By Dru Sefton, Current.org, December 10, 2013
| Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board members got an | ominous preview Monday of the corporation's upcoming white | paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. | | At a meeting at CPB's headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry | Hawkes of Booz & Co.'s media and technology practice told | board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear | 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 | pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even | if their operators don't participate in the auction. | | "That means that one-third of the system could have to change | channels," noted Vincent Curren, CPB's c.o.o. "This will | likely be more disruptive than the digital transition. This | will be a major undertaking for our industry over the next | several years."
Continued:
The FCC should have thought of this before the DTV conversion. Back then, they could have designed the allocations table that consolidated all stations in each city-of-license into half (or fewer) the number of analog channels.
Neal McLain
***** Moderator's Note *****The real question is "What does a new DTV transmitter cost?", because the answer to /that/ question will tell us how much the PBS stations will push back, and thus how long it will be before the added bandwidth is available to mobile users.
Bill Horne Moderator