The Airwaves are Liberated, so what?

Hopefully you have read the re-posted information on the FCC's vote to free up the "white space" that is unallocated. There is a lot of speculation of what can be done with this extra broadcasting space, but no one has really set plans.

To those of you who do not bother about why or how things work, you just know that they do and want to use them, you may not understand the giant impact that this may have.

Yeah, you may have read somewhere that they could use these airwaves to implement global wireless internet. Yes, this is true, and is the most speculated plans for the white space; however, this is just a face-value perspective of what all this would involve. Yeah, we could have internet anywhere we go, but we need to understand what would need to be involved behind such an infrastructure to support that.

(techy part)
I prospect that in order for such an implementation, IPv4 would not be able to support the amount of users to connect them to the internet. Yes, the Whitespace ISPs (whoever they're to be) could implement a NAT system like cellphone providers provide, or something like that, but i think that enough people could be brought on board (and enough capital invested) to spur the IPv6 transition.

Those who know networking (and a few of those who don't) have been waiting years for people to see such an opportunity.

Many people have written much more specific descriptions of the benefits to IPv6 implementation, so i won't get into it very deep, but here's a general idea:

Right now we have IPv4 addressing to route information over the internet. No matter what type of computer you have, or what country you're in, you're using one of the addresses to access the internet. Addressing in networking is similar to house addressing. Every website, service, or person has to have one in order to recieve information (mail) on the internet. The problem is, we now have more people trying to access the internet than there are addresses. If you know your IP address, you know that it consists of 4 sets of numbers (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). IPv4 addressing is difficult to explain to a person who has no prior knowledge of how these things work, and i'm trying to keep these descriptions in those ranges. Don't put too much thought into it, the addresses are all taken.

So, how do people still get on the internet if they're all taken? Well, ISPs keep economic control on the IP addresses that they give people. If they start to run out, they use computing techniques to push out more addresses. A small example of this is in your house. If you are connected to a wireless router and have many computers connected, then you are using what is called Network Address Translation (NAT) to "give out" more addresses. Your router is a computer. It takes the single address that your ISP has given you and creates tables and routes to split your connection to the different computers in your house. This is where the problem comes in. Every time your connection gets hit with these computers used to route traffic, your bandwidth quality decreases.

Ok, so simply put, IPv6 has enough addresses that we'll never (i use that word lightly) run out. This will free up alot of the routing congestion that slows down people's connections now.

It would be a huge technological advance.


Next Week: What is an Operating System?