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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.'"
But arent "crises" usually time-sensitive issues which generally have gotten worse? Seems a bit much to call "some people continue to be without internet" a crisis.
Sorry, but language "inflation" bothers me, it devalues words.
The lack of a requirement to operate under a license will only make a mess of the available spectrum, exactly as it is with both 2.4 and 5.8 GHz wifi. In places where there are many competing WISPs, nothing actually works, because all of them are interfering with each others’ access points. The licenses should be essentially free, but at the same time the number of operators in a given area should be limited. The thing about rural areas is that there are not many potential customers there, so installing a 10.000$ professional radio relay for 10 customers is simply not viable. The hardware needs to be cheap, the license needs to be free and the company that would get the license should not have to worry about interference from their competition, because otherwise it’s not worth the WISP’s trouble and they drop those problematic locations quite quickly.
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
What do they consider rural in the UK? Is there any truly rural space left in the British Isles? I hate to think what large swathes of Australia, Canada and the USA where plenty of people live might be considered.
Yes there is some. Some parts of The Scottish Highlands are really remote. And of course there are uninhabited islands.
no, they're reusing the old analog tv broadcast frequencies which are in the process of being decommissioned for TV broadcasting. No new frequencies are involved.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
"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.
No, African-American is the politically correct way to say black all over the world, didn't you know. Except in most countries it's Non-American African-American.
Don't confuse "rural" with "remote". It is entirely possible to live in a very rural area of South East England, and SE England has generally a very high population density.
I'm guessing you're from the United States or Canada where there's lots of territory that is "remote", and in urban areas the suburban sprawl is so huge that a city of 4M people covers a colossal area. But in the UK cities are very compact and "green belt" legislation has prevented many cities from expanding much, and has pretty much stopped suburban sprawl completely dead. Therefore the urban areas are very compact. It's very evident that when you fly over the UK, there are vast areas of rural green space. Just because it's not remote doesn't make it not rural. Much of these rural areas are far enough away from a telephone exchange that you'll have performance problems with a 56K modem and ADSL just isn't a viable proposition. However, they aren't "remote" and therefore (for the most part) can be easily be provisioned by radio signals.
Once you get north of Manchester, the population density really drops off, too, and as you get further into Scotland you do find remote, hard-to-get-to areas. While not as remote as, say, northern Alaska, they are remote enough that if you get caught there in a winter storm without good equipment you're very likely to die. The population isn't evenly spread around Great Britain by any stretch of the imagination.
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