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FCC Unanimously Approves White Space Wi-Fi
Smelly Jeffrey writes "With the release of this whitepaper, the FCC unanimously approved plans for a new technology with strong supporters and even stronger detractors. White Space Wi-Fi effectively allows manufacturers of wireless devices to incorporate transceivers that operate on unused DTV channels. Although the deregulation is new, the idea seems to have caught Google's interest recently as well. It seems that this has been rather rushed through the normally stagnant channels at the FCC. While some view it as interference in the already crowded spectrum, it seems the FCC Chairman really likes the idea of re-purposing dark parts of the newly allocated DTV bands once more." Update: 11/06 18:15 GMT by T : You may want to look at Tuesday's mention of the decision as well, but the additional links here are interesting.
This was posted to the front page just a day ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/05/0016251
"Squatting on the spectrum is just as bad as squatting domains or houses."
Actually, it's much worse. The unallocated spectrum for communications is much more limited.
Well, for those of us who use wireless microphones (like you see at concerts, conventions, sports stadiums, or churches), we are the ones who might get screwed. They FCC says they are putting measures in place to prevent this, but we'll have to see what happens. There will be another ruling to finalize all this. Here's a decent summary from Shure[PDF] (they make wireless mics).
Joking aside, Google sums up the change on their web site Free the Airwaves. From what I gather, devices will only be able to be sold as lnog as they keep to a restricted set of wavelengths.
Other than that, it's a 'free for all', which should in theory allow cheaper wifi, broadband, free mobile phone calls (as they would communicate directly with each other), and healthy competition in the overall communication sector.
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Uh, how about anyone and everyone at at concerts, conventions, sports stadiums, or churches?
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Widely held misconception. A digital ATSC channel takes up 6MHz, same as an analog NTSC channel.
Oh my LOLs.
I mean, seriously, bluetooth has a 100 ft. maximum distance for a reliable connection. That's only the width of a medium sized stage. You'd better hope nobody needs a wireless mic while talking to audience members or anything.
And BT just doesn't have the bandwidth to even 44.1khz stereo (although it does have enough for mono, but A2DP, the only non-shitty spec, specifies stereo). A2DP using SBC still doesn't give as accurate a rendition as an analog mic signal ever will. Maybe some of the other specs would come close, but they're optional and therefore may as well not exist.
However, ATSC can transmit multiple SD sub-channels in one 6MHz band and use MPEG compression to save bandwidth, making it more bandwidth-efficient than NTSC. (So I would say that you and GP are both correct.)