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Is this the same technology that Microsoft has tried to demo (twice) with less-than-spectacular results?

you could tune the satellite to be almost on a station, right on the 'edge' of the station, and get around the blocking method they used for PPV... you would get a blurry picture but good sound. Great way to watch porn when you're a 12 year old.

Don't take that away google. Think of the children.

Hm, all that Python must be having an effect on them.

Get your biggest competitor for bandwidth to spend all of their money on the spectrum you don't want by executing a feint in that direction, and then taking over the spectrum you really wanted.

It's almost like someone who reads those business books that are based on military strategy actually figured out how to apply the military concepts to competition...

and with digital television on the way, much easier to implement without interference. The UHF channels used on your television (most households in the USA have some cable or Satellite feed so don't use broadcast television really) have a small amount of bandwidth between each. If you combined that bandwidth with multiple radio links or some transmission technique, you could use it for WiFi like services locally in the home. The strength of signal could be such that it wouldn't interfere with neighbors reception ( as most aren't using broadcast television anyway) and it gives out more spectrum for home use.

Additionally, there are methods to use a small footprint in the WiFi band to herd the small signals between tv channels. It would look like frequency hopping, require much smaller signal strength, and would cause negligible interference to broadcast television. Simpler still is to allow the user to input the television channels they do watch so that interference is even more remote. If you can steal (locally only) use of channels that are not used at all in the area (how many stations are on channel 63 or 42?), there is literally TONS of bandwidth to use, and all of it at a better frequency range for non-line-of-sight transmissions. That is to say; better signal quality at lower signal strengths.

http://code.google.com/p/spacesharp/

I used to have a native x86 whitespace compiler, but I never could read my code.

I suspect that it won't be long before "internet" will be a basic service like "electricity" or "telephone".

The only big problem left to solve before true high speed access would be available to nearly everyone is the method of distribution. Using existing service wiring is problematic. Telephone wires aren't adequate due to bandwidth and signal / noise problems. Running networking over power wiring is not workable; it has all the problems of using the phone wiring but much, much worse. Running networking over the cable TV systems is the most functional - but cable doesn't go to every town and house and not all cable systems are compatible.

There's been a push to "wire" the country with glass fiber. They've even got it all the way to the house in some areas. As they build out the fiber networks they'll gradually reach more and more customers. But there's a BIG problem here: there's a huge number of houses and apartments to cover. The phone and electric systems grew up with the country, as each new home / subdivision was created these services were connected; essentially, the phone company took 100 years to get wiring to every residence.

To start out now and try to connect every residence - the magnitude of this problem is staggering. Assuming 100 million residences, if the army of installers could run fiber to and connect 10,000 residences every day - it'd take over 27 years. And that assumes the installers would be working 7 days per week. I'm not even going to try to estimate the cost of doing this.

If workable and reliable long-range wireless networking is developed / proven - and there's RF bandwidth that it can use - this could connect large number of residences inexpensively and quickly. Just plug your network cable into the "network radio" and you'd be online; no army of installers required. This would make it possible to make high speed access available to almost everyone in much, much less than 27 years.

I'm glad to see that Google is putting their resources behind making this a reality. It's not going to be easy to make this kind of technology work reliably but there's some very bright people at Google and if anyone can find a solution they can.

This idea is horribly dangerous for anyone running a PA. That "whitespace" is where wireless mics run. They use UHF/VHF frequencies to communicate between the receiver and the mic itself. I recently toured the Shure Plant in Niles IL and they pointed out that these whitespace devices are causing an extremely large amount of harm to something that's already standardized to run in the whitespace. I don't know, it really kind of worries me that my wireless mic systems won't work anymore, or that, when I go to a concert, the artists will be limited to cable length.