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Google Looks to "White Space" Spectrum
Nerdposeur writes "After maneuvering the major carriers into agreeing to open access rules via the recent spectrum auction, Google appears to be looking into a new area of spectrum that could provide internet connectivity. 'In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the Internet leader outlined plans for low-power devices that use local wireless airwaves to access the 'white space' between television channels. A Google executive called the plan 'Wi-Fi 2.0 or Wi-Fi on steroids.' Interestingly, Google has Microsoft, Intel, and others on their side in this one. Was this spectrum their target all along?"
Is this the same technology that Microsoft has tried to demo (twice) with less-than-spectacular results?
you could tune the satellite to be almost on a station, right on the 'edge' of the station, and get around the blocking method they used for PPV... you would get a blurry picture but good sound. Great way to watch porn when you're a 12 year old.
Don't take that away google. Think of the children.
I seem to remember this a while back on the PBS stations in my area. They would push this content across the space between the channels. The only issue at that time, I thought, was that you were only allowed to receive what they gave you and not have a two way street... I don't think this is a particularly new idea. Oh yeah - I didn't read the article... so if I am off the mark, oh well.
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Get your biggest competitor for bandwidth to spend all of their money on the spectrum you don't want by executing a feint in that direction, and then taking over the spectrum you really wanted.
It's almost like someone who reads those business books that are based on military strategy actually figured out how to apply the military concepts to competition...
Follow your heart == tell them what they want to hear
Just like MuniWiFi did. Google, where are your commitments to that??
Just like WiMAX works so well .
Just like Earthlink, master of all that's good, wireless, and now nearly bankrupt might think.
Sure, software-defined radios might be nice. But let's put in real freaking fibre instead of still another plan to screw telcos/cellular carriers. If Google needs more bandwidth for YouTube, let them finally invest in the infrastructure to deliver it, not 'convenient' short-term wireless ploys. Egads.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
and with digital television on the way, much easier to implement without interference. The UHF channels used on your television (most households in the USA have some cable or Satellite feed so don't use broadcast television really) have a small amount of bandwidth between each. If you combined that bandwidth with multiple radio links or some transmission technique, you could use it for WiFi like services locally in the home. The strength of signal could be such that it wouldn't interfere with neighbors reception ( as most aren't using broadcast television anyway) and it gives out more spectrum for home use.
Additionally, there are methods to use a small footprint in the WiFi band to herd the small signals between tv channels. It would look like frequency hopping, require much smaller signal strength, and would cause negligible interference to broadcast television. Simpler still is to allow the user to input the television channels they do watch so that interference is even more remote. If you can steal (locally only) use of channels that are not used at all in the area (how many stations are on channel 63 or 42?), there is literally TONS of bandwidth to use, and all of it at a better frequency range for non-line-of-sight transmissions. That is to say; better signal quality at lower signal strengths.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
http://code.google.com/p/spacesharp/
I used to have a native x86 whitespace compiler, but I never could read my code.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I disagree.
What Google offers is the ability to deliver an advertisement that is customized down to the level of the individual user. To achieve this, they collect data on individual users by offering a wide array of "free" services.
If this is successful, I can only assume that it will be far more profitable than traditional, blanket advertising (i.e. it will cost a company far less to acquire a customer with Google ads than with any other service).
Google isn't quite there yet, but as far as I can tell, they are the only company that can reasonably even attempt this, let alone succeed.
It's true, Google might fizzle out, but there is a real possibility that they will change the world even more so than they already have.
Google seriously needs competition. We all need this to happen. It's good for them, good for everyone else.
This fragments the spectrum leaving you with a lot of fragments of two exact sizes perfectly interspersed. Down the road there you would have to take spectrum from both the "channel" and "space" allocations to make any block bigger then a single channel and dropping either spectrum would only give you back a sequence of broken spectrum. If some of this spectrum really should be re-allocated to something else surely it would make a lot more sense to take one or more channels from either or both ends? While trying to claim the "white space" seems like an effort to be efficient, it's making a mess of the most well known high bandwidth broadcast spectrum we have leading to an eventual mess further down the road.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Those frequencies are called GUARD BANDS , they are seperation to prevent signal bleed-over.
