Make that 'Bandwidth'

FCC broadband deployment director Rob Curtis weighed in on the commission’s new broadband blog Wednesday morning with a posting that had some in the cable industry scratching their heads.

Referring to last week’s public workshop on broadband deployment, Curtis said that “many of our experts on wireless technology emphasized the importance of spectrum to our national wireless future – both improving the efficiency of existing spectrum and exploring making spectrum available in frequencies currently occupied by other technologies, such as analog cable television [emphasis ours].”

Wireless companies have long eyed hungrily the analog spectrum occupied by broadcasters, and got some of that real estate in the switch to digital TV, but analog cable is an issue of bandwidth.

An FCC sourceconfirmed that the point Curtis was trying to make was that when cable operators reclaim analog bandwidth in their transition to digital cable, that frees up cable operators to offer higher-speed Internet.