WiFi 802.22 Can Cover 12,000 Square Miles 216
tekgoblin writes "IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles. The standard is actually for Wireless Regional Area Networks (or WRAN), which use the white spaces left in the TV frequency spectrum."
The Wireless Mesh age comes. (Score:3, Interesting)
This will be GREAT for the wireless mesh people who want to get away from the mess of the internet and communicate without fear of the big bad media companies spying on their every move.
Of course, yes, we all know the bad side of archaic, no-censorship networks (child porn, terrorism, etc.), but you just have to deal with that.
The creators of the products to mesh technologies probably should work together with encryption and sandboxing companies to create an ecnrypted sandbox so that people don't have their lives destroyed because of a thumbnail that someone ELSE uploaded, or at least advise people on products they can use.
No doubt the governments will try suppress such things by making it illegal to run a WRAN without a licence or some shit.
Re:And of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up a point... Television and Radio are broadcast. They don't require a return signal for two way communication.
What kind of output will your home antenna need to reach back to a tower that's 50 miles away?
Re:For scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop drooling over your 'stick it to the telco' thoughts, and actually think for a moment. The stated bandwidth of this is 22Mbps per WRAN (not per user, per WRAN). The population of New York State (averaged) is 411 people/sq mi. So in the 12000sq mi area a tower covers you have almost 5 million people (on average). So each person can have a whopping 4 BITS per second of bandwidth. Even if you covered on 1 sq mi per tower (a huge expense) your would still be sharing 22Mbps with 410 other people. Of course, the actual density in NYC is more like 30000 people/sq mi.
The only place this makes sense is where the population has very low density, which are places that currently have no coverage at all. Just like TFA says.