The internet has changed the life of many people, you’re probably an example since you’re reading this geeky blog that’s mostly intended for geeks, the curious, and technology lovers.
But the internet won’t really reach it’s maximum potential, that is, until it’s almost everywhere just like electricity or TV.
In February 2009, by order of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all TV transmissions currently being done over VHF have to cease, and all those TV channels will go only through digital signals. This means that one of the most versatiles spectrums will be up for grabs.
This spectrum (ranging anywhere from the 55MHz to 88MHz if I’m not mistaken) has the power to reach much larger distances than your 2.4GHz WIFI router, the distance actually depends on the height of antennas and somewhat visibility (you can see the formulas for theoretical distances on wikipedia)
Google, Motorola, Microsoft, Philips and many companies are asking the FCC to keep all this “white space” spectrum to be freed for anyone to use, just like WiFI’s 2.5GHz, which has extended somewhat the accessibility to the internet.
There are other companies however that want to license the spectrum and have it exclusively for them, an example are the companies that make wireless microphones (which didn’t seem to have any problem with whoever was broadcasting TV, so interference can clearly be fixed). Google has even proposed to keep an open geographical database of whatever signals are allowed to license smaller frequency ranges of the spectrum, so whatever transmission your computer will make will not interfere with them.
This would probably mean that smaller tv stations could transmit locally without interfering with anyone if they had license a subrange.
Anyway, I just ask you to sign this petition to the FCC and spread the word out for other to sign it, so that we can have internet everywhere we go on top of VHF signals, or as how they’re calling it WiFI 2.0
Here’s a video from google in case you didn’t understand me.
Just imagine how many more visits your site will have if EVERYONE will have access to the internet from anywhere. It will truly change our lifes in one way or another.