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1st 'Super Wi-Fi' Net Goes Live In North Carolina
alphadogg writes "Lucky residents of Wilmington, N.C., will be the first in the nation to have access to a 'Super Wi-Fi' network. Officials from New Hanover County, N.C., announced Thursday that they had become the first in the United States to deploy a mobile data network on so-called 'white spaces' spectrum that the FCC first authorized for unlicensed use in 2008."
Boy! How were they able to do that without some cable / telecom lobby dumping stacks of 100$ on the state political whores to block it? Amazing.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I will just hold off for championship edition, or even maybe turbo as they will be much better
From TFA: "The county was able to make a quick transition in using the spectrum for a mobile data network because it was the first to successfully transition from analog to digital television."
It was at this point that I stopped reading.
(In other news: The orange harvest was great this year because of our success with the apple harvest of a few years ago.)
Kid-proof tablet..
...on details. Like exactly what frequencies were used, hardware, networking scheme, etc.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I live in Wilmington and here's a bit of a better article from the local newspaper, the Star News.
And for all the tin-foil hat types, you'll love this bit:
"Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo said the white space network enables the city's police department to install surveillance cameras at a fraction of the cost of installing one using cables and other wires necessary to reach a signal."
I made the mistake of reading the article which provided no informations whatsoever about using un-licensed spectrum for wi-fi.
I'm glad I'm not a tech living in that area. I can imagine the calls. "My new Dell won't get on the Super WiFi, it says it has WiFi!"
One more way to muddy the waters, nice job FCC. As it is I get calls from people wanting to get help hooking their new wireless mouse up to WiFi.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
While I admit to being a bit jealous (since I live in Jacksonville-Camp Lejeune), this is very cool. What is the average bandwidth speed of this "super-wifi", just curious?
Regards,
MBC1977,
http://spectrumbridge.com
The above guys are the ones handling the system here. They have been working on it for quite some time now.
Since they've been approved for use and people are beginning to create and use transmitters, it's no longer white space now is it?
In other news, "The nations first super wi-fi network was shutdown after a flurry of piracy allegations" "county officials have been indicted, local residents have been removed from the net, and local telco's are throwing a week long coke bash at the governors mansion." "Coming to you live from our studio, the only news team you'll ever need, (or get)."
You know, Battlestar Galactica had one thing that I really liked, that they used only wired communications. Maybe we should go back to wired communication also, I'm at least getting sick and tired of being blasted by 10-15 WiFI networks all the time. Go back to wires, it's faster, causes less air traffic, is more secure. What's the problem? Do we really need to use our iPads while in the toilet or while flying to another country ?
GeoKone.NET
North Carolina is best Carolina
Don't assume this rollout represents friendliness to municipal internet in North Carolina. The state congress effectively banned it last year; only those existing projects explicitly named in the bill were exempt from the ban hammer. I'm not sure if this project was one of those so named or whether it's simply not covered by the law, but either way North Carolina now officially sucks for public telecom services. It's not actually impossible to start a municipal internet service, but you're required to publish all of your business plans and to hold public meetings at which every private telecom in your municipality or any bordering municipality is entitled to a competing proposal. This is Monticello, MN on steroids: Telecoms don't even have to sue the public project now, they simply wait until someone is actually organized enough to attempt a public option, analyze the completely public business plan for the public option, and at the mandatory meeting pitch a competing proposal that improves their existing service just barely enough to kill that public option.
The best part is, while every single provision in the bill exists to hamper public options in ways that private companies don't deal with and couldn't survive, the bill was called the "Level Playing Field" act. North Carolina House Bill 129. I now live under a telecommunications policy that was literally written by Time Warner.
Amazing
crop rotation: it does your soil good
I have full faith that NC will screw it up and it will be stillborn.
Why is there no option for a licensed data band for public use? This makes no sense to me. We can't get a public fiber network because that's a little to communistic (and I'm basically OK with that as long as the only barrier to entry is capital), so why can't we get some decent wireless bandwidth?
The 2.4Ghz band is a perfect example of "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade." It works even though it shouldn't. But other than a few experiments by ham radio operators there's no way it will work over long distances (greater than a mile), at least not day-in day-out, 99.99% uptime.
But imagine if we could go out and buy a license for, let's say the Upper D block of the 700MHz band (which didn't sell in the auctions), and let regular people buy equipment that would operate in that band, at high (greater than 1Watt) power, from a fixed location, for data service. Also allow ISPs to buy licenses so end users have something to connect to, and allow for groups to form mesh networks if they so choose. The license would be similar to a driver's license, in that you might not need to know how to design a Pi network, but you should know how to use an antenna tuner, for example. The band will need to be policed, of course, but that's not impossible either.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
802.11n would provide as many as 50 movies to stream at one time, At least at 380p. But if you use this for phone calls, I am not sure of the number, but like 10 or 20 phone calls per movie bandwidth. so like over 500 phone calls. And texts don't start me on texts ... millions of texts you could send per minute. on the 6MHz channels.
And that's a slow 802.11n WiFi. Now 6MHz is a lot less then
40 MHz, but you get a lot of free Mobile usage from it.
Hope fully this isn't the same technology that LightSquared has been using.
Causes havok with Aviation GPS.
I would research this but I'm in the field and don't always have internet. Does anyone on slashdot have information on what is the cheapest / best way to set one of these networks up? I live on a hill overlooking one of the top 30 cities in the USA and I would really like to set up a Metropolitan Area Network that is dissociated from the traditional internet. Basically for gaming and file sharing. If we can do this and it catches on then we can begin to set up point to point microwave relays between them at some point. Anyone remember Wan's across american about 7 years ago? Please link me to some hardware for this network there was nothing in the article.
I had a conversation with the head of the "e-nc" initiative several years back when I was considering a wireless ISP start-up. He told me they had done the research on 3 prior applicants by contacting the local telcos/cable to confirm no planned roll-outs of high speed services. As soon as the start-ups got off the ground Sprint(now Embarq) deployed DSL and caused 2 of them to fold.
Dirty dealing by old plantation $ is still amazingly well entrenched in this region.......
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11