Source : Ottawa Citizen

Time is running out for the those trusty rabbit ears you have on top of your TV.

The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that sets the date for the shutdown of the analogue TV broadcasting stream, which supplies the TV signal to rabbit ear antennas, as Feb. 17, 2009.

The U.S. Senate passed the new legislation setting the cut-off date on Wednesday.

In three years, as many as 70 million Americans will see their TV sets go black as the UHF and VHF radio waves used to carry TV signals to their aged televisions is reassigned for other purposes.

And, while no such date has been set for the shutdown of open-air analogue broadcasting north of the border, one expert says Canada won't be far behind. "Canada would end up following step with the United States," said Ian Morrison, spokesman for the independent watchdog Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. "There are an awful lot of people still using the rabbit ears."

Canadians living in border towns, who are used to tuning their rabbit ears to pick up American TV stations, will be hit the hardest, he said.

But Mr. Morrison said that he is skeptical that the U.S. will meet its 2009 target: Too many people, many of them elderly or impoverished, are still using the old technology.

As many as one in six Canadians still use rabbit ears to pick up their television broadcasts, Mr. Morrison said, most of them in Quebec.

In the U.S., the federal government says it will shell out more than $1.5 billion in cash to make sure that its citizens are prepared for the next generation of TV broadcasting. Owners of old TV sets in the U.S. will be issued two vouchers worth $40 each that they can put toward buying new TVs to pick-up the high-definition broadcasts.

The newly approved TV broadcast legislation was included in the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005. The act "requires television broadcasters to vacate the analogue portion of the public spectrum."

The U.S. plan will switch off the traditional analogue broadcast system and replace it with an all digital, high-definition system. High definition signals use a fraction of the radio spectrum that traditional analogue signals do.

By freeing up the additional spectrum, the U.S. government plans to re-assign broadcasting airwaves to military, ambulance, police and fire officials to allow them to better communicate with one another and to give those services access to futuristic technologies, such as onboard navigation systems.

The government says it was a breakdown in communication that slowed emergency response after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and last fall's deadly hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas. It believes giving emergency personnel more communications technology will lessen future tragedies.

The government then plans to take whatever bandwidth spectrum is left over and hold a spectrum auction, selling the bandwidth off to cellphone and other communications companies. It has been reported that the auction could see the U.S. government bring in as much as $10 billion U.S.

Past spectrum auctions have contributed more than $20 billion to U.S. coffers. A similar auction by the Canadian government in 2001 saw the government collect nearly $1.5 billion. A large spectrum auction in Britain in 2000 saw its federal government collect $50 billion.

The cellular companies will use the additional bandwidth for futuristic services, such as allowing videos to be streamed to cellphones and bringing faster Internet access to mobile computers.

© Ottawa Citizen