FCC adds 100MHz of spectrum to the commons

[doctorow]

[Permalink]

[Boundegar]

On April 1st? Mm-hm.

[sssss]

The linked article is from March 31, 2014, 11:19 am.

[sssss]

And here it is from fcc.gov:
http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-increases-5ghz-spectrum-wi-fi-other-unlicensed-uses

[aacmckay]

100 milli-Hz? That’s not a heck of a lot of bandwidth…

[joe_b]

Yes, BoingBoing is off by a factor of one billion. Capitalizing that M matters.

Is it necessary to buy new equipment to be able to use the new bandwidth? I suppose that for some equipment that already uses adjacent frequencies in the 5 GHz band a firmware update would suffice.

[fuzzyfungus]

But, but, how will Verizon survive the coming Exaflood or something if we don’t give them that spectrum? Do you all want civilization to collapse under the sheer weight of twitpics because we failed to provide sufficient subsidies?

[stephen_schenck]

And Mark wrote “the Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra” in another post - mistakes are legion today.

[Rhyolite]

Glad to know that I’m not the only one to look at the headline and think that mHz is a strange unit.

[nixiebunny]

I work with a guy who likes to measure things down to the milliHertz level at 5 GHz. His test instruments are borrowed and/or leased. Look up the Symmetricom 5110A.

[mojotexas]

What qualities does this bandwidth frequency have when compared to the 2.4Ghz that WiFi routers currently run on. Does it transmit over greater distances or with more capacity?

[chipandre]

In practice, it’s close enough to 2.4GHz that the frequency alone won’t make much difference in range, and capacity is a function of bandwidth, not frequency. Antennas will be able to be a bit smaller, and power requirements will go down a tad. In fact, there is already a chunk of ~5GHz spectrum allocated to wifi in the US, so this will likely just be an extension of that.

[Jardine]

@joe_b

I suppose that for some equipment that already uses adjacent frequencies in the 5 GHz band a firmware update would suffice.

Mwhahaha. As if a company would ever provide a firmware update when they can sell you a new router.

[Sim0n]

Do [regular] people even still buy routers? I’m under the impression that ISPs today just give you one big magic box that does everything and people couldn’t be happier, one less thing to worry about.

And amongst “everything” is throttle your netflix and leak your wifi password

[isomorphic]

@Jardine

As if a company would ever provide a firmware update when they can sell you a new router.

Solution: Buy routers which you can flash over the vendor firmware with DD-WRT / OpenWRT / Tomato or some other open-source firmware. Although that applies to the router CPU (usually a Broadcom derivative) and not necessarily the radio firmware.

However, sometimes the radio firmware is open-sourced (rarely by the vendor, usually reverse-engineered). If not, even the boxed binary radio firmware can often be tweaked in ways not intended by the vendor, without having to reverse-engineer the whole firmware.

If anyone can solve this for routers that actually have the hardware capability for another channel, it will be the DD-WRT people.

[isomorphic]

@Sim0n

Do [regular] people even still buy routers? I’m under the impression that ISPs today just give you one big magic box that does everything and people couldn’t be happier, one less thing to worry about.

I know you wrote “[regular]”, but people really, really need to not use their ISP router. Might as well give your cable company your house keys.

While you’re at it, buy a router that, as I wrote in another post, you can flash an open-source firmware onto. You’ll get more features than the ISP junk and control over your own privacy.

[cementimental]

misread as ‘to the cosmos’ and assumed they were bending the laws of physics somehow