Houston grandmother first to use new Super Wi-Fi technology

It’s not always the youngest generation that is the first to try out the latest technology. A Houston grandmother has become the country’s first user of a technology called “Super Wi-Fi.”
Now to be clear, it’s not called “super” because of its speed, but rather because the Wi-Fi signal has the ability to travel over greater distances and through walls thanks to its utilization of spectrum from unused television channels. The FCC created rules to enable the use of the spectrum specifically for this new version of Wi-Fi.
Leticia Aguirre’s home became a Super Wi-Fi hotspot thanks to a partnership between Rice University and a Houston-based non-profit group called Technology for All (TFA). Aguirre, who is 48 and a working grandmother, had previously been using a free community broadband Wi-Fi network in her home established by a Rice University-based research team led by Professor Edward Knightly and TFA. But Aguirre never received a good signal in her home because she lives at the edge of the network. That fact made her the perfect candidate for Knightly’s research team to introduce the new Super Wi-Fi technology.
The Super Wi-Fi equipment used was created by Ryan Guerra, a graduate student at Rice. The equipment dynamically shifts between traditional Wi-Fi and unused UHF digital television channels to offer the best coverage. One of the advantages of the new Super Wi-Fi equipment is that it looks like any other traditional Wi-Fi hotspot to users. Additional Super Wi-Fi links are planned for Aguirre’s neighbors with the goal of reaching up to 3,000 homes in East Houston.
The initiative has federal support from the National Science Foundation and hopes to develop the technology as an open-source solution in an effort to ease deployment of it in additional cities and rural areas.
Source link: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/houston-grandmother-first-to-use-new-super-wi-fi-technology-20110424/