They'd love us to be back in the bad old days, where the cost of entry was high and they completely controlled distribution because ONLY they could make the little plastic disks. They used to have a cool deal going on: radio stations promote records for free (or some. Ahem. "Consideration"), the music would sell, and the system would feed itself. Now, the radio stations won't take any risks (since they're all owned by a few companies who overpaid for them and have huge payments to make). The record companies will sue anything that moves and wants money from the radio stations who might have promoted their Lady Gaga like garbage for free, and then they whine every time that somebody tries to give the public something close to what it wants. I wish that they'd hurry up an go out of business so that somebody with half a clue can get things going again. I mean, how do you blow this?

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!