White space 'Smart City' network goes up in Wilmington, North Carolina
By Nilay Patel 
posted February 26th 2010 2:21AM
posted February 26th 2010 2:21AM
White space internet just took another step on its long, vaporous journey: in addition to the 916-person trial in tiny Claudville, Virginia kicked off last year, Spectrum Bridge just launched its first large-scale "Smart City" network in Wilmington, North Carolina. If you'll recall, white spaces are the bits of spectrum in between TV frequencies, and a whole host of heavy hitters including Microsoft and Google pushed the FCC to open them up for data usage after years of lobbying and comically failed tests. Wilmington was selected for the big trial since it was the first community to switch completely to DTV broadcasting, and the city's using the new network for a variety of infrastructure tasks, including traffic camera monitoring, free WiFi in city parks, and remote wetlands monitoring stations. There's also more to come, including medical uses and more broadband for schools as time goes on. We're assuming NAB is totally SulkyFace5000 right now, but we've got to hand it to the White Spaces Coalition -- after all that talk, they've finally gotten up and running in a larger community. Anyone in Wilmington care to chime in and tell us how it's working?
I live in Wilmington. We've had free CityWiFi .. for forever. It's pretty speedy in some spots (like courthouse, police station, etc. anywhere with a tower on top of the building). However, this is the first I have heard of this going beyond city wifi, so I am going to have to dig around for more information.
Was expecting Mr. Murph again on this one. :D
According to this CNET Article, there's no public part of it yet, but it looks like it's got some really cool potential applications. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10459424-266.html
If any of this trickles down to the public before I move away, I'll gladly report in.
A slight aside: I live in Wilmington, and despite this being the first place to ditch analog TV signals, the local channels are ironically not available in HD on Dish Network.
Yeah, I'm in Wilmington. Work at Best Buy here and we've been looking for this now. As said earlier nothing public in "white space" territory but we do have public wifi freaking everywhere due to the population density and college nature of the town (UNCW). Oh, and as far as traffic monitoring goes I certainly haven't seen anything indicative of that. New Hanover County is the most expensive county in NC to insure a car. Let's hope it does something to alleviate the traffic.
Yeah, no public access for us yet. It's just testing going on right now. With the DTV switch and this white space deal, all we need now is to get Google to show up with their Fiber Infrastructure giveaway we'll be all set. ;)
@Tilpots : Hell yeah, let us give that 1Gbps connection a whirl!
@trueislander
I talked to the Mayor's secretary and a guy in the IT Dept. and they both said the city was working on a bid. Bring it!