The column on NASA making money mentions that the FCC sold off the 700MHz analog television band and took in $19.6 billion. Who did they sell it to? Their propaganda says they freed up the band to provide police, fire, and emergency services with additional bandwidth but I don’t see how those local, taxpayer supported outfits came up with $19 billion. If they FCC really did provide that portion of the broadcast spectrum to emergency services, why didn’t they donate it?
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In this case: Is NASA the only federal agency that makes a profit? - The Straight Dope
They (the taxpayer supported outfits) didn’t. Those sales went to various wireless companies (giving them the right to transmit over the sold frequencies) like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. The newly-restricted (and not-for-sale) frequencies were reserved for the afore-mantioned police, fire, and emergency services.
Essentially, they did just that - by reserving those frequencies for the afore-mentioned services and not charging for their use.
Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer. The FCC has never charged for public safety pool frequencies, beyond various administrative fees for things such as filing, station construction notification, antenna registrations and renewals.
Except, as originally proposed, the FCC did actually want to charge for these new frequencies, known as Block D. When the reserve in the auction was not met, it was postponed, and the entity originally envisioned as the administrator essentially went defunct when it ran out of funding.
As of yet, Block D licenses have not been assigned, although there has been a block of 700MHz channels (specifically 764-776MHz) available for public safety licensing for about a decade.
And any news article that touts these new 700MHz as being “better” because they “travel further” and “penetrate buildings better” should see its author drug out into the street and shot on sight for making their readers dumber for reading their article.
A misnomer is an incorrect name for something. You are probably looking for misconception.
/peeve
And the 700MHz band is definitely better than some other bands for certain purposes – but it depends on what you’re comparing it to.
Certainly not comparatively better than 800MHz in any technical respect, which has been in use for over 20 years. Signal propagation is comparable to 800MHz and does not compare at all to UHF/VHF/Low-band. I must concede 700MHz RF will penetrate better than UHF or VHF (but not better than 800MHz), but I must also qualify this by noting that properly built UHF or VHF systems easily make up for this lost ground with BDAs (bi-directional amplifiers), in-building repeaters and leaky coax.
It is most certainly not the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is how the media have been portraying it for some time. All it really is, is more spectrum for the FCC and its coordinators to mismanage. There are only a handful of areas in the US where the additional spectrum is absolutely needed, those being major metropolitan with existing mis-managed TV-band allocations such as Los Angeles and New York.