. Audio Technica 3000-series [1] is about the cheapest thing that's decent (my middle school operated 16). Note the frequency band options. WiFi in particular is not designed for a 100% stable connection with low latency and no jitter, and good luck getting it to do that. You can power-cycle your laptop's WiFi every few hours; you can't lose the lead singer in a musical or the pastor in a church service. There are digital, frequency-agile wireless systems like ULX-D [2] which are a little better at dealing with crowded RF landscapes, but this is still low-middle tier. UHF-R is a tier above that, starting around $2000 per system. The gear for really challenging RF environments is Shure Axient, and you can't even get pricing on that without talking to a high-end certified distributor, but anecdotally the transmitters are about $3,000 and a dual-channel receiver is $7,500. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless-Lavalier-System/dp/B003R6V5QM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674281&sr=8-1&keywords=audio-technica+300 http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless-Lav... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Shure-ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008BMHAKC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674532&sr=8-4&keywords=shure+ulx-d http://www.amazon.com/Shure-ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008... [3] http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless-systems/uhfr-systems http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless-systems/uhfr... It's tempting to think of the problems in fields other than your own as trivial, but please don't fall into that trap. You don't want to hear a play through Skype on iPhones (which is a moot point, because you wouldn't anyway). Reliable RF audio that sounds good is a hard/expensive game and eliminating TV whitespace fucks over people who are playing in the lower/middle tiers.
    - TrevorJ 11y ago
      This is all very true.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      A smart protocol that could share with unlicensed devices would seem to relieve your concerns. It should be possible.
    - 11y ago
animefan 11y ago
I don't think this is of the same order of magnitude importance as the potential for wifi. For any policy change, you can find some case where it negatively affects someone. Churches, schools and nonprofit theaters might tug on the heartstrings but if as a society we really thought these things are incredibly underfunded (I don't) then we could just give them money directly through government grants. Government policy must be able to change, and there is no guarantee of compensation when it does. To do so would be prohibitively expensive, since the government never receives any money when people indirectly benefit from its policies. Even if it is for the greater good, please understand who you're fucking over here before you cheer it on. I think it is for the greater good, and I accept the negative consequences while I cheer it on. Are you saying this is a bad policy, or do you just want people to feel bad anyway?
- superuser2 11y ago
  >you can find some case where it negatively affects someone But what form does that take? Certainly we cannot compensate people when we take away their government funding or contracts, that would be absurd. And where there is a degree of blame involved (like polluters) we require that they clean up their own mess. But when government seizes someone's real estate through eminent domain, it's required to pay them fair market price for it. When government decides that your car is unsafe, it doesn't require you to scrap it and buy a new one at your own expense - the manufacturer does a recall. When government decides to change the building code, old buildings are generally allowed to stay as they are until they perform extensive renovations (indicating that they have the financial means to become compliant again). Can you provide an example of a case where a nonprofit entity is just humming along, and then out of nowhere the government forces them to throw away their capital equipment? > Are you saying this is a bad policy Maybe. Since we're losing something, we'd better actually be winning something. Comcast has been extremely successful at passing state laws to block municipal fiber buildout. What makes you think Comcast's lobbyists will ever allow citywide WiFi to see the light of day? Perhaps this can be addressed by allowing wireless mics to continue functioning until service on this band is actually going to be rolled out. Is WiFi even the right approach? If you want a world without bandwidth rationing, then fiber is the way to go. Choosing RF as our path forward means we throw in the towel on that one and accept that people will always have to regulate their appetite for bandwidth. Are there technical reasons we can't use 4G/LTE to provide the same service, or simply the strategies of the carriers to extract the most rent possible from the least infrastructure? An enormous portion of the spectrum is reserved for military and government. Is that necessary? Is that even a good thing for military and government? We're constantly hearing about different agencies, branches of the military, and even divisions within a branch not being able to talk to each other because they use different radios. Could we consider consolidating some of that spectrum using the medium-sharing algorithms we know about now, and end up with better service for government and more space for the private sector? Probably. Isn't this what WiMax was supposed to be? What happened to that?

