The White Space Fight

By Teejay Valerio

 Coming soon to a future near you! The FCC wants to push it, Teejay wants it too! Canada will catch up someday to these current technologies. For now, all us Canadians can do is to drool while our neighbours down south play with these newfangled gadgets. White Space Technology. How lovely. More after the break!


Being from Canada, it's hard to get excited for new technologies as we are light years behind other countries in not only developing them, but more importantly, implementing the existing current ones into our society. I'm bummed about our lack of Netflix, Hulu, Boxy and other streaming content provider support here, as D2D streaming really is the way of future with entertainment media.

The fact that 3G data networks are "NEW!" and "Bleeding Edge!" in Canada (2 or so years only), while 4G betas are already being rolled out in other major Metropolitan areas kind of saddens me; it's hard not to be thankful at the fact that at least we have some sort of wireless connection on-the-go. Connecting your laptop or using a smartphone to tether through a mifi connection using the EVDO standard is commonplace in the US and I do predict that we will see this technology hit Canadian pastures in the next couple years at the least.

What excites me though, is the FCC's push to develop White space technology. White space devices (WSD's) that have been repeatedly tested to not interfere with other existing broadcasting frequencies genuinely tickles my fancy; said devices could hit the market as soon as late 2010!
While the FCC slowly moves WSD's from the planning stages to the marketing stage, it makes me wonder how far behind we will be in adopting these new technologies when they become a standard down south.

It's interesting to hear the potential of using White space broadcasting both short and long range. 80Mbps for regular and 400-800 Mbps for short-range networking! WoW!
A note to the FCC: You've already voted 5-0 to approve the use of unlicensed white space (Nov 2008). Now let's get cracking and push these WSD's out already to utilize the unused broadcast spectrum so that Canada can adopt the technology before I die!

Should I even talk about the delay of the Motorola (Verizon) Droid here in Canada? (DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license.)  Maybe I'll just save that for next time. In the meantime all hail King Jobs and his iPhone empire!