Again, y’all are arguing about something that isn’t being proposed. There is no proposal for the federal gov’t to provide free wi-fi on a large scale. The “free” in the article is allowing general access to parts of the spectrum by companies and municipalities rather then reserving it for wireless companies or as a buffer between other already allocated spectra.
It should be intuitive by now. The lobby committing the most bribe money to politicians, …i mean to “influential, free speech”, will win.
You are right. :smack: Ok, so the proposal is to hand over currently used spectrum that could be used for a WiFi like service in the future. I have heard of this, but wasn’t associating it with this OP.
The article is talking about free public WiFi using this technology, however, and the costs would still be high, though if you were able to use a similar broadcast system to the old style TV stuff then it might reduce some of those costs. You’d still need backbone links and broadcast towers, and you’d still need to either contract out support or build a support system, both of which would be costly as well.
I’m not opposed to this (certainly not in the FCC freeing up currently unused spectrum)…it would be a cool project to work on and I could see a lot of benefits to this.
My assumption is that free really won’t be. I predict it get sold off to Apple for the iphone, Google, Time Warner, etc. and offers enough free basic access but is really a gateway for premium services. Either that or so heavily filtered, good luck pulling up webpages written in Latin.
Here’s a report commenting on how terrible the reporting was in the original Washington Post article.
Thanks. That makes a lot of sense and puts the whole thing in perspective.
It’s already failed several times over at the municipal level. Granted, technology has moved on, but I still don’t see this being a good idea.
Anyhoo, I really like the idea behind the actual proposal. The gov’t should manage the spectrum to allow the maximum number of users. Consumers would be much better off in a world where there were an array of different mobile broadband providers rather then just a few big players who have the clout and cash to get the FCC to give them a monopoly over the block.
Obviously for some applications such monopolies are necessary, but it sounds like the tech exists for that not to be the case with “super wi-fi”. And large carriers will still have their pre-existing chunks of spectra, so its not like national networks will be forced out.
Also I hope someone comes up with a better name then “super wi-fi”
That makes a lot more sense. What was being reported seemed over the top even to a lefty like me.
Okay, that’s actually cool. I can foresee the day when that would not be enough bandwidth (several months before implementation), but it’s still cool, in a desperate race against obsolescence way. Thanks for the info and welcome aboard!
Sorry, just a drive by here, but I’ll see if I have some time tomorrow to do some research to see if what I’m saying below is correct or if I’m full of it.
[QUOTE=Abelian Grape]
There’s a document on the Google internal network outlining how this would work (if you are a Google employee, a moma search for “CarTalk” should find it). The basic idea laid out in the document was that in the past decade or so, advances in digital signal processing have resulted in orders of magnitude increases in how much data we can pack into these longer waves used for TV. This means that with access to this spectrum, a single tower could handle all of the bandwidth of an entire city. And since these are longer wavelengths they can actually penetrate and travel far enough to cover that city geographically, or even an entire region, same way TV spectrum does now. The end result was that you could completely cover the entire US for a very cheap price. Less than Google’s current cash on hand, easily. Trying to extrapolate the cost of this from existing wifi or cell phone data plans is not valid, as these technologies require vastly more towers or hotspots for the same coverage.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not a radio engineer, but this, in my experience anyway, does not seem right and I’m going to need to see a cite or at least part of the white paper you are referring too. One tower could cover a single city? How does the end user communicate back to this mythical single tower?? :dubious:
There is nothing magical about the broadcast TV spectrum…it’s just a different frequency. If anyone had technology that would enable a single tower to broadcast and receive at bandwidth levels sufficient for an entire city, then someone would be doing that NOW…they would simply be using licensed spectrum.
I’d need to see more details, and as I said I’m not a radio engineer unfortunately, but I can tell you that unless technology has leaped ahead massively in the last year that it’s clearly wrong. My guess is you aren’t remembering it correctly, not that the white paper is wrong. If you can, go back and re-read it at least and see if they actually say that a single tower could service an entire city using the current TV broadcast spectrum. Even assume you could get the whole spectrum (which I doubt), I see two basic problems…one, routing and arbitration (you are talking about thousand or tens of thousands of simultaneous users), and two how do the users send data back to the network? Even assuming you could broadcast wireless from a single tower to the entire city, how do I, Joe User, connect to this network and send my requests to it? I’d need an equally powerful transmitter to hit a single tower and tell the network that I want to go surfing for porn.
I’m not sure about the bandwidth part either, but then I’m not sure exactly how much of the spectrum we are talking about here. I’ve worked on microwave systems in the 8 and 16 Ghz range, and seen backbone (point to point) backbone links up to 10 GB/s and up to 50 miles (with good LOS)…I’m pretty sure that big carriers get more out of their links, but that’s point to point. In my experience, omni-directional links generally lose a lot of bandwidth and distance.
I agree with this 100%.
If it allows me an alternative to Time Fucking Warner, then I’m all for it.