A couple of you sent me links to stories about a new FCC ruling which will open up the channels Wi-Fi is able to use, making wireless network speeds much, MUCH faster.

Wireless connections are, by their very nature, slower, less secure, and more prone to interference than wired connections. If you can plug a cord directly from your device into the router, you’ll have a much better experience overall. But with many devices (most, now, actually), that is not an option. You need the wireless connection so you can connect a tablet or smartphone or digital band or whatever other wireless-only device you have.

In a shared environment, in which many devices are using that wireless connection, the connection is actually skipping from device to device very rapidly, giving each device a little bit of connection time before moving on to the next, then cycling back through them all over and over; no two devices have access at the same time.

With this new ruling, which opens up 100Mhz of frequency in the 5.15 – 5.25 gigahertz frequency range, that will no longer be necessary. Now, each device can have its own wireless channel for connecting to and using a wireless hotspot. This will make your connection speed much faster, up to one gigabit per second – or possibly even faster – as opposed to the speeds available now, which at their absolute fastest are 300 megabits, although we all get closer to 25 or 50. It will be as though your device has its own provate commute lane instead of having to share the road with a thousand other cars. This will be especially welcome in public places like libraries or airports or coffee shops or schools to name a few. It applies to ‘unlicensed devices’ which provide infrastructure-based (remember that word from class?) hotspots and the devices that use them such as routers and baby monitors and tablets. It also removes the indoor-only requirement for these devices. Licensed devices would be those used for regulated data transmission, such as emergency personnel, airlines, etc. and they are not affected by this.

Now you can do both of these things, and much faster to boot!

You may remember we talked about the various wireless protocols in use today; if you look at your wireless router, it likely sys something like ‘a/b/g’ compatible. It may have other protocols listed as well, such as ab or ag. Those protocols, which all fall under the 802.11 standard, are simply the rules that the router uses to send traffic back and forth. This new protocol hasn’t been classified as far as I can tell, but I suspect new devices that can use it will be coming pretty soon, as I’m not convinced a simple firmware update, or flash update (which we also discused in class) will be sufficient.

There’s so much information about it I have decided to simply link three relevant articles – you can read much more about the recent ruling and what it means at Cnet, PC World and The Register.

FCC frees up 100MHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi (Cnet)

FCC Clears the Way for Gigabit Wi-Fi (PC World)

FCC doubles 5GHz spectrum in prep for one-giagbit Wi-Fi (The Register, from the UK)