Today's Technology section of the Wall Street Journal carries an article by Sarmad Ali called The 10 Biggest Problems with Wireless & How To Fix Them. It includes some data from Forrester Research concerning consumer satisfaction with a number of aspects of their cellular service. One would think that relative coverage in a competitive market would be fairly well researched before signing up, but some 15% of consumers sayd they were dissatisfied with the coverage of their provider (another 27% were neutral). Another 15% were dissatisfied with the dependability of their calls (31% were neutral). Ten percent were dissatisfied with the sound quality of their voice calls (30% neutral).
In my first professional job after college, I shared an office with South Dakota Public Broadcasting's director of engineering, a radio guy for some 20 years before television came along. He had a sign on the wall that said, "God didn't intend for pictures to fly through the air." Maybe it should have been packets instead of pictures.
Fast forward umpty-ump years to last night. On the short drive from Washington's National Airport to my hotel downtown, I had to redial four times to complete a "got here OK" conversation with my wife. Yes, one of those was after my cab emerged from a tunnel, but three weren't and my phone showed lots of bars everywhere except the tunnel.
As us broadcasters transition to digital, we're going to have to get used to the kind of satisfaction numbers that cellular "enjoys." Even HD Radio, which chose a more robust technology than did television, is showing subjectively less coverage than does analog radio, especially on the HD-2 and HD-3 channels. Of course, what that probably means will be that we will drive even more people to cable, DBS, satellite radio, and IP radio (the latter of which is less than a couple of years away in cars and is doing quite well already in homes and offices).
--Dennis
I will agree with the author that there are digital reception challenges out there. They are different than analog, and create their own set of problems.
For TV, the coding that was selected was optimized for the typical RF environment found in much of this country-- long-distance reception in wide-open markets. Granted, less of the population lives in these areas, but they have fewer distribution choices than do people in the cities. The 8VSB modulation system is at it's best in 'fixed' links typical of the ordinary TV household-- mobile was never really a big issue because few people watch TV while in motion. Those that argue for mobile 8VSB reception have more interest in non-TV business models than they do TV business models.
Radio, on the other hand, is used mobile much of the time. There, I puzzle why there is this push for digital when the analog signal works OK most of the time, and works even when the signal is less than perfect. Digital does offer opportunity for new and expanded use of the medium, but with truly annoying problems like 'cliff effect'. If the digital system is considerably more fragile than the old analog system, it will be slow to adopt, or may never adopt. The move towards higher and higher frequencies is not helping, either. Satellite and IP radio rely on microwave signals, which behave in very different ways (to the user) than do the low frequencies where traditional radio is used. It is definitely trickier to receive a radio signal broadcast at microwave than one broadcast at lower frequencies. To be truly successful, a system using microwave 'broadcasting' has to be extremely roboust, which limits the number of bits available for the service it is supposed to provide. Thus, there is a diminishing return on investment for some of these new radio technologies.
The thing that may very well save over-the-air TV is the skyrocketing costs of cable and DBS. If rates keep increasing, it will (as it already has) drive people back to over-the-air. Radio is a different story. Radio has to be above all, reliable. The radio can't act like a computer, losing signal then having to reaacquire it. It has to act like we have always expected it to act. Anything less, and people will be reluctant to adopt it.
Posted by: Tim Stoffel | Wednesday, 25 October 2006 at 13:06