I'm not sure where to put this... but since the operative word here is "free", I figured F&F was as good a place as any.
Here's the deal: when we convert from analog to digital TV, a whole bunch of airwaves are going to be freed up. This is called "whitespace".
The FCC has voted that, starting 3/19/2009, people can use a "personal whitespace device" to get online on these old TV airwaves.
Tons of high profile people/agencies/companies (including Google) think this is the future of internet access, from what I've been reading. Basically, there are very few areas of the U.S. that don't have some TV wave penetration- so it would be pretty easy to use the existing analog TV infrastructure to cast what's more or less a giant WiFi bubble over, well, everybody. This solves the problem about what to do about rural broadband internet access- something that nobody's been able to completely solve so far. And what I read on Google's blog was that these old TV waves would provide far superior wireless internet than current WiFi does- something on the order of 1000kbps.
So here's my question: how do I get a whitespace device? Any techies out there know about this? I've been searching like mad, but so far I haven't been able to find anything.
Here's the deal: when we convert from analog to digital TV, a whole bunch of airwaves are going to be freed up. This is called "whitespace".
The FCC has voted that, starting 3/19/2009, people can use a "personal whitespace device" to get online on these old TV airwaves.
Tons of high profile people/agencies/companies (including Google) think this is the future of internet access, from what I've been reading. Basically, there are very few areas of the U.S. that don't have some TV wave penetration- so it would be pretty easy to use the existing analog TV infrastructure to cast what's more or less a giant WiFi bubble over, well, everybody. This solves the problem about what to do about rural broadband internet access- something that nobody's been able to completely solve so far. And what I read on Google's blog was that these old TV waves would provide far superior wireless internet than current WiFi does- something on the order of 1000kbps.
So here's my question: how do I get a whitespace device? Any techies out there know about this? I've been searching like mad, but so far I haven't been able to find anything.
