1st 'Super Wi-Fi' Net Goes Live In North Carolina 60
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the greased-lightning dept.
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."
TFA is kinda light... (Score:4, Informative)
...on details. Like exactly what frequencies were used, hardware, networking scheme, etc.
Re:Congradulations (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.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
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.