White Space lobby leaps to Europe

Having secured FCC approval for the use of cognitive radios in White Space on the American side of the pond, a lobbying consortium has jumped the Atlantic to try their luck with European regulators. White spaces are frequencies that are allocated to TV transmissions, but that aren't being utilised fully thanks to the way that …

[Hate2Register]

I am so grateful..

..to be educated thusly: "...in the USA, that leaves large swaths of frequency available, if you can avoid interfering with Eastenders."

Wow, I didn't know they had Eastenders in the USA. It says as lot about Americans if they really do watch that show. Hehe.

Watch that white Space!

[Mage]

White Space

That's what is between their ears.

It causes interference. The concept is inherently broken

[JB]

One-way traffic

I'd like to see a European lobbying group cross the Atlantic and try and strong-arm the Americans into some money-making scheme, they wouldn't last five minutes. Why is it always one way traffic? And this whole White Space concept sounds pretty dodgy. What sort of applications would it be used for? Seems to me only PMR radios that have a range of about 100 yards would work in these cirumstances, but then I'm not a lobbyist being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to push it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Transmitting inside the overlap?

Anyone who knows anything about radio will know this is just a giant headache waiting to happen. Trying to send a radio signal between the edge of two frequencies means that signal will interfere with both.

What's the bloody point anyway? All we'll be sold is shitty, overpriced services with limited range or ability, more behavioural analysis and more advertising.

No thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Hate2Register

I remember Eastenders being on public TV way back when - the late '80s and early '90s, when I was pre-teenish.

My main impressions of it were from watching a few minutes when I was too early for 'Nova' ("My god, this is depressing. This is what people watch in England?") and from reading the little description blurbs in the public TV guide ("Let's see if I can find a character mentioned twice in this month's guide... Nope.").

It kind of got balanced out with Red Dwarf and Are You Being Served, though. Great shows, those.

[druck]

No

Already most of our precious TV frequencies are being sold off against our will, instead of being used to deliver more HD channels on Freeview. Now the yank schisters are coming over to attempt to fuck up what frequencies we are left with, using their faith-rather-than-physics based congnative radio shite.