[RTTY] FW: If you care about CW and RTTY - time is of the essence

[Al Kozakiewicz]

>Today, most of the demand for wideband text transmissions (remember that images are restricted to the phone/image >subbands) is in automated usage.  

Another area where technology has overtaken regulation.

In an all analog world, it makes some sense to regulate transmissions based on content. In a digital world, it does not. There is no syntactic difference between text, image, an Excel file or any other non-streaming data source.  It is all data.

Winlink, just to pick an example, uses telnet (N.B. virtually every TCP based network service uses telnet) to download email, including attachments. Attachments can be anything - an audio recording, picture, whatever. Content of that nature is in theory illegal in the automated subbands, but there is no practical way to enforce that restriction.

Does the restriction make sense? Probably not anymore.  What would be the best way to apportion usage? By bandwidth. What is the FCC seemingly proposing? Eliminating bandwidth restrictions.

I agree that we are unlikely to see the end of times in the short term. It is the law of unintended consequences that worries me.

Al
AB2ZY