White Space closer to becoming “Wi-Fi Space”

You may remember Corey’s piece back in August explaining a proposal before the US Congress to allow television “whitespace” – the TV frequencies that aren’t used between normal channels – to become conduits for high-speed Internet access nationwide.

Well, after Tuesday’s landmark vote from the Federal Communications Commission, that is one step closer to a reality.

Although many in the telecom industry were fighting hard to restrict this use of the airwaves, the FCC commissioners voted 4-1 to allow the white space across the country to be opened up for new technologies and allow Internet access to flow freely through the air. If nothing else, this could provide a reliable on-ramp to the information superhighway in some of the most rural areas of the country.

As Corey mentioned yesterday, more and more telecom company are turning to bandwidth caps to try and cut costs and increase profits within the company. That’s why a decision like this becomes so much bigger – nationwide wireless Internet connectivity could theoretically allow far more data to flow between users than any Comcast, AT&T, Verizon or any other telecom company could support on their current infrastructure.

If the telecom industry wants to keep up, they would almost be forced to rebuild their systems instead of just slowly opening the same old pipes for those of use using the flow.

Let’s just hope the US Government actually does something right with this opportunity and opens the airwaves up to the most talented developers instead of auctioning them off to the highest bidders.