Quote Originally Posted by Irving View Post
How close are we to freeing up the original television broadcast frequencies for other uses now that everything is digital?
In theory, the bands that are set aside for TV could be broken up and the actual TV bands could be noticeably smaller with digital.

In reality, I doubt we will ever see that happen. The FCC is a .gov circus, and if they ever re-purpose/reclassify those bands, they will probably fall into the same rules as the existing 400MHz licensed band, which is to say very limited usage, limited throughput, and people buying and sitting on licenses because "you never know when we might need it". Several of the railroads hold lots of licenses for frequencies that they haven't used in decades, but the cost to keep them is minimal, and should they ever come up with a good use (when I was working for one of the radio manufacturers, we built some test devices for UPRR) for radios, they have the channels. Not that long ago, mid 2000's, the FCC changed the rules to shrink the channels in the licensed bands of 150-174MHz and 450-470MHz from 25KHz to 12.5KHz.

Now, if the FCC does something totally astonishing, and we see the option of 20-40MHz license free channels in low frequency bands like that, it will revolutionize the WISP world. The lower the frequency, the better the signal propagation you get, hence my comments on 24,58, and 60GHz networks. This means that perfect line of sight and perfect fresnel zone clearance will be less critical for reliable and functional links, and the channel size would allow for the data traffic necessary for WISP or other wireless ethernet applications.