Perhaps Google has no real engineers working for them after all.
The only big problem left to solve before true high speed access would be available to nearly everyone is the method of distribution. Using existing service wiring is problematic. Telephone wires aren't adequate due to bandwidth and signal / noise problems. Running networking over power wiring is not workable; it has all the problems of using the phone wiring but much, much worse. Running networking over the cable TV systems is the most functional - but cable doesn't go to every town and house and not all cable systems are compatible.
There's been a push to "wire" the country with glass fiber. They've even got it all the way to the house in some areas. As they build out the fiber networks they'll gradually reach more and more customers. But there's a BIG problem here: there's a huge number of houses and apartments to cover. The phone and electric systems grew up with the country, as each new home / subdivision was created these services were connected; essentially, the phone company took 100 years to get wiring to every residence.
To start out now and try to connect every residence - the magnitude of this problem is staggering. Assuming 100 million residences, if the army of installers could run fiber to and connect 10,000 residences every day - it'd take over 27 years. And that assumes the installers would be working 7 days per week. I'm not even going to try to estimate the cost of doing this.
If workable and reliable long-range wireless networking is developed / proven - and there's RF bandwidth that it can use - this could connect large number of residences inexpensively and quickly. Just plug your network cable into the "network radio" and you'd be online; no army of installers required. This would make it possible to make high speed access available to almost everyone in much, much less than 27 years.
I'm glad to see that Google is putting their resources behind making this a reality. It's not going to be easy to make this kind of technology work reliably but there's some very bright people at Google and if anyone can find a solution they can.
And a provider of email services.
And a provider of chat services.
And a provider of shared calendaring services.
And a provider of domain-wide hosting of the above.
And a provider of web-based mapping tools.
And a supporter of numerous Open Source software projects.
And one of the movers and shakers in the press for green technology.
And the only search giant to refuse a federal request for all search records.
And
When people say, "Google just does advertising," what they're really saying is, "what has Google done for me this week that I didn't know about last week." It's an attention span problem.
In fact, as people have become more skilled at gaming Google, and Google is the only show of note in town, search has actually got worse.
Oh I don't know about that. They went through a stage search returns being buried in junk pages. That's gone now, or substantially so. Certainly I no longer have the problems I used to.
You're sort of making the assumption that the internet is static, so google aren't moving.
What's really happening is the internet is a constantly seething morass of junk, exploits, and bot created pages who's sole intent is to gain control of your machine. In the face of that I'm surprised google still manage to sift through the shart and produce useful results.
You do know that Google owns You Tube right?
This article http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-has-google-done-in-search-lately.html disagrees with you. It may be from last year, but I've seen other search related features show up on that blog.
In fact, that blog is on my list and it seems like they are always coming up with extras to add into their search. Little extra things you can click on when the search results in a stock symbol or dated item.
Also, have you taken a look at Google labs experimental search?
I'm not saying some competition would be good, but it isn't as stagnant as I think you would make it out to be. This link http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/faster-google-search-on-your-mobile.html shows another more recent search improvement they've done recently
OK, here's an issue that I never see discussed when White Space devices come up. If I live in a fringe TV reception area and need an aerial 10m above the ground to get an adequate signal, a White Space transmitter at ground level next door isn't going to be able to see the TV signal. But when it assumes the spectrum is free and starts transmitting, boy is it going to knock out my TV reception!
Which is 100% better than untargeted advertising. Some of it I don't even mind. If google gets to the point where it is offering suggestions as well as people I know, they'll strike gold.
I'm looking to buy a new computer, right now there are 4 forms of marketing that can 'get' to me.
