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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.