Here's an idea-- using our current 50,000 watt radio towers as giant wireless network broadcasters. Basically, a form of "digital radio" your computer could tap into from even miles away, even in rural areas.

Here's how it would work. Normally, radios broadcast music on an analogue signal that your radio picks up in real time. Digital radio would have to work like streaming media works; your computer picks up the streaming media and then plays it, just like Web radio.

But music isn't the only thing you could broadcast this way. Television signals, text files (like RSS streams), and even shareware programs-- all could be available for download. Your local station might have "the shareware game hour" from 8-9PM, where it just broadcasted games. Tune in for that hour and you'd start downloading games which, if you liked 'em, you could then purchase them. Perhaps you could get several 10-minute clips of movies... if you liked 'em, you could buy the whole thing and purchase the DVD through the mail.

Figuring out check-sums on files would be difficult, because the personal antenna isn't large enough to communicate back to the big antenna. And we really can't have each person with a 1000-watt transmitter/receiver on his or her house... we'd be frying birds as they flew through the air and microwaving children as they played outside. It would be an FCC nightmare, much like dealing with television, radio, CB, HAM, and cell phones have become. This simplifies us down to one major broadcast signal for TV/Radio/anything else you just want to throw at people, and one signal for interpersonal communication (peer to peer).

Thoughts?

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