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."

Comments

Wow.

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Wow.

[RapidEye]

It helps that Wilmington has their own Battleship sitting in the Cape Fear River.
Run a pirate flag up that sucker and dare AT&T and Verizon to unplug that network =-)

Re:Wow.

[tlhIngan]

The bad news is that residents of Wilmington NC will soon see TV channels disappearing as the devices broadcast over existing stations. (The distant stations from neighboring cities.)

Actually, that's what keeping whitespace devices (which have been talked about for years prior to the digital TV transition) from taking off - how to keep from interfering with regular TV.

The initial proposal was to simply have the devices scan for free channels, but that lead to the hidden node effect (just because you can't detect it doesn't mean that someone in your transmission range can't detect it).

The next proposal was a GPS receiver and a database lookup. Which had the chicken-and-egg problem - you need to get online to get the free channel list, but you can't get online until you get on a free channel. Google proposed to run this database (for free), and proposals were made to have that database available in offline form so devices could embed it in. But then there are "freshness" problems.

The current solution seems to be manually mapping out the free channels, and isolating the devices to within the surveyed geographic area. But of course, that's led to the current very slow deployment of white space devices. On the plus side, it means there's a very low chance of interference (it's been surveyed) and if a new station wants in, the existing devices can be updated to not use the channel over the air, while new channels get the new updated channel list on setup.

WTF?

[adolf]

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.)

Re:WTF?

[artor3]

You didn't miss much. The article contains none of the information that would actually be interesting.

What is the cost to residents? Is it going to be a public service like a utility, or is there a private company running it?
How much bandwidth do they actually get? The 802.22 spec says 22 Mbps per channel, but what does that mean for users?
Are they in a 40 mW area or in one of the spaces authorized for the full 100 mW? If the former, how long will the range actually be?

This has the potential to be very good, and I'd really like to get some info on how it works out.

Re:WTF?

[clarkkent09]

Well, as far as I understand the article, shutting off the analog TV opened up the frequencies to be used for "Super Wi-Fi", so it's not that crazy.

Re:WTF?

[hairyfeet]

But how badly will it be filtered and monitored? because if NC is anything like the rest of the south the busybodies will make sure you can't even look up breast cancer because it has breast in it. that is one thing i'll give you coast dwellers, you don't see to have near the problem with busybodies as we do in the bible belt.

Re:WTF?

[grumling]

Poorly written article. "Super Wi-Fi" sits in unused tv spectrum. Moving to digital modulation (and having a database of television transmitter propagation) made it a little easier to get this going. It has been used by wireless microphones and other devices for years. There's a surprising amount of unused bandwidth sitting out there just because the original TV tuners back in the 1950s had such poor selectivity they needed a lot of guard band to keep interference down. Now that the FCC knows there aren't any old televisions from the 1950s in use, they could tighten up the allocations. But they're going to try this instead.

The frequency spectrum opened up during the digital transition (which could have happened using analog modulation) was for the 700MHz wireless auction.

TFA is kinda light...

[Sooner Boomer]

...on details. Like exactly what frequencies were used, hardware, networking scheme, etc.

Re:TFA is kinda light...

[Khyber]

Ban this spam account.

Makes it easy for police to put up new cameras.

[BenSnyder]

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."

Re:Makes it easy for police to put up new cameras.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."
And that's how we get this rolled out, nationwide: Shout "9/11" | "tough on crime" | "think of the children"!

Re:Makes it easy for police to put up new cameras.

[YoopDaDum]

It will also make it easy to jam the surveillance cameras wireless connections to the head end. Grab your pop-corn and sit down to enjoy another round of the sword vs. the shield while providers make their system more robust to this. In the end the only certainty is that the cheap aspect won't last very long, and some people will make money from it.

Congradulations

[MBC1977]

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?

Re:Congradulations

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know the exact speed, but

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/66587

points out that the "White Spaces" channels are only 6 MHz wide, while Wi-Fi "needs 20-40 MHz". So if you were doing something like 802.11n, but for the White Spaces channels, you would need more channels to get the same bandwidth.

The real advantage seems to be improved range.

Enjoy your grandfathering...

[RobinEggs]

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.

Licsensed vs unlicsensed

[grumling]

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.