(2010-09-24) Fleishman White Spaces Bandwidth Skeptic

Glenn Fleishman is a skeptic about how much Band-Width can be provided via Analog Tv White Spaces. Further, there's a canard circulating about how Microsoft has "covered its campus" with two white-space transmitters. That's true--that's not the canard. No, the problem is that Microsoft can serve the space but not the user base with two transmitters, even if the transmitters could handle the mythical 400 to 800 Mbps of raw throughput... Microsoft installed thousands of Aruba WiFi access points across its campus a few years ago not just to provide coverage but also to provide bandwidth. WiMAX has been hyped in the same way. You can have distance or speed but not both: the more area you cover, the more users you cover, the more you have contention for air space or time slots, and the less bandwidth available to each user.