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First White Spaces AP Gives Grandma the Internet
alphadogg writes "A Houston restaurant worker is the first user of a prototype wireless access point using low-frequency signals in the so-called White Spaces between unused UHF digital TV signals. The access point was set up in the home of a grandmother and homeowner who had never had a reliable Internet connection before the White Spaces spectrum created one. Widely but wrongly dubbed 'Super Wi-Fi,' these lower frequencies can reach further and penetrate buildings more easily than standard Wi-Fi radios, which implement the IEEE 802.11 specification."
Unreadable most ever headline.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Wikipedia says speeds would be in the 80 to 800 Mb range. I suppose then that the actual speeds for a typical user would be in the 8 to 80 Mbit range.
In other words it would be fast enough for standard definition video and often fast enough for HD video.
Have a Station that I created myself using CB Radio as a half-duplex physical layer for low-rate TCP/IP communications by modulating through my Soundcard, getting reliably around 500 Baud 3 miles range with 2-watts: it's enough to send fax-like messages like what NOAA Wether stations do on storm alerts.
Working on migrating to RS232C to use a simply timer circuit and make it audible with a little peizo-electric speaker setup, to free-up my Soundcard.
Anyone remember Wavewhore that would use an actual ISA-bus TV card to modulate across the same frequencies of Television to get internet access directly from the root Station allocations? Too bad we're all paying for it now.
UHF => Ultra High Frequency. Yet, somehow the spaces between are channels are "low frequency". Perhaps they mean low bandwidth, as each unused channel in only about 6MHz. Alternately, this could just be a redefinition of what "High Frequency" is.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
"... Smith at the time thought he was advancing technology when volunteering for the device. Unfortunately the manufacturer didn't do enough radiation analysis and didn't realize that the device created frequencies that caused her to fart uncontrollably and induced Irritable Bowell Syndrome as well.."
Not to mention the Spontaneous Hermaphrodism Syndrome.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I'm sorry, but we use X-rays for medical scans precisely because they penetrate WORSE than lower frequencies--otherwise they would go straight through the body tissues and we would not see anything! Not to mention that longer wavelengths would produce lower-resolution images.
It's a well-known fact that the attenuation of electromagnetic waves is a direct function of the size of the obstacle relative to the wavelength of the energy (d/lambda). This is why lower frequencies (with longer wavelengths) travel farther with the same amount of output power.