Thomas Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason university, has an interesting take on broadband technologies in yesterday’s Financial Times:

“The vaunted digital television transition is under way. It offers to upgrade broadcast tele­vision picture quality. But high definition is mostly window-dressing. Indeed, television advertisers will not pay broadcasters much more for HD audiences, either because viewers watch on sets too small to notice it or because big-screen users subscribe to cable or satellite services for their HD fix…

“The US and most European Union countries have set aside at least 400 MHz for off-air television, frequencies considered to be the motherlode of radio spectrum, given their favourable signal characteristics. For cellular or mobile broadband networks, this airspace is far more capacious than what has been made available for 1G, 2G, and 3G cellular combined. Allowing tele­vision band frequencies to be used for non-broadcast services would reduce mobile voice prices and unleash a plethora of new applications.

“The prospects are exciting – but not to governments. While forcing consumers to buy new digital television receivers, regulators are only lazily attending to the digital dividend. Indeed, the five channels made available by Berlin’s 2003 switch-over lie idle. The Netherlands, the first country to go all-digital in television broadcasting in 2005, has likewise done nothing to reallocate its airwaves.”

 Go here to read the rest of Hazlett’s article.  For all the progress we’ve made technologically, our policies have yet to catch up to the new realities before us.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 5:16 am and is filed under Policy, Broadband, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.