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1st 'Super Wi-Fi' Net Goes Live In North Carolina

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

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."

11 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Wow. by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Wow. by RapidEye · · Score: 3, Funny

      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 =-)

      --
      "Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
    2. Re:Wow. by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. WTF? by adolf · · Score: 4, Funny

    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..
    1. Re:WTF? by artor3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:WTF? by clarkkent09 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
  3. TFA is kinda light... by Sooner+Boomer · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
    Chaos maximizes locally around me.
  4. Makes it easy for police to put up new cameras. by BenSnyder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:Makes it easy for police to put up new cameras. by YoopDaDum · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  5. Re:Congradulations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Enjoy your grandfathering... by RobinEggs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.