Open Spectrum: Toward Ubiquitous Connectivity

obiwan2u writes "ACM's Queue magazine has a moderately dense article describing how new intelligent radios may free up under-utilized spectrum bandwidth, possibly providing solutions to the last mile bottleneck."

Comments

Re:Last mile, what's it worth?

[wytcld]

If you live in the wilderness, is getting broadband really a priority?

Sure. I used to live in the wilderness of Brooklyn. Now I'm in a New England town of 3000. Had to find a place with a DSL connection as good as I had there. Managed to. I get the same 35ms pings to Manhattan I used to. If I could be even more rural and get those pings, I just might. I do remote administration for clients in Manhattan. Also have some servers here. This works as well as being in Brooklyn, the living costs are a hell of a lot cheaper, and the beauty ain't bad.

Part of why the wild stuff isn't well enough defended is it's "far away from civilization." Put it inside civilization, and maybe we'll take better care of it. Having it inside, means having civilization's nervous system extend thoroughly through it. There's no reason for civilization to be limited to artificially dense puddles of muck, nor for it to have as its other option suburban sterility. The wilder our civilization gets, the greater its ecological subtlety, and the more impregnable in a multitude of dimensions to assault from one-dimensional fundamentalists, whether Islamic, Bush League, or the next misfortune on the world stage.