Raphael 11y ago

So there will be a market for Wi-Fi microphones.

superuser2 11y ago
Like I said, the big corporate rental houses can buy new inventory. Schools, churches, and nonprofit/educational theater cannot.
stretchwithme 11y ago
Looking at what's on Amazon, this doesn't seem like an expensive problem to resolve. Most people already have all they need for a wifi microphones in their pockets, albeit probably not of the same quality as professional systems. The unfortunate thing is that their is no mechanism for selling the right to use this spectrum for all those who've made investments in such devices. It may be worth millions to discontinue their use of it and it may only be worth thousands to existing users, but no way for high value potential users to compensate the current users. Of course, if spectrum were treated like property or you had to pay to rent what you use, everybody could buy or rent what they need.
- superuser2 11y ago
  I don't know what you're seeing on Amazon, but there is a lot of cheap crap out there that, unfortunately, doesn't work reliably enough or sound good enough to use in a performance setting. Audio Technica 3000-series [1] is about the cheapest thing that's decent (my middle school operated 16). Note the frequency band options. WiFi in particular is not designed for a 100% stable connection with low latency and no jitter, and good luck getting it to do that. You can power-cycle your laptop's WiFi every few hours; you can't lose the lead singer in a musical or the pastor in a church service. There are digital, frequency-agile wireless systems like ULX-D [2] which are a little better at dealing with crowded RF landscapes, but this is still low-middle tier. UHF-R is a tier above that, starting around $2000 per system. The gear for really challenging RF environments is Shure Axient, and you can't even get pricing on that without talking to a high-end certified distributor, but anecdotally the transmitters are about $3,000 and a dual-channel receiver is $7,500. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless-Lavalier-System/dp/B003R6V5QM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674281&sr=8-1&keywords=audio-technica+300 http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATW-3131BD-Wireless-Lav... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Shure-ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008BMHAKC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1439674532&sr=8-4&keywords=shure+ulx-d http://www.amazon.com/Shure-ULXD24-B87A-G50-Handheld/dp/B008... [3] http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless-systems/uhfr-systems http://www.shure.com/americas/products/wireless-systems/uhfr... It's tempting to think of the problems in fields other than your own as trivial, but please don't fall into that trap. You don't want to hear a play through Skype on iPhones (which is a moot point, because you wouldn't anyway). Reliable RF audio that sounds good is a hard/expensive game and eliminating TV whitespace fucks over people who are playing in the lower/middle tiers.
  - TrevorJ 11y ago
    This is all very true.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    A smart protocol that could share with unlicensed devices would seem to relieve your concerns. It should be possible.
  - 11y ago

animefan 11y ago

I don't think this is of the same order of magnitude importance as the potential for wifi. For any policy change, you can find some case where it negatively affects someone. Churches, schools and nonprofit theaters might tug on the heartstrings but if as a society we really thought these things are incredibly underfunded (I don't) then we could just give them money directly through government grants. Government policy must be able to change, and there is no guarantee of compensation when it does. To do so would be prohibitively expensive, since the government never receives any money when people indirectly benefit from its policies. Even if it is for the greater good, please understand who you're fucking over here before you cheer it on. I think it is for the greater good, and I accept the negative consequences while I cheer it on. Are you saying this is a bad policy, or do you just want people to feel bad anyway?

superuser2 11y ago
>you can find some case where it negatively affects someone But what form does that take? Certainly we cannot compensate people when we take away their government funding or contracts, that would be absurd. And where there is a degree of blame involved (like polluters) we require that they clean up their own mess. But when government seizes someone's real estate through eminent domain, it's required to pay them fair market price for it. When government decides that your car is unsafe, it doesn't require you to scrap it and buy a new one at your own expense - the manufacturer does a recall. When government decides to change the building code, old buildings are generally allowed to stay as they are until they perform extensive renovations (indicating that they have the financial means to become compliant again). Can you provide an example of a case where a nonprofit entity is just humming along, and then out of nowhere the government forces them to throw away their capital equipment? > Are you saying this is a bad policy Maybe. Since we're losing something, we'd better actually be winning something. Comcast has been extremely successful at passing state laws to block municipal fiber buildout. What makes you think Comcast's lobbyists will ever allow citywide WiFi to see the light of day? Perhaps this can be addressed by allowing wireless mics to continue functioning until service on this band is actually going to be rolled out. Is WiFi even the right approach? If you want a world without bandwidth rationing, then fiber is the way to go. Choosing RF as our path forward means we throw in the towel on that one and accept that people will always have to regulate their appetite for bandwidth. Are there technical reasons we can't use 4G/LTE to provide the same service, or simply the strategies of the carriers to extract the most rent possible from the least infrastructure? An enormous portion of the spectrum is reserved for military and government. Is that necessary? Is that even a good thing for military and government? We're constantly hearing about different agencies, branches of the military, and even divisions within a branch not being able to talk to each other because they use different radios. Could we consider consolidating some of that spectrum using the medium-sharing algorithms we know about now, and end up with better service for government and more space for the private sector? Probably. Isn't this what WiMax was supposed to be? What happened to that?