Two N.J. public-television stations will collect more than $330 million to turn off their transmitters.

At a time when the Trump Administration is signaling its interest in eliminating the small amount of funding still available to public broadcasting in the United States, the recent FCC Spectrum Auction brought some public stations much-needed revenue to complete station or facility upgrades and help underwrite the cost of locally produced programming. But some TV station owners will pocket tens of millions of dollars from auction proceeds earned from a license that was supposed to include a commitment to serve in the public interest.

Current – News for People in Public Media has tracked the station changes that will come to public-television stations as a result of the spectrum auction. In most cases, the public-TV stations that sold their channel position will not disappear entirely. Many will “merge into other station’s spectrum” — which means in plain English they will share space with another local station.

It won’t be a total loss for public-television in most of these cities. Many are served by “repeater” stations that essentially rebroadcast programming from another nearby station. In larger cities, multiple public-TV stations are not uncommon and losing one might not have a big impact, especially if remaining stations pick up some of the programming that will go missing when the affected station signs off. But in some states, the loss of free over the air TV stations could exacerbate the growing problem of maintaining quality coverage of local news and events.

For cord-cutters, local free television remains an essential part of the kind of TV package consumers used to pay the cable or satellite company to receive. Local stations still deliver an important public service to the community through news and public affairs programming, but that responsibility is increasingly taking a back seat to profits.

The state of New Jersey is served by two media markets – one in New York City, the other Philadelphia, neither in New Jersey.

For some states, the challenge to deliver locally focused programming in areas dominated by media markets in adjacent states has been a problem for decades. No state has faced this challenge more than New Jersey, divided in half and served by two out-of-state media Designated Market Areas (DMAs). The northern half of New Jersey is part of the New York City TV market and the southern half is part of the Philadelphia DMA. As a result, local stories about events inside New Jersey can get lost in favor of stories centered on New York or Philadelphia, even more so during today’s era of media consolidation and cutbacks in newsroom budgets.

A Free Press project is trying to address that problem by encouraging New Jersey state officials to create a public trust fund from part of the hundreds of millions earned by the state’s stations from the spectrum auction to support community-driven projects, responsive local journalism, serious investigative reporting, civic technology and essential public media outlets. The campaign seeks to remind state and local officials that the airwaves still belong to the public, and the stations collecting large sums from the auction agreed to serve their communities in return for obtaining that license to broadcast. Simply putting auction proceeds into their pockets isn’t serving the public interest.

“It’s only right that money from the sale of the state’s 20th-century media outlets be used to create a new, forward-thinking media landscape for this century that focuses on local communities and is attuned to residents’ needs,” said Mike Rispoli, Free Press Action Fund journalism campaign director and director of the News Voices: New Jersey project. “When local stations go off the air, news coverage disappears. That means people are less informed, civic participation drops and political corruption increases. Spectrum revenues must be used to support those who rely on locally produced news and information to engage with their neighbors, learn about volunteer opportunities, make decisions about voting, run for public office, get information about small businesses and support their children in local schools.”

Just two New Jersey public-television stations WNJN and WNJT together collected more than $330 million in auction revenues — two of the largest individual payouts of any noncommercial stations. Now both stations plan to go off the air. Where exactly will that money be going?

The News Voices: New Jersey project wants some of it spent on making sure New Jersey residents have a New Jersey-focused news media, particularly in a state where political scandals have not been uncommon.

“Some ideas we’ve heard from journalists and community members on how to use these public proceeds include support for locally focused digital news startups; apps and tools to help people sift through public data and expedite Freedom of Information Act requests; robust community-engagement projects designed to lift up voices long ignored by newsrooms, in communities of color, immigrant communities, and other underserved areas; and media-literacy programs to identify and combat the spread of fake news and disinformation,” Rispoli said.

The group is asking interested members of the public to sign up for the project and help advocate for stronger newsrooms and communities. A similar effort is also getting underway in North Carolina.

As of today, here is an update on what is happening with the public-TV stations affected by the FCC Spectrum Auction.

