'Super Wi-Fi': Super, But Not Wi-Fi

A new city-wide broadband technology came to Wilmington, NC yesterday, and it may help connect rural homes to broadband and power public Wi-Fi hotspots in cities. It could become a real threat to cell phone carriers' 3G data monopoly, and could bring the Internet to rural homes. But there's one thing the radical new "TV white spaces" network technology most certianly isn't: it isn't "super Wi-Fi," as a press release dubbed it.

"Wi-Fi is a trademark, there is no such thing as 'Super Wi-Fi,' and white spaces is not Wi-Fi," Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said. "This could cause confusion among consumers who may actually expect the technology to be Wi-Fi, and it isn't."

The Wireless Innovation Alliance, the trade group for TV white spaces technology providers, doesn't seem to care much for the Wi-Fi Alliance's complaints.

"The term 'wifi' has always been a general term for the family of 802.11 protocols and products using these protocols. The term 'Super WiFi' is a verbal tool for conveying a thought or concept in an easy-to-understand way, such as when a child asks for a Band-Aid for a boo-boo, and you give him or her a generic brand plastic adhesive," a Wireless Innovation Alliance spokesperson said in a statement."

The phrase is also being used for a trade show, the "Super Wi-Fi Summit." Scott Kargman, the COO of Crossfire Media, one of the directors of the summit, said the company is using the phrase because "it's a commonly used term, and people seem to understand it."

Davis-Felner isn't impressed.

"We don't like people using the trademark that way … and we take protecting our trademarks very seriously," Davis-Fellner said.

What Is White Spaces?
White space radios use the empty TV channels around you to transmit data. The white spaces in the UHF band are treated as unlicensed spectrum, so they aren't exclusive to a single wireless carrier; anyone can use them, just like the 2.4-Ghz band used for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cordless phones.

It's not that the Wi-Fi folks dislike white spaces. They just say the technologies are different, and they're right. Operating on a much lower frequency than Wi-Fi, white space technology currently brings slower connections at a much greater range.

White space radios in the U.S., according to the Wireless Innovation Alliance trade group, will most likely use a new standard called 802.22 for "regional area networks." That's different from the 802.11 Wi-Fi "local area network," 802.15 Bluetooth "personal area network," and 802.16 WiMAX "metropolitan area network" scopes, according to the IEEE 802 Working Group Web site.

In other words, from a technical perspective this is no more "super Wi-Fi" than Bluetooth is "mini Wi-Fi" or Sprint's 4G WiMAX is "mega Wi-Fi."

In Wilmington, the white-space network will initially provide backhaul to public Wi-Fi routers in two parks and connect four Webcams in a local garden, according to Forbes.

White Spaces Vs. 3G
Initially, white spaces networking will compete with embedded 3G, DSL, and home WiMAX. It will be a way for wireless Internet providers, especially in rural areas, to zap their network over to a main router in a home, which will then redistribute it to devices over Ethernet or standard Wi-Fi connections. It can also provide wireless backhaul for public Wi-Fi routers, or connect to other fixed devices like smart energy meters which would otherwise use 3G.

That's in part because for now, at least, you can't move a white-space device around. You can't put a white-space radio into a phone or laptop because each white-space device must check its location against a database to determine which TV channels and wireless microphones are being used in the device's area, so they can avoid those channels.

That may change a few years down the road, when "personal/portable" white space devices appear. Based on the 802.22 standard, these will be chips able to fit into laptops and tablets, with software that can "sense" clear frequencies as they move around.

According to Forbes, personal/portable white space chips will come by the end of 2012, and chipsets will often combine white space and Wi-Fi technology.

Personal/portable white space technologies seem better suited for campus-wide and large building-wide networks than for replacing the average home Wi-Fi network, though. It'll be able to cover greater distances with one router, but at slower speeds. In other words, to me it looks like more of a threat to big wireless carriers' 3G and 4G data networks than to smaller Wi-Fi hotspots.

"From a data rate standpoint, you're going to see better performance out of the frequency where WiFi operates … [white spaces] can go longer distances and it does a better job of going through barriers, but at much lower data rates," Davis-Felner said.

Furthermore, there's a real Super Wi-Fi coming - 802.11ac, otherwise known as "VHT," or "very high throughput."

"That will be the next generation of Wi-Fi in the sense that it brings an even higher data rate … more like a gigabit per second," Davis-Felner said. Pre-standard 802.11ac gadgets will appear this year, with standards-certified products showing up next year, she said.