3 ms·

You conflate unicast web traffic with city-wide and world-wide broadcast. It's a different medium.

• nullc 3y ago
  Pedantically, use of amateur radio as a broadcast medium is prohibited in FCC land except for special exceptions like beacon stations. This, like the wholesale prohibition on music is also antiquated in my view -- already commercial broadcast radio is dying because of streaming. The public interest would be maximized by allowing a degree of non-commercial broadcast and music usage over amateur bands, subject to restrictions. For example, it would be pretty rad to have an event with an orchestra linked between two nearby cities with full duplex ultra low latency radio--- which can achieve much lower latency than ordinary internet due to the line-of-sight nature. Now I realize that by 'broadcast' you don't mean the rule-violating one-way-communications kind but the literal propagation characteristics. But at UHF+ it's easier to have a directional signal than an omnidirectional one, and once you get to a few GHz it's quite natural to have laser beam like signals. Plus, at 2m+ signals are naturally limited to the radio horizon (except for exceptional cases). Personally, when I've advocated for relaxations on encryption and other content restrictions I've done so for UHF+ (or even SHF+) bands where the degree of under-utilization and potential for spectrum reuse through directionality are very high, and abuse is inherently geographically limited by physics.