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FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Spectrum Gap

Posted by timothy on from the congress-from-whom-all-blessings-flow dept.

locallyunscene writes "'We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month,' FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. 'So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?'"

1 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Wireless technology by Renegrade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Welcome to the real world of physics.

    Wired and optical technologies will ever be superior to wireless, by the simple fact that they're essentially 1D lines running through 3D space, whereas a typical wireless signal is a 3D signal in 3D space - a single frequency gives a fixed bandwidth to a single user in a given ~volume~.

    Advanced tricks allow increased sharing, but the fundamental limitations remain.

    Consider the volume of a typical wifi base station .. now imagine filling that volume with OC192 cabling. As they say on the "intartoobs", "pwned".