We're seeing more G.722 in VOIP phone sets these days. This gives you 7 khz bandwidth which is respectable for voice. It's also a royalty free codec that's simple to implement. It's supported (mostly) in Asterisk and is commonly used by the corporate conference systems and radio stations. There are better codecs, but the royalties preclude their inclusion into the things that most people buy. Cell phones, as far as audio go, as a disease! I used to be the Chief Engineer at a major talk radio station and... dealing with cell phones was just awful.I refuse to participate on a conference call or any critical phone call using a cell phone. How people can use those things as their primary home phones mystifies me.

I live in a very rural area in the Southern California high desert not far from Nevada (Look! There goes Art Bell!) and used to have a C Band dish. After I first moved here (1990 or so) you could tune a few transponders in with a video receiver that had Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM) on them. This is just a fancy way of saying "many little SSB carriers". Connecting a radio that receives short wave to the sat receiver allowed you to listen to phone calls from Alaska and Hawaii. You'd change channels by simply tuning the radio between channels. You'd only hear one side of the conversation but it was kind of interesting at the time. I 'm pretty sure that's all gone now that those places actually have been connected via fiber. (Look! UFO's!) TV was just going scrambled but there were a few things "still in the clear". I suspect that that's still the case. There's also FTA "Free to Air" digital TV or DVB. Consider setting up a couple of long wire antennas, one "North -South" another "East - West". The absence of noise allows you to receive some interesting things on SW.

I guess the term "Anchor Tenant" has multiple meanings in this case. I wonder why they're doing it in San Francisco, with it's incredibly restrictive business rules and ridiculously expensive and unreliable electricity?

I guess that TV broadcasters didn't give the government enough money. I have a better idea! How about if a good sized chunk of that spectrum was made license free, like 2.4 and 5.8 ghz? Why should we give up "public airwaves" to the Verizons of the world to sell back to us by the kilobyte at high prices with data caps, etc. Look what's been done with the crumbs that the FCC has allowed us already!

In 2003, I was on a small team using a similar WHOI system called REMUS to take surveys of ports and waterways, looking for mines. We had been training with the system, mainly in Southern California and when Iraq started up, they decided that they wanted to try the new technology there. We did, and it was successful. http://www.joetalbot.net/pages/030401-N-3783H-075A.htm In the course of our training, we managed to get the things stuck, beached and lost several times despite a system that would take it to the surface when it's little PC-104 mind was blown. Remember, there are things down there (plants, critters, caves, rocks, ships and junk) that are unknown to us before these things are launched (that's often why we launch them, you know? To take surveys?). These things navigate underwater using a small network of buoy "transponders" the respond to pings from the unit. The slight response delay (caused by the water and very predictable) tells the unit how far it is from the buoy, who's locations are known to the units (windows) programming software. These things are pretty cool and useful, but they're also kind of primitive. We used to attach a "pinger" to the units so that when they got stuck, we could recover them with divers. A pinger is a small capsule that contains a device that periodically emits a 20-70 khz "ping" that is easily picked up by a hand held, very directional receiver carried by a diver. http://www.benthos.com/undersea-pingers-locators-product-overview.asp Given what the system is worth, I would imagine that it has a pinger for location as well.

The Navy did the "biggest IT contract ever let" and it was pretty much an expensive bloated disaster. See http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3813651 I'm beginning to think that "too big to fail" means "too big" and that failure is inevitable.

This smells like another attempt to get politicians or eco-opportunists into "the climate business".Remember, they almost pulled it off. It was really disappointing and scary to me that there are some out there who wold pull any kind of stunt and use any tactic to support using allegedly "settled science" to achieve very questionable political goals. Once again, don't get your science from Politicians, celebrities or lawyers. Examine why you believe what you do. Honest skepticism is healthy. To those who call skeptics "deniers" (like holocaust deniers), please keep your religion to yourself.True scientists are skeptical, as they should be.

Never had a call drop? Never been someplace where there is "no network"? Never had a conversation that you simply couldn't understand because of the "stacked" aggressive compression? C'mon! Thanks to the wireless companies, people have lower standards now, in terms of audio quality, reliability and availability. I used to work for Jabra years ago, before they had any market share and weren't really sure what direction to take. I was brought on to improve audio quality for various products. One was the small "all in ear" headset. It had terrible audio due to the lack of "proximity effect", there was really no way to "fix" this problem. I used to piss everybody off by calling it "an ear mounted speakerphone" in meetings. People would never accept the poor quality on land line phones (the headset market at that time). Poof! Along comes wireless and the lack of quality is expected by the consumer. Result: sell product and then company! People who have only a cell phone are nuts, and deaf!