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The US May Finally See Widespread 'Super Wi-Fi' Deployment (siliconvalley.com)
The end of the FCC's spectrum auction last week "should give a clear indication of how much space will be available in each TV market for Super Wi-Fi," according to the Bay Area Newsgroup. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
[T]he technology has promised speedy internet for rural citizens and to help urban dwellers get connected in buildings and rooms that are now twilight zones for Wi-Fi signals... And because the spectrum is regulated and largely reserved for television signals, Super Wi-Fi transmissions don't have to contend with interference from random devices like microwaves or cordless phones, as do signals in other wireless bands. Super Wi-Fi signals generally won't be as fast as regular Wi-Fi signals, but for many customers, they'll be faster and provide better service than what they'd get otherwise...
It's widely expected that there will be plenty of room for Super Wi-Fi in rural areas where there are few television signals, which is why companies like Cal.net and Q-Wireless have pressed forward with the technology even before the auction closes. The big question is whether regulators will preserve sufficient space for Super Wi-Fi in areas like New York and Los Angeles where there are lots of broadcast stations and in cities like Detroit and San Diego that have to share the airwaves with cities from other countries. If there's not enough space in those areas, Super Wi-Fi, in this country at least, will likely be relegated to rural areas.
It's widely expected that there will be plenty of room for Super Wi-Fi in rural areas where there are few television signals, which is why companies like Cal.net and Q-Wireless have pressed forward with the technology even before the auction closes. The big question is whether regulators will preserve sufficient space for Super Wi-Fi in areas like New York and Los Angeles where there are lots of broadcast stations and in cities like Detroit and San Diego that have to share the airwaves with cities from other countries. If there's not enough space in those areas, Super Wi-Fi, in this country at least, will likely be relegated to rural areas.
If it's all but useless in the city, but can provide rural users with something better than satellite service or dial-up, it's still a big deal. And by "rural users," I mean ... people who live 20 miles outside of places like Washington, DC. There are places even in the relatively close-in 'burbs where nobody's been willing or able to pull fiber, and the CO is too far away for DSL, and the metering hit on LTE if it's even there (or the too-slow-to-use-ness of 3G) is a show stopper. Not sure what deployment on this actually looks like, though, and there still has to be some sort of low-latency, reliable backhaul. But if it's easy enough to pop something shoebox-size on modest towers in the countryside, that's pretty compelling.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
See subject.
Because rural WiFi crowding is such a problem...
So, Mr. Snarky City Guy, you really don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? The problem isn't WiFi congestion in rural areas, it's the lack of any affordable infrastructure able to get broadband out to those areas in the first place. Having your WiFi busy on your property when your neighbor's WiFi is a quarter mile away is NOT a problem. But if neither of you can actually get those routers to connect to the internet because there's no there there, what's the point? There are millions of people who live where poor DSL, at best, is the broadband they can get - no matter what they're willing to pay. That, or laggy, expensive, very much capped satellite service with dial-up upload speeds. No cable, no fiber, no T-1 to your business ... just dial-up, and perhaps some 3G mobile coverage if you're lucky.
This broadband desert starts happening just a few miles outside of most towns. You know, where the people who grow your food live.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
ClearWire was promising, but the packet loss and latency just made it painful to use. Also, I assume this new system will use lower frequencies which will penetrate buildings and metallic window tint better than ClearWire did.
... as it ties down less frequency range than analog. But will there be enough auctioned off?
davecb@spamcop.net
Whatever happend to wimax? I used to have a modem that on wimax, it was pretty good.
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Don't have to contend with interference from random devices like microwaves. That's amazing! I wish I could avoid random things.
It's always 2 years off. Fusion is always 20 years off.
Can we focus on LTE 5 which is actually being deployed in all hardware as we speak?
Well?
An approach that would meet the needs of far more people would be addressing poor i ner city areas, but that would mean going against ISPs that fight tooth and nail against any such municipal programs.
I had wifi when I was on dialup you insensitive clod!
Most cell companies are nearing the end of their LTE roll outs so if you can get a cell signal out in the sticks it's normally pretty quick anymore.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I think you need to reread his comment because it seems like he is agreeing with you.
Basically in rural areas there is no internet or "wifi". So there are no congestion problems in those areas. It's when you get to cities that it becomes congested.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) initially decided not to enforce a single date for ending analog broadcasts, opting to let market forces decide when the switchover will occur.[8] It subsequently reversed its position, on May 17, 2007,[9] setting an analogue shutoff date of August 31, 2011,[10] just over two years after the American transition date of June 12, 2009. Mandatory markets with a transmitter that does not transition to digital by the deadline will lose the over-the-air signal for the corresponding station permanently or until a digital transmitter is brought on-the-air for that station in that area. Note that the transition deadline only concerns over-the-air signals and does not impact other televisions reception methods in Canada such as over the Internet (already digital), cable (some analog, most digital), or satellite (already digital). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, shut the fuck up already. Seattle's broadband situation is fine. Go to a small community on the other side of the mountains if you want to see what indecent internet access looks like.
Comcast has the government-granted monopoly over most of the city, and they don't offer service for their entire monopoly area. How can you call that fine?
Yeah, that's going to work out well. It is going to use a white space database to select 'unused' spectrum (i.e. TV channels) and enable Super WiFi equipment to operate there. But here's the thing: I have a decent rooftop antenna and I can pick up ATSC signals from as far away as 60 miles. Now someone nearby plugs in their Super WiFi access point and the database says, "Go ahead and use this channel. Nobody could possibly receive TV with a pair or rabbit ears." And my TV reception goes into the crapper. So this happens to enough of my neighbors and they break down and pay exorbitant fees to have cable TV built out. And then they get broadband with that, making Super WiFi pointless.
