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| Sunday, March 2, 2003 |
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Surprised? 
| | The Guardian: The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq. |
Riding backsaddle all the way
I still feel like everything I do is pre-beta
| | Marketing: Flogging on a Blog is Steven Levy's latest in Newsweek. The subtitle: Dr Pepper is trying to use the grass-roots power of Weblogs to promote its new drink. That would be Raging Cow, a milk drink. What makes it a good piece, of course, is that he gives me the last word: |
| | One Weblog guru thinks the campaign might backfire. "It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that¹s so generally bent on exposing things," says alpha blogger Doc Searls. "In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing." |
Finding the infrequency
| | Took me the better part of an hour to find the law school, but I needed the walk (there are tubers that get more exercize than I routinely do). Now I'm settled in Moot Court Room 80, in the row in front of Aaron, Cory and Wendy, who are typing away so furiously that it sounds like it's raining in here. I'm using wi-fi kindly provided by aaronsw, which is the name of the hot spot. Good man, Aaron. |
| | The subject on the floor is etiquette: Does the "unlicensed" spectrum band need etiquette rules at this time? Or should the FCC leave the space alone? This panel will address this general question, as well as specific etiquette proposals. |
| | From the sound of the rain around me, the subject is well covered. |
| | So I'll put some nostalgic perspective around the subject. |
| | I grew up in Maywood, New Jersey, which is roughly at the North end of the region politely called the Meadowlands, but in fact is a vast industrial crapwater swamp the salty base of which makes it ideal for AM radio transmission. (That's MW to you folks in other parts of the world.) That's why all but three of the New York AM stations listed here radiate from towers across the river in New Jersey. |
| | The closest station to Maywood was (and still is) WABC, whose 650-foot tower near the intersection of Routes 17 and 46 was framed by my bedroom window. WABC was what they called a "clear channel" station, which meant it operated at the maximum allowable power of 50,000 watts, without any directional protection to any other station in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. This meant you could get the station at night, when the ionosphere reflects AM signals back to the ground at a distance, over about half the U.S., and far beyond if you had a really good radio. More about how all this works is explained here in a piece to which I contributed a lot of the technical stuff, many years ago. |
| | Clear channel stations, in the old AM station privilege allocation scheme, were the highest caste. There were a few exceptions, but generally no other stations were allowed to radiate at night on clear channel frequencies. So stations toward the middle of the country — WGN, WLS, WHAS, KMOX, WMAQ, WSM, WOAI, WCCO, WLW, WJR, KDKA, KXL, WSB, WWL — covered all 48 states at night. |
| | Interference was considered a Bad Thing. That's why the rules favored weak, interference-free signals to strong interference-diminished ones. |
| | Political and commercial pressures on the FCC eventually did away with clear channel privileges, while gradually reducing interference protections to every class of station on the band. As a result the AM band at night is now a mess. |
| | A good example of how the system used to work is provided by KXOL of Brigham City, Utah. KXOL broadcasts at 1660, on what's called the "expanded" AM band: frequencies from 1610 to 1710 that were appended to the top end of the dial a few years back. Older radios don't go up that high (my '88 Subaru only goes to 1620), but newer ones do. |
| | KXOL is an oldies station, and a very good one. They dump the entire oldies library into the schedule, so you have no idea what's coming up next. It's also one of the first expanded band stations to go on the air. Like all stations in that band, it's licensed to 10,000 watts by day and 1,000 watts at night. The idea was that these stations' signals wouldn't really serve distant listeners at night, and in fact would provide some protection to them by limiting radiated power. |
| | But in fact 1,000 watts gets out pretty well at night, if there's no interference. In its first few years, KXOL had listeners at night from all over the West, including me (when I drove a car, like my wife's, that would get the signal). It often sounded just about as good as its neighbor, Salt Lake City's 50,000-watt KSL, whose former clear channel signal still covers the West pretty well at night, even though there are now a pile of stations on a frequency that had stayed clear of other signals until just the past couple decades. |
| | Recently a number of other stations have showed up on 1660, including one in Merced, California, making KXOL unlistenable in its old nighttime coverage area. |
| | A similar situation has befallen the FM band as well. |
| | Except in rare freak conditions, FM doesn't bounce off the ionosphere. Its short wavelength limits coverage to the territory roughly visible to the transmitting antenna, which is why FM transmitters tend to locate themselves atop high buildings, towers and mountains (e.g. the Empire State Building in New York and Mt. Wilson in Los Angeles). When the current FM band was set up in the late 40s, channels were allocated by a table of assignments in Part 73 of the FCC Rules (the same part that covers AM as well). The idea was to assign stations to channels and locations sufficiently far from other stations on the same and adjacent frequencies to effectively minimize potential interference. It was a bit clumsy (paying no respect, for example, to the terrain shadowing caused by mountains), but it was based on a high degree of etiquitte. Avoiding interference was given a high priority. |
| | But, again, the rules changed over the years, as more and more stations were poured onto the dial all over the country. As a result many stations' effective coverage has been severely reduced. One example is Los Angeles most powerful FM station, KPFK, which radiates with 110,000 watts from atop Mt.Wilson. Several years ago a small FM station went on the air on the same frequency in Tijuana, Mexico, just over the border from San Diego. Until that happened, KPFK had a reasonably strong signal from San Diego to Pt. Conception, far west of Santa Barbara. The new station in Tijuana obliterated KPFK's fringe, and caused terrible interference even in Los Angeles. |
| | Now, if KPFK had been a commercial station run by a well-connected political machine (such as the much-despised Clear Channel Worldwide), there's no way that the Tijuana station, even though it's in another country, would have come on the air. What's more, most of the relaxation of interference guidelines have been the result of potical pressures. In fact, the history of FCC rulemaking is an endless story of triumph by politics and money over engineering. |
| | Now, the radio engineering issues I'm talking about here are legacies of RF science's stone age. But they apply in the political, regulatory and commercial domains where we're having these Property vs. Commons discussions. They apply because good engineering, generally speaking, has been at the losing ends of arguments, over and over again. Engineering has won mostly by regulatory incumbency: its on founding concerns, burned into initial regulatory regimes. Minimum separation requirements on FM, for example, are almost silly in a time when we can do 3-D terrain modeling, apply directional antenna technology, and so on. But minimum separation still embodies interference-minimizing values that are important to maintain. |
| | Today we're talking about a world where frequencies aren't fixed, low powers are more desireable than high ones, and in some cases interference is a good thing. What we need, then, is a new regime that is zero-based on a new set of concerns. What should those concerns be? |
| | I believe conceiving the Net, and the airwaves of which it partially consists, as a commons, does a much better job of framing a useful regulatory regime than the property model, which still sounds to me like a legacy of the regime that gave us commercial broadcasting. |
They should change their name to F-Mobile
| | I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Los Altos, using the wi-fi there. I'll be on just long enough to find directions to the Spectrum Thing. On T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan, my five minutes, at ten cents per minute, should cost fifty cents. But it costs six dollars, because T-Mobile charges a full hour for any amount of usage short of that, even for one minute. |
| | I couldn't get on at first, because it showed I already had an account, even though I had cancelled the account last month after finding that T-Mobile had been charging me $59.95/month for ... something. They refused to convert what I had already paid that month to some other plan that would let me use the minutes, and also could barely explain what the $59.95 was for. In fact, I can't find any rates that high on their current rate schedule. When I pointed that out to the service person on the phone a few minutes ago, she said "I know." Helpful, huh? |
| | Awright. Gotta get out of here. See you at the show. |
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