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The New Wireless - The Year 2009

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
at 2:41pm

While this news story is a few weeks old, it’s just about the greatest one of the year for the internet (at least in the US): New rules could rock wireless world.

For those of you who may not know, as of February 2009, all over-the-air broadcast NTSC TV will be gone. Basically this means everything will have either shifted to HDTV, or all over-the-air broadcasts will be digital television from cable companies. In technical terms, this opens up the 700Mhz frequency range which is currently reserved for these broadcasts.

So the question is … what do we do with it? Well, the FCC has just decided that some type of information will be broadcast over those frequencies, and as of now, this most likely will be internet access and services. The question then becomes, who controls it?

Many large corporations are fighting for the rights to it including AT&T and others. But if Google has their way, it’ll be an entirely open system which anyone can use. The good news is what while the FCC hasn’t given it to Google, they’ve decided that it will for sure be an open system.

Just think of it this way: by late 2009, you could, in theory, have free wireless internet access from anywhere broadcast TV previously reached, at full broadband speeds upwards of 2Mbps.

This could possibly become the best announcement ever.