FCC Opens Wireless 3.6GHZ Band

mdeb writes "Broadband Reports has a story on the FCC opening up a portion of the 3.6 GHz spectrum. "This initiative would reserve 50 megahertz in the 3.6 GHz band for unlicensed wireless Internet operations. Setting aside this spectrum would make it easier for vendors to build devices that would work across all Wi-Fi frequencies and create new wireless Internet opportunities in rural America. The new proposal would allow transmissions at power levels higher than currently permitted for Part 15 unlicensed devices.""

Comments

Re:Rural Broadband via Wireless

[hab136]

Does this mean if I lived out in the 'country', and my neighbours had nodes, or a corporate sponsership program was setup, internet would be readily available?

Check out http://www.locustworld.com/ for information about mesh networks.. essentially you hop along your neighbors until you get to a neighbor that has internet, thereby giving everyone internet.

Re:Does distance scale with frequency?

[microwave_EE]

Not necessarily. Distance scales by the inverse of the atmospheric absorption. Of course there are many, many other factors involved: EM noise from the environment, RF noise from pre-existing transmitters using this frequency range, power of the transmitter, effective area of the transmitter (or receiver), modulation scheme (how data is modulated onto the RF carrier--for example, AM, FM, PM, digitization then FM, etc), and a whole host of other issues.