FCC Moves To Boost Wireless Speeds

coondoggie writes "The Federal Communications Commission said it wants to make up to 195 megahertz of additional spectrum in the 5 GHz band available to unlicensed wireless devices with the idea that such a move would enable Wi-Fi equipment that can offer faster speeds of one gigabit per second or more, increase overall capacity, and reduce congestion. 'Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure devices today operate in 555 megahertz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band, and are used for short range, high speed wireless connections including Wi-Fi enabled local area networks and fixed outdoor broadband transceivers used by wireless Internet service providers to connect smart phones, tablets and laptops to the broadband network,' the FCC stated."

Comments

Yeah, and?

[girlintraining]

With no centralized interoperability specification -- the next iteration of whatever devices operate on that spectrum will interfere destructively with the previous generation. Remember pre-N gear when it first came out? Whole neighborhoods went dark while one guy sat in his basement browsing porn because he'd just gotten home with the latest and greatest from the store. Suddenly, everyone has to upgrade overnight. Then there's channel overlap... some jerk decides to set his wifi to channel 3 instead of 1 or 6 and now half the spectrum is fracked.

There will be no boost in wireless speeds. The only thing this has going for it is 5Ghz doesn't travel as far as 2.4Ghz, which doesn't travel very far anyway... and that'll mean by simple virtue of physics, devices will have a smaller surface area in which they can cause destructive interference.

No, if you ask me, the FCC's incompetence is not accidental... they don't want wireless internet because it would mean all those people they got BILLIONS OF DOLLARS from would be upset. Politics, blah blah. You get the idea. We'll never have high speed, ranged, wireless internet, unless we decide to go pirate and tell them to eat a bag of dicks. (puts finger to ear)

Oh wait... I hear some people have started doing that.