Thought paying $65 a month for broadband service is too much? Just wait a few years when one Wall Street analyst predicts you will be paying twice that rate for internet access, all because the cable industry is gradually achieving a high-speed broadband monopoly.

Jonathan Chaplin, New Street Research analyst, predicts as a result of cord-cutting and the retreat of phone companies from offering high-speed internet service competition, the cable industry will win as much as 72.2% of the broadband market by the year 2020. With it, they also win the power to raise prices both fast and furiously.

In a note to investors, Chapin wrote the number of Americans left to sign up for broadband service for the first time has dwindled, and most of the rest of new customer additions will come at the expense of phone companies, especially those still selling nothing better than DSL.

“Our long-term penetration forecast is predicated on cable increasing its market share, given a strong network advantage in 70% of the country (this assumes that telco fiber deployment increases from 16% of the country today to close to 30% five years from now),” Chaplin wrote.

Cable companies already control 65% of the U.S. broadband market as of late last year. Chaplin points out large cable operators have largely given up on slapping usage caps and usage pricing on broadband service to replace revenue lost from TV cord-cutting, so now they are likely going to raise general broadband pricing on everyone.

“Comcast and Charter have given up on usage-based pricing for now; however, we expect them to continue annual price increases,” Chaplin said. “As the primary source of value to households shifts increasingly from pay-TV to broadband, we would expect the cable companies to reflect more of the annual rate increases they push through on their bundles to be reflected in broadband than in the past. Interestingly, Comcast is now pricing standalone broadband at $85 for their flagship product, which is a $20 premium to the rack rate bundled price.”

Chaplin himself regularly cheerleads cable operators to do exactly as he predicts: raise prices. Back in late 2015, Chaplin pestered then CEO Robert Marcus of Time Warner Cable about why TWC was avoiding data caps, and in June of that year, Chaplin sent a note to investors claiming broadband was too cheap.

“Our analysis suggests that broadband as a product is underpriced,” Chaplin wrote. “Our work suggests that cable companies have room to take up broadband pricing significantly and we believe regulators should not oppose the re-pricing (it is good for competition & investment).”

“The companies will undoubtedly have to take pay-TV pricing down to help ‘fund’ the price increase for broadband, but this is a good thing for the business,” Chaplin added. “Post re-pricing, [online video] competition would cease to be a threat and the companies would grow revenue and free cash flow at a far faster rate than they would otherwise.”

Four large telecom companies won the bulk of the available licenses to operate their wireless services on the upcoming 600MHz band, once UHF TV channels occupying part of it vacate. But what exactly did AT&T, Comcast, Dish, and T-Mobile buy and where? Mosaik, a mapping firm, produced maps (courtesy Fierce Wireless) showing exactly where the four companies won 600MHz spectrum in the recent auction. The differences are striking. T-Mobile effectively won the right to launch new service almost everywhere in the country, in part because it acquired a huge number of cheap, low-demand licenses in largely rural areas.

Dish’s plans for its spectrum remain a complete mystery, while Comcast’s winning bids are entirely within areas where it provides cable service. AT&T, although already holding a large supply of low band frequencies, apparently needs more capacity in larger cities, and paid handsomely to get it.

AT&T

Most of AT&T’s winning bids cover larger cities where it already operates an extensive cellular network. Among the areas where AT&T can expand service: Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis, Birmingham, Mobile, Tampa, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Minneapolis and Little Rock. But AT&T also grabbed licenses for rural western Massachusetts, central Ohio, and southern Michigan.

Comcast

Comcast’s winning bids consisted of 10MHz of spectrum, except in Nashville where it nabbed 20MHz. Comcast grabbed enough spectrum to cover every city in Florida except Tampa (where Charter provides cable service). The cable company focused heavily on east and west coast bids, winning spectrum across much of the Pacific Northwest, the Boston-NYC-DC corridor, and Illinois and Indiana. The only downside is that 10MHz is not a lot of spectrum to support a large wireless service, but then Comcast does not require that at this time, because it will rely primarily on a shared arrangement with Verizon Wireless to power Xfinity Mobile.

