UK To Get Whitespace Radio

judgecorp writes "The UK's telecom regulator, Ofcom, will approve whitespace radio, allowing systems that use vacant spaces in the TV broadcast spectrum on the same 'license' exempt basis as Wi-Fi. It is hoped that white space radio will solve the rural broadband crisis in the country. From the article: 'Ofcom hopes for deployments by 2013, putting the UK ahead of other countries, and proposes it be used for a higher-power variant of Wi-Fi as well as for rural broadband connections and machine-to-machine communication.'"

Re:I wonder what Jodrell Bank make of this

[CProgrammer98]

no, they're reusing the old analog tv broadcast frequencies which are in the process of being decommissioned for TV broadcasting. No new frequencies are involved.

Re:AWFULLY RACIST !!

[Dan Dankleton]

No, African-American is the politically correct way to say black all over the world, didn't you know. Except in most countries it's Non-American African-American.

Re:Rural? UK? ATFS?

[Alioth]

Don't confuse "rural" with "remote". It is entirely possible to live in a very rural area of South East England, and SE England has generally a very high population density.

I'm guessing you're from the United States or Canada where there's lots of territory that is "remote", and in urban areas the suburban sprawl is so huge that a city of 4M people covers a colossal area. But in the UK cities are very compact and "green belt" legislation has prevented many cities from expanding much, and has pretty much stopped suburban sprawl completely dead. Therefore the urban areas are very compact. It's very evident that when you fly over the UK, there are vast areas of rural green space. Just because it's not remote doesn't make it not rural. Much of these rural areas are far enough away from a telephone exchange that you'll have performance problems with a 56K modem and ADSL just isn't a viable proposition. However, they aren't "remote" and therefore (for the most part) can be easily be provisioned by radio signals.

Once you get north of Manchester, the population density really drops off, too, and as you get further into Scotland you do find remote, hard-to-get-to areas. While not as remote as, say, northern Alaska, they are remote enough that if you get caught there in a winter storm without good equipment you're very likely to die. The population isn't evenly spread around Great Britain by any stretch of the imagination.