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WiFi 802.22 Can Cover 12,000 Square Miles
tekgoblin writes "IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles. The standard is actually for Wireless Regional Area Networks (or WRAN), which use the white spaces left in the TV frequency spectrum."
Someone's finally planning to plan to do something with the spectrum? We didn't downgrade ourselves to digital TV for nothing?
Should I change the password and enable WPA?
Or allow my neighbors in a 12,000 sq mile radius to share my connection?
I like sharing, it seems neighborly.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
By my calculations, you could cover the entire continental US with just under 250 of those base stations. Obviously real life factors would increase that number quite a lot, but that still doesn't seem like that many towers. I'm guessing it's probably not practical to put very many people on a single tower, so such a system would have to be fairly exclusive (probably expensive).
I read the internet for the articles.
12000 = pi r^2
3819.7186 ~= r^2
61.8039 ~= r
So, simple maths suggest that we're definitely not going to have reception if we're more than 62 miles away from the tower, and that doesn't take into account the curvature of the earth, the height of the tower, atmospheric distortions, etc.
but it does suggest the standard would allow for decent reception within a 30 mile radius. That ain't too bad.
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12,000 square miles
12000 square miles is not very impressive from a purely RF perspective. In fact, its not even trying very hard.
A=pi*r**2 thats sqrt(12000/3) thats sqrt(4000) thats a bit more than 60, since 60**2 = 3600.
So estimated in my head they're saying a 60 mile radius. BFD.
Now 60 miles at "digital TV" spectrum freqs and bandwidth with less than a couple kilowatts out to a 500 foot tower, now that would be impressive.
Or a battery life that does not require tethering the device to a 440V 3-phase AC supply rather than being "wireless".
I'm curious how they're working around that "obvious" physical limitation.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's suspiciously close to exactly 100km - could that 12,000 square mile figure have been derived from a metric back-of-the-envelope figure of "about 100km"?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Only in California though.
This will be GREAT for the wireless mesh people who want to get away from the mess of the internet and communicate without fear of the big bad media companies spying on their every move.
Of course, yes, we all know the bad side of archaic, no-censorship networks (child porn, terrorism, etc.), but you just have to deal with that.
The creators of the products to mesh technologies probably should work together with encryption and sandboxing companies to create an ecnrypted sandbox so that people don't have their lives destroyed because of a thumbnail that someone ELSE uploaded, or at least advise people on products they can use.
No doubt the governments will try suppress such things by making it illegal to run a WRAN without a licence or some shit.
This news is most welcome! It has the potential to level the ISP playing field again and harkin back to the times when mom and pop ISPs existed. How? Small start-up ISPs can now offer competing broadband to the likes of AT&T and offer the service at an unlimited tier. Thus, AT&T will be forced to remove its service caps. Companies will be able to build their own MAN's without having to pay Verizon/AT&T/CenturyLink leases for the lines. I will be following this with some excitement especially because I would love to run my own small ISP.
Which brings up a point... Television and Radio are broadcast. They don't require a return signal for two way communication.
What kind of output will your home antenna need to reach back to a tower that's 50 miles away?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Did Broadcast Television make you sterile? Because it transmitted at power levels 100X as great as this needs, on dozens of channels at a time in the same frequency band as this.
Republicans in Congress are proposing to eliminate unlicensed use of the new white space spectrum. That is, they'll require that the spectrum be sold to a entity willing to pay a market-competitive price - meaning the spectrum will have to produce a profit for one entity rather than producing value for everyone.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/republican-spectrum-bill-reins-in-wireless-free-riders-like-google.ars
Call your Congressional reps and tell them unlicensed wireless can produce much more value for our society, and should be expanded rather than ceding more control to the existing wireless monopolies.
Stop drooling over your 'stick it to the telco' thoughts, and actually think for a moment. The stated bandwidth of this is 22Mbps per WRAN (not per user, per WRAN). The population of New York State (averaged) is 411 people/sq mi. So in the 12000sq mi area a tower covers you have almost 5 million people (on average). So each person can have a whopping 4 BITS per second of bandwidth. Even if you covered on 1 sq mi per tower (a huge expense) your would still be sharing 22Mbps with 410 other people. Of course, the actual density in NYC is more like 30000 people/sq mi.
The only place this makes sense is where the population has very low density, which are places that currently have no coverage at all. Just like TFA says.
... and if you're close to the television transmitter you'll catch on fire.
If such a transmitter was located on you house, unless you had an antenna that ensured the radiation was not directed inward the building would be quite uninhabitable. Now, there's no way such a power level would be required for this, but something around 10s of watts would be quite possible. That will still expose you to a great many orders of magnitude higher RF power levels than you are presently receiving (depending on the antenna of course). It's the same with cell phones: sure the power output is modest, but put it an inch away from you brain and the power matters a lot more than the tower some miles away.
I don't expect there to be any significant risk, but let's at least understand the issue here.