Senators Aim to Wirelessly Jumpstart Broadband

JimW writes "Article at Practically Networked...A couple of senators actually have a clue about how broadband might be effectively promoted. Not that I have anything against my tax dollars propping up failing telco's by pushing DSL on areas where it isn't financially viable. Methinks the dark fiber will stay dark." Their plan calls for 255 MHz of spectrum to be allocated for wireless broadband - to compare, the band occupied by 802.11b is 83Mhz wide, with each channel being 22MHz (they overlap).

Comments

Well SOMETHING has to be done!!!

[eyegor]

It's hard to imagine babs boxer and George Allen getting together on anything, but this seems to be a good first step.

Last mile is the hardest nut to crack. Around these parts, Verizon hasn't delivered broadband to very many people (I suspect they're waiting for their competitors to die off first) and our cable provider (adelphia) is in chapter 11.

My only concern is that we need to ensure that nothing will interfere with the wireless data. 802.11 shares spectrum with too many things.

Excellent!

[xchino]

I work for a local ISP, and the competiton between other local ISP's for spectrum caused so many problems that everyone finally just registered a frequency. Except us, since everyone else switched we took over 2.4, but the interference problems persist, especially in residential areas with high concentrations of 2.4ghz phones. I hope this makes it to fruition, it'll make it much easier to find a good interference free frequency for more reliable wireless connections.

This is real! 2100MHz +/- or MMDS may be the range

[puzzled]

I run a WISP that covers five counties and I can assure you that this stuff is real. I am on a 'technical steering committee' that drives Cisco's lobbying efforts along with a handful of other industry insiders and the most of the talk around this issue went down about three months ago.

I think the easiest method to find 255MHz in the sub 6000MHz range would be to boot the owner/non-operators out of MMDS space, but there was also some talk about 2100MHz +/-

On the other hand, there is some mil stuff in the 3500MHz range that is pretty darned close to retirement - just take a look at http://www.alvarion.com and see the 3.5 GHz OFDM product :-) :-) :-)