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In 2003, I sat in on a session at a conference in San Francisco. The topic was “Smart Radios” and the discussion was thrilling. They also spoke about how there was an outside chance that our FCC would open up prime frequencies to be used without licenses. And how these smart radios were able to sense the TV Channels airspace and if it didn’t sense a channel, it could use that channel.

This is called “White Space” radios. Many have their view on why, but I always think of it as when you turn your TV to that channel you would get white noise on your TV. Using these for a new high-powered WIFI network has caused many to don this as “White-Fi.”

I came back to the office all excited and began to search, and search, and found nothing. Over the next five years very liitle could be found. But in 2008, the FCC decided that when the switch to HD TV was final and Standard TV Channels were no longer needed, they would consider leaving them open for public use.

Flash forward two years and today, the FCC commissioners voted 5-0 to make it even easier to use these old TV channels. The FCC went so far as to eliminate the need for even using smart radios. This will make it even less expensive for the customer equipment.

This is exciting because these TV frequencies and go through trees and concrete and brick walls. Imagine this:

You come by semo.net and pick up a radio that you take home and place in your home and plug it into your computer or network and you have 20 Megabits of bandwidth. Yes, this is that awesome.

So when could this happen? Some think that prototypes could be available in January and mass-production by this time next year.

What a great decision the FCC made!

For more information see the following article:
http://arstechnica.com/