Wireless broadcasting | Wireless at warp speed | The Economist

Wireless broadcasting | Wireless at warp speed | The Economist

As usual, The Economist does a good job of explaining technology and this piece about the 'white space' made available by the FCC last week will likely be a boon to Vermont. I fully expect the Vermont Telecommunications Authority to find a way to persuade providers to deploy networks that use these frequencies. How long will that take?

"After four years of deliberations—and staunch opposition from television broadcasters, makers and users of wireless microphones, and mobile-phone companies—the federal regulators voted unanimously on November 4th to allow a new generation of wireless gizmos to access the internet using the empty airwaves (“white spaces”) between television’s channels 2 to 51.

The FCC could have auctioned off those frequencies—it raised $19.6 billion in March 2008 by auctioning blocks of frequencies above 700 megahertz that will be vacated when television switches from analog to digital broadcasting—but to its credit it opted to make them freely available.

The decision is a huge win for public-interest groups and tech firms like Google, Microsoft and Intel, who believe the white-space transmission could bring broadband to poorly served parts of the country.

They see it as America’s last chance to build a “third pipe” capable of providing much-needed competition to today’s broadband duopoly controlled by the phone and cable companies. As a bonus, white space could also provide improved communications for fire-fighters, police forces, ambulance crews and other emergency responders.

Competition and community services aside, the FCC has other reasons for making the white-space frequencies free for public use. It hopes to replicate the wave of innovation that swept the wireless world a decade ago with the introduction of unlicensed WiFi devices using frequencies in the public 2.4-gigahertz band.

The frequencies involved were chosen for television back in the 1950s for good reason: they travel long distances, are hardly affected by the weather, carry lots of data, and penetrate deep into the nooks and crannies of buildings. No surprise proponents have dubbed them “WiFi on steroids”.

Once the changeover from analog to digital broadcasting is complete, the television networks will no longer need the white spaces between analog channels to prevent interference from noise and other transmissions. Apart from digital broadcasts being far less vulnerable to interference, there’s now plenty of frequency-hopping technology around for detecting digital broadcasts and avoiding them.

...the FCC has made it clear that white-space devices—whether mobile phones, laptops, game consoles, music players or other appliances with internet connections—will be required to operate on no more than four watts of broadcasting power. They will also be restricted to channels 21 to 51, where there are fewer television stations."