SpectrumTalk

Using the Additional Time for the DTV Transition

Now that Congress has, for whatever reason, extended the DTV transition, FCC and NTIA will look like the SEC at this week's hearing if they don't take advantage of the time to try to improve things. The image at top is from FCC's website today - the date of the transition has not been changed yet. Shall we start a pool on when it will be changed? Feel to post your own guess to this blog below.

I have commented in the past on the "battling DTV websites" of NTIA and FCC: www.dtv.gov and www.dtv2009.gov . While NTIA is tasked by law to give out the famous coupons, the information they give on related issues is not always the same as FCC's. I am not saying whose is better - but why can't they agree to use the same information on the details?

I was looking recently at the foreign language information available on both websites. Here is a table of what's there along with Census data:

Language	Total Speakers in US	Speakers Whose English Ability Rated "Not Well" or "Not at All"	DTV Information at FCC Site	DTV Information at NTIA Site
Spanish	28,101,052	7,931,848	Yes	Yes
Chinese	2,022,143	571,123	Yes(2)	Yes (2)
Vietnamese	1,009,627	326,971	Yes	Yes
Korean	894,063	264,420	Yes	Yes
Russian	706,242	192,294	Yes	Yes
French	1,643,838	145,580	Yes	Yes
Portuguese	564,630	118,723	Yes
Polish	667,414	112,487	Yes
Italian	1,008,370	111,249	Yes
Japanese	477,997	89,677	Yes
French Creole	453,368	85,598	Yes
Tagalog	1,224,241	85,217	Yes	Yes
German	1,382,613	84,254
Arabic	614,582	71,128	Yes
Armenian	202,708	45,685
Persian/Farsi	312,085	43,135	Yes
Greek	365,436	37,562	Yes
Gujarathii	235,988	30,340
Urdu	262,900	26,146
Hindi	317,057	19,936
Cambodian/ Kmer	182,000		Yes
Navajo	178,000		Yes
Hmong	168,000		Yes	Yes
Laotian	149,000		Yes
Serbocroatian	130,000		Yes (Bosnian)
Romanian	114,000
Amharic	82,000		Yes	Yes
Samoan	57,000
Ilocano	50,000		Yes
Somali	43,000		Yes
Tongan	24,000		Yes
Dakota/Lakota	24,000
Kurdish	10,000
Yup'ik	16,000		Yes
Sudanese	?		Yes
Sources:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf
http://www.usefoundation.org/userdata/file/Research/languages_of_the_usa.pdf
Somali data - http://paa2006.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=61036 Both FCC and NTIA have traditional Chinese characters (PRC) and simplified characters (Taiwan)

The second column gives the total number of speakers of each language in the US and the third gives, more importantly, the number of speakers who can't speak English well. The data is based on the 2000 census and hence isn't good for recent refugees from Sudan and Somalia. It also only has English speaking data for the top 20 languages. I did not include one language on the NTIA site that I think is Laotian or Cambodian.

I suspect this data shows that if your congressman has influence, you are much more likely to get information in your language. Thus the 16,000 Yup'ik speakers get information from FCC, but not NTIA, while the 86,000 German speakers with bad English don't. NTIA also ignores Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Japanese, and French Creole which account for 517,000 people with poor English ability. If you want some clues as to why a language was chosen, check out the geographic distribution of each language and you can guess which congressman pressured which agency. For example did Ted Stevens ask for Yup'ik while no one spoke up for Armenian?

In the case of the Hmong, an interesting question is whether the older immigrants who don't speak English can read Hmong since it was only a spoken language until the late 20th century. Similarly, there are Navajos in rural areas who avoided compulsory education and don't speak English but it is not clear if they can read Navajo.

The new team at FCC inherited a real mess as they all realize. I hope they can make real progress soon. I also hope they remember to explain to the public what NCTA calls the "Second DTV Transition" this has a real potential to embarrass everyone involved unless the cable industry explains better what is happening.