Radio: COME TO LOW BOBS CAR EMPORIUM. Not looking for cars.
TV: Tampax, for those times you need to be dry. Not looking (or ever looking) for Tampax
Internet: PUNCH THE MONKEY WIN A FREE CREDIT REPORT. I don't care about my credit.
Friend: I just got this thing from Newegg, you should check them out.
What google is doing is positioning themselves as the 'friend' which wins for everyone. I get what I'm searching for and the sellers aren't having their ads go onto deaf ears (or blind eyes)
It is the big $$ broadcasting companies and the regulators that are opposing the WSD because they fear any competition.
Check out the lecture at http://videolectures.net/kiblix07_meinrath_wtrr/ (the WSD part starts at around 42:00)
s/Tube//
Those kinds of books have lots to say about life in general.
More of this kind of thing can be found in the writings of Macheavelli, Clauswitz and Herman Kahn.
'Macheavellian' is a compliment, and cool clear thinking even about the horrible is the best way to mitigate it.
...
- When I search for something, I expect my search terms to be honored. If I search for a few words, I expect all of those words (or reasonable variants of them) to appear in each item returned in the search results. I realize sites update their material frequently, but I'm talking about the summaries in the results page. Sometimes I can force it by repeating the missing word a few times, e.g search for: word1 word2 missing missing missing .
- Google does not allow you to search for an exact arbitary string of characters other than regexp syntax (which makes no sense to the majority of people, myself included). If, for example, I search for "( Score: 5", you'd think the first results page would be plastered with slashdot posts. Nope. There's one, archived on someone else's site, at the bottom, and it still doesn't match the character-for-character string I searched for. Add slashdot after and outside the previously mentioned quoted string, and sure enough Slashdot posts start showing up - but still none of the results matches my exact search string (I asked for spaces around the score for a reason!).
These things really do need fixed; Google is not that fun to use when you're searching for a specific, often cryptic, error message for example.Precisely. You get it, right?
Another Old media trick. Buy your competitors. Make them look like another entity.
Well, actually that's pretty much business as war theory. But you will soon be seeing YouTube looking less like Google, I suspect, when in fact it *is* more like Google.
It's not just consolidation. Deeper than that.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There's a downside for some of us as well when it comes to targeted advertising. I don't know how many times I get hit with advertising for things that I've just gone and ranted about them. Some stupid bot parsed out a couple keywords then slammed me with a bunch of ads for the same stuff that I just ranted on about.
I like untargeted advertising. There's a much greater chance that at random, I'd click a link for something interesting (well, I don't, but other folks apparently do) than I would for something that instantly pisses me off just by glancing at it.
This idea is horribly dangerous for anyone running a PA. That "whitespace" is where wireless mics run. They use UHF/VHF frequencies to communicate between the receiver and the mic itself. I recently toured the Shure Plant in Niles IL and they pointed out that these whitespace devices are causing an extremely large amount of harm to something that's already standardized to run in the whitespace. I don't know, it really kind of worries me that my wireless mic systems won't work anymore, or that, when I go to a concert, the artists will be limited to cable length.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Of course making money isn't the most important thing in life. Unless you're a publicly listed company with shareholders to please. Which they are.
Now they're public it's inevitable that Sergei and Larry's little projects are going to become vehicles to sell more ad space. The fact that they make life slightly more interesting to the rest of us is irrelevant to (most of) their shareholders.
So, when youtube can directly monetize their offering, how will google shares drop instead of rise?
When google makes more money, stock goes up. So when google (youtube) makes more money, stocks should still go up.
Am I right? I fear im missing something obvious here...
So, are you saying they'll migrate their codebase to Whitespace ?
It has nothing to do with fidelity, it's just wireless internet.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
It's true that this is the bulk of their revenue, but given that they have other for-pay services, and I've worked for companies that are customers of those services, so I'm going to have to disagree with you.