 practical innovation, which is odd considering the implied opportunity cost that is incurred when spectrum is purchased, networks are built and phones are either not available or do not work very well. We return to this fundamental disconnect in Chapter 21. Cable, Copper, Wireless and Fibre and the World of the Big TV 6.1 Big TV How did televisions in our living rooms get to be SO HUGE? The answer is of course that plasma screen technologies and LCD technologies and glass- production technologies have combined together to produce a new generation of monstrously large televisions that do much more than they used to. Specifically these are devices that not only take information from a terrestrial or satellite broadcast but are also connected to the internet and more often than not also include one or more forms of wireless connectivity. Televisions, set-top boxes and home hubs have therefore become an integral part of the telecommunications value proposition though who owns what parts of that added value remains open to debate. A brief review of technology progress provides some useful context. Eighty years ago mechanical television systems designed by John Logie Baird in the UK and Charles Francis Jenkins in the US typically had screens of an inch or SO wide with a 30-line picture. US TV broadcasting was initially in the AM radio band between 550 and 1500 kHz. In 1930 the Federal Radio Commission allocated channels in the 2 MHz band to support higher resolution (45 and 60 line) pictures. In the UK 30-line television programmes were broadcast by the BBC from September 1929. Most mechanical TV broadcasts in the US had stopped by 1933 but carried on in the UK until 1935 and until 1937 in the Soviet Union. Follow the link for a description of how mechanical TV systems worked. Electronic television required a number of enabling technologies including the valve but also a cathode ray tube to display the image and a camera tube to capture the image. There is substantial variance of opinion as to who was first with what,