A green light for free-software defined radio?

They are a bit like Winmodems or software modems. Were you strip out the hardware that did all the work on previous devices and replace it all with software. The hardware that is used it used is kept to a absolute minimum. All the frequency generation, modulation, and other such things are done purely in software.

Sure this uses a lot of CPU, but going this direction has SIGNIFICANT advantages. You can do things with software radios that you simply can not do with regular radio hardware, at least unless your spending a shitload of money.

The Intel wireless devices and other things are essentionally software radios also.

Going back to software modems vs hardware modems. Sure software modems are cheap and crappy and other such things. But what people didn't realise at the time is that once you had the control of the hardware and software you could easily update the protocols the devices supported and changed their behavior so that software modems can be made to significantly out perform contemporary, and much more expensive, 'real' modems. Back when I played Quake2 I could get significantly better internet performance (better bandwidth and better latencies) using a software modem then I could with a hardware modem. And it didn't have anything to do with the hardware modem being crappy or anything like that. (although the phone line was pretty crappy) The difference was that I could change and update the protocols the software modem supported simply by updating my drivers, with the hardware modem I was stuck using older protocols that were less effective.

Software radio is like this, but it's much much more important.

Look at the stuff already being used by GNU Radio software and hardware:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/

Capture HDTV broadcasts. Detect wifi hotspots. Track people using Cell phones, satellite communications, magnetic signal proccessing, wireless communications, video transimission and reception, audio transmission and reception. Anything people can use a radio for. All with similar hardware and similar software. It's very flexible.

The cost of providing similar functionality in hardware would be outrageous. Software radio is a important foundation for tommorrow's communications.

The future of communication is through global wireless mesh network. All of it ad-hoc, completely open, nearly completely free. Almost organic in nature. All of it working together, satelite, wide-ranging wifi, small time radio operators, high speed/high reliable commercial wired communications etc etc.

The radio spectrum is a literally untapped shared resource for sharing and communicating on a global scale. Right now you have all major governments admitting that this is a resource that belongs to it's citizens. AND you have ALL major governments that have near total restrictions on what those citizens can and cannot do with it.

The key to openning up and making it work is highly sophisticated, open, and cheap radios. Much more sophisticated and open then what we have now. In order to make this affordable for the average person it needs to be software radios. .

Your already seeing this with Intel Wifi, for example. Or Atheros. Pretty much any significant consumer device will be software-based.

Needless to say there are significant advantages for people that have influence over the FCC to keep radio from openning up. For very significant censorship and financial reasons.... FCC doesn't want to lose it's power, the government does not want to lose control of it's regulation of speech, and big media companies do not want to lose control over their monopoly of of the airwaves, etc etc

Look at the tiny amount of open spectrum we have to work with, and look at the massive amout of usefullness and value people are already able to extract from this very crowded and very limited resource.