As a rule, we don’t cover standards announcements by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers because they’re incredibly boring. But occasionally this bunch of nerds coughs up something that people who aren’t soldering gunslingers might actually care about…like a wireless router standard so powerful it has a reach of 62 miles. Meet IEEE 802.22; it’s about to make everywhere wireless.
How? Using the frequencies analog television stations used to broadcast on. Your laptop’s wireless card uses IEEE 802.11, which is basically extremely short-range radio (which is why your router craps out when you’re more than twenty feet away from it). But, of course, the frequencies 802.22 use can go much further, at least in theory.
So, this is neat and stuff, but why is it worth reporting? Well, it’s also fairly quick (22MB per second maximum), which means that if you, say, installed a few of these around major cities, you’d suddenly have cheap, solid wireless access wherever you went without having to pay nosebleed prices to AT&T. In rural areas, instead of relying on crappy dial-up, you could get less crappy wireless. In short, this could make your devices currently stuck with a cellular connection vastly cheaper and more useful. Of course, this will also mean more people surprising random strangers with Goatse, but that’s the price of progress.