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UK To Get Whitespace Radio
judgecorp writes "The UK's telecom regulator, Ofcom, will approve whitespace radio, allowing systems that use vacant spaces in the TV broadcast spectrum on the same 'license' exempt basis as Wi-Fi. It is hoped that white space radio will solve the rural broadband crisis in the country. From the article: 'Ofcom hopes for deployments by 2013, putting the UK ahead of other countries, and proposes it be used for a higher-power variant of Wi-Fi as well as for rural broadband connections and machine-to-machine communication.'"
rural in this instant means too far by copper from local exchange for decent adsl speeds. remember a lot of the uk telephone network is very very old simply because of how early we adopted the telephone. My dad was a GPO (predecessor of BT) engineer in the 70's and I have memories of going into a small (8'x6') hut at the end of the village playing field which was full of electromechanical telecoms switches and was the villages exchange. The following year it was replaced with a larger exchange due to the building of a new estate but all the did was run an extension from the location of the old exchange to the new and as far as i know there has been no relaying of cabling since then
"hat crisis being that the reduced commincation infrastructure is creating local pockets of populations that are so poorly educated"
I'm sorry , what? Schools have these things called "teachers" who teach the children and I think you'll find people in the country are very WELL educated because they have decent schools with teachers who can teach and don't just dump kids in front of a PC. Its in the inner city - where good broadband services are available - where you'll find a lot more of the idiotic and lazy kids.