The most valued “White Space” – Super WiFi

The coming decade is going to see the next biggest innovation in the wireless industry – Super WiFi which uses the existing white space in the spectrum for transmission,

To start with, What are “White Spaces‘? At the start of the radio and television broadcasting era, several frequency ranges were allocated for different types of transmission / channels and there are some vacant/un-used frequencies in between these allocated bands. These un-used frequencies are called “White Spaces”. The reason why the white spaces were required is to reduce the interference among several channels when the transmission medium was analog.

Now that “analog” transmissions have been a long past history in this digitized world, it is worth reconsidering the frequency allocation done long back. As a part of this, it was identified that there is no need for the white spaces to be made available as interference is not expected to occur during digital transmissions. Hence the existing frequency bands which have been allocated can be tighten-ed and these white space could better be used for any other Wireless transmissions.

These white spaces are now being considered to be used for a new wireless technology called Super WiFi. Super WiFi (also known as WiFi on Steroids) covers a few miles as opposed to a 802.11n WiFi which covers a little more than 100 feet. In addition to this, Super WiFi is expected to provide higher speeds than the current 4G technology.

Microsoft , in its Redmond campus has already replaced many of its 802.11n WiFi routers with 2 Super WiFi routers. FCC has approved the first real public WiFi and it was launched in Wilmington , North Caroline a couple of weeks ago.

All in all, I believe that this is going to be a key wireless technology that is going to rule the next Internet revolution.

TMCNet is organizing Super-WiFi summit at Austin, Texas from October 2-4 , 2012.