Welcome to the self-proclaimed Rural Ottawa High-Speed Internet Blog. High-speed Internet access is virtually ubiquitous in the urban and suburban areas of Ottawa, but when I started this blog in 2005, only about 60% of the rural areas of Ottawa have coverage. However, even for rural citizens, high-speed Internet access is becoming as necessary as telephone service. Happily, high-speed coverage for rural Ottawa has increased significantly, and not only is coverage reportedly above 90%, many rural residents and businesses now have more than one choice of high-speed ISP.

This purpose of this weblog is to track news and events related to high-speed (broadband) Internet access in the rural areas of Ottawa and, to a lesser extent, in nearby townships.

RSS Feed

I think members of this blog can be notified of any new postings via email. Membership is free (and I won't spam you). As well, if you have an RSS news reader, you can easily be notifed of new postings to this blog by subscribing to: http://firstlinehs.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Postings & Moderation

I've opened up this blog to allow anyone to post to it. However, I continue to moderate and will remove any inappropriate content, e.g. anything not related to high-speed internet access in the rural Ottawa, the Ottawa Valley, Eastern Ontario, and the Outaouais.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

PCMag article: Why We Need White-Space Broadband

PC Magazine has published an article about using unlicensed white-space frequencies for high-speed Internet transmissions in rural areas.

In the USA, the government is requiring all TV broadcasters to convert their analog television signals to digital signals. This frees-up all the analog TV channels on VHF (channels 2-13; 54-216 MHz) and UHF (channels 14-83; 470-1002 MHz). These frequency spectrums (white-space) could be used for wireless high-speed Internet access, especially in rural areas where there is not a lot of white-space use to begin with. And because these are lower frequencies, especially the VHF range, the signals can travel much further, which also makes them suitable for rural areas.

I'm not sure how applicable the article is to Canada, since I'm not sure if the Canadian government is going to follow the USA's lead in the matter. If anyone knows for sure, please provide info.

posted by Chris Spencer at 1:36 pm 1 comments

1 Comments:

Blogger Michael Z. Bell said...

Just to clarify this a bit: "white space" refers to unused spaces in the TV spectrum allocation. The digital signals will still be using some of the same spectrum allocation as the analog signals, but not the VHF spectrum. For example, the CBC digital service actually uses channel 25 (which to make it consumer friendly is called "4.1") and Radio Canada uses channel 22 ("9.1").

That being said, there are some good opportunities for novel services here unless the spectrum is simply auctioned to the highest bidder. There's an article on this from a Canadian perspective at the Alternative Telecommunications Policy Forum.

October 27, 2008 10:39 am  

Post a Comment

<< Home