It looks like this will play right into the hands of the likes of Comcast. Jam broadcast TV and get more cable TV subscribers. So yeah, Super WiFi will help bring broadband to rural areas.
Have gnu, will travel.
An approach that would meet the needs of far more people would be addressing poor inner city areas
That's a different problem that requires a different solution.
Then it's not "WiFi", but WiMAX2. The problem is that the names have been butchered by people who don't really know what they mean. WiFi was initially designed for one computer per AP, with the computer and AP in the same room. The idea was to replace the cable for fixed computers, and that's how it was built. It wasn't designed for roaming, handoff, multi-AP deployments, or even (really) multi-device deployments. The initial standards were slow, and replacement for the 56k wires of the day.
So a wide-spread WiFi is the opposite of everything WiFi was initially designed to do. So to keep the same name will only confuse people.
Learn to love Alaska
Need a tower, real backhaul for each user, have staff aim a real antenna per user? The home gets a good service.
How many users can share that tower if they expect 24/7 service with internet like data caps?
Reserve a bit spectrum and some bandwidth per user per tower 24/7?
How many rural users per tower so each user gets real their own real internet experience? How many towers per rural area?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Rural WiFi is not the same thing your home WiFi, although it does use the same frequencies and technologies.
Rural WiFi is used by wireless ISPs (that is, the rural equivalent to your urban cable modem or DSL connection). This is accomplished with directional antennas that concentrate the signal so that it can span five to 10 miles. They do this because it is prohibitively expensive to string fiber (or copper) when there are only a few customers per mile. Because the signal is so weak by the time it gets all the way to the receiver, interference anywhere along the "line of sight" path is more difficult to filter out.
An urban dweller needs maybe a 500-foot circle of no interference. The rural need is a non-interference rectangle 500 feet wide by maybe 10 miles long, stretching from his roof-mount antenna all the way to the ISP antenna which likely is mounted on a grain elevator in a nearby town.
If Super Wi-Fi means Slow Wi-Fi, then this is the plan? Fiber everywhere is the ONLY solution.
TV spectrum is in MHz. Wi-Fi is GHz. 100x-plus more bandwidth.
Am I the only person who has an issue with name including WiFi for what, I am assuming, is not a unlicensed service. The single biggest reason WiFi is so popular is people can self implement it at no cost after the initial hardware outlay. My assumption is with this so call Super WiFI is you will have to subscribe with someone who purchased the spectrum in the auction. Using the name WiFi in this context is only going to lead to consumer confusion.
have a superman S logo on it?
Considering that SmartTVs automatically search and connect to open WiFi networks surrounding your area despite you disabling it, plus all the development for Internet-of-Things devices "they" have been pushing, having this sort of network makes sense for the government to track pretty much everything you do without you being able to do anything about it.
Super Wi-Fi signals generally won't be as fast as regular Wi-Fi signals
How do they manage to make them slower than light?
"Super Wi-Fi signals generally won't be as fast as regular Wi-Fi signals, but for many customers, they'll be faster"
I've been to places where you'd expect nothing, yet LTE was there. Seems AT&T and Sprint got their shit together, don't know about Verizon and T-Mobile. Hell aside from the data caps and ping, LTE would be a viable candidate for rural Internet.
Actually, Rise Broadband (one of these rural wireless ISPs, or the only one, not sure) have multiple smaller antenna towers around an area that connect to the larger towers. A bad storm that happened last May where I live bent the small tower my home connects to right in the middle of the thing, so there was no Internet for a good two weeks because Rise is not the best ISP. Also it's not even broadband by current FCC definition, not even at their fastest tier, which may not even be offered everywhere.
"sufficient space for Super Wi-Fi in areas like New York and Los Angeles where there are lots of broadcast stations"
After the re-pack, there will be the same amount of spectrum reserved for TV in Ogallala, NE as in New York City. Super Wi-Fi will have to compete with cellular services in both cities, not TV services.
Between cellular signal boosters (went from 1-2 asu indoors up to 30 asu) and unlimited-ish data plans it's now liveable, although you still want to save patching your boxes for the end of your billing month.
Gave my crappy, oversubscribed DSL the heave-ho two months ago, not looking back. If Super-WiFi comes here, great, but if not, the current situation is at least functional since cellular data finally got cheaper. Hopefully the caps continue to quickly rise as providers compete with each other.
Just like in the 40s where they required telcos to provide phone service to every home in America at a reasonable charge. These telcos made a fortune on analog lines over the years, make them build out a proper broadband network to rural America. Its a good investment in America.
I am guessing you haven't been on DSL for a long time. I'm sitting here in Central Texas, 17 miles from a small town that has a single fiber cable. I know this, because the cable got cut last year and EVERYTHING (Land Lines, Cell Phones, Internet, Merchant Terminals) went down.
I am 3 miles from the phone company POP. If I get 1 bar on my cell phone that's great coverage out here. It's hilly country and I get zero TV stations as the nearest transmitter is 70 miles away in San Antonio.
Using "modern" DSL I get 6 MB down and 768K up. That's enough to watch NetFlix, or You Tube. Web Surfing is plenty snappy. I do plenty of Skype video calls with no problems. Sure, I can't watch a movie on NetFlix while making a four way Skype Video call while downloading a 20 GB file...
So color me cautious but I believe the endless cries for "Rural Internet!" are politically motivated as I've been hearing for years about the desperate need to get Internet to all these country folk. I am familiar with the BPL disaster that cost insane amounts of money and delivered nothing. Are we sure this isn't a way for some politician to repay a contribution to his PAC? Sure sounds like it.
...another problem, with the same old enemies? Sounds like a similar problem to me.