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Mobile phone companies and other would-be users of wireless spectrum have long lusted after television’s empty airwaves. This week, after two years of haggling and testing, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC, finally gave the go-ahead for others in America to use them.

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The reason these channels are so valuable—and why they were chosen for terrestrial television in the first place—is because their signals travel for kilometres, can carry a lot of information, are unaffected by weather and foliage, go through walls and penetrate all the nooks and crannies within the bowels of buildings. They will allow mobile carriers to cover, from a single tower, up to ten times the area possible from a tower using existing frequencies. Dropped calls should then become a thing of the past.

White-space wireless: The Difference Engine: Bigger than Wi-Fi | The Economist