Dish Network

What Dish intends to do with its spectrum remains a complete mystery, but it grabbed a significant amount of it in New York City and its nearby suburbs, including Connecticut. It also won respectable quantities of frequencies in Alaska, California, Florida, Puerto Rico, Seattle and Portland, and several midwestern and south-central cities.

T-Mobile USA

T-Mobile published a similar map as part of its press package claiming victory in the spectrum auction. This map better highlights T-Mobile’s extensive spectrum wins in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. If T-Mobile uses it all, it will command similar coverage areas comparable to Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile will manage this without any need to merge with anyone else, as AT&T and Sprint have historically argued in their past failed efforts to acquire T-Mobile.

Verizon Communications announced a deal Tuesday with a leading optical fiber manufacturer to supply up to 12.4 million miles of fiber cable annually for a large buildout of Verizon’s fiber network to power its forthcoming 5G wireless service.

Verizon’s $1.05 billion agreement with Corning, Inc., of Corning N.Y., will guarantee Verizon will have an ample supply of optical fiber available from 2018-2020 at a time when the company noticed a fiber cable shortage was causing problems for its current FiOS/5G fiber buildout now underway in Boston.

“This new architecture is designed to improve Verizon’s 4G LTE coverage, speed the deployment of 5G, and deliver high-speed broadband to homes and businesses of all sizes,” Verizon said in a statement. But Verizon did not make it very clear the expansion will primarily benefit Verizon Wireless, not Verizon Communications’ FiOS fiber to the home service.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, appearing exclusively on CNBC this morning, rejected the notion that the fiber buildout would represent a restart of Verizon’s long-suspended expansion of its FiOS fiber to the home service.

“When we deployed FiOS we would run a fiber cable into a neighborhood with six or eight strands in it,” McAdam said. “Now we’re going to drop off six or eight strands to every street light in every neighborhood so that allows you to deliver a gigabit of thruput into the home and allows you to do things like intelligent transportation, electric grid management, and water system management. You hear a lot about autonomous cars and things like that today that don’t work without 5G.”

Verizon’s Boston project represents the current CEO’s vision: a wireless-based network supported by an extensive fiber network. But instead of connecting fiber to homes, McAdam’s network connects fiber to tens of thousands of palm-sized “small cells” and other wireless infrastructure that will deliver services to individual neighborhoods instead of individual homes.

Critics still question whether Verizon’s 5G network will be able to sustain its speed and capacity claims outside of testing labs, especially as shared wireless network infrastructure faces future usage demands. Fiber to the home service does not require customers to share bandwidth the same way a wireless connection would and can manage much higher capacity.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam and Corning chairman and CEO Wendel Weeks appeared jointly on CNBC to discuss Verizon’s $1.05 billion agreement with Corning to guarantee up to 12.4 million miles of optical fiber a year from 2018-2020. (11:24)

As the wireless industry grabs a bigger chunk of the television dial, the remaining free over-the-air stations are going to be on the move starting next year. More than 900 American television stations will get new channel numbers after the move is complete, all to squeeze signals into the unchanged VHF and diminished UHF dial.

The folks at Rabbit Ears have a handy tool that will guide you through the changes, and they are enormous. Just use the drop-down box next to “Market” and find your city. Here at Stop the Cap! HQ, all but two stations in Rochester, N.Y., are getting new channel positions:

TV station reassignments as a result of the channel repack for Rochester, NY. The first two columns show the new vs. current actual channel number.

Most viewers won’t notice a big difference because the FCC is allowing stations to continue to market themselves with a virtual channel number than usually dates back to before the migration to digital TV broadcasting. But the channel changes can still be important for viewers using an antenna, especially if your local station(s) migrate into the VHF or UHF bands where they might not have been before. Two different antennas are sometimes required to get good reception from both bands. The traditional “rabbit ears” indoor telescoping antenna is usually designed for VHF reception, while small loop antennas work better for UHF. Various other antenna configurations can work for both bands, some better than others. Outdoor aerials can be designed to receive VHF, UHF or both. You may need an antenna upgrade if your antenna isn’t designed to receive the station(s) you want to see after they move.