Volumetric Public Space

Not sure if this will interest any of you, but I just received an email from an organisation called "ascii" in Amsterdam - this being the flotsam from various mailing lists I subscribed to when back in 2004 I momentarily pretended to be a documentary auteur bumming round central Europe, visiting organisations that are involved in creating what's commonly referred to by the sexy title "community wireless networks" - essentially disseminators of the knowledge required to create ad-hoc computer networks using cheap tech (and frankly, many of those involved happens to be some of the most qualified and passionate geeks I've ever come across). The documentary project came to a sudden halt during IDFA in Amsterdam that same year in a haze of butter cookies and strong espressos (tangential thought: Do watch "Darwin's Nightmare" if you ever get the chance...), but that's another tale (I still have hours of unedited, embarrassingly amateurish interviews packed away on a dusty Lacie drive - all shot on an iSight at full res, which generated an incredible 5Mb per second data stream (read: unmanageable)).
The point I want to get across here, is the little known fact that the airwaves, literally "the sky" around us, is a highly segmented piece of real estate, used by governments worldwide to raise billions in revenue (recall the financially back-breaking mobile license auctions for 3g a few years back). Of course, this network also runs below us, in the shape of strands of copper and optical fiber.
What the "community wireless network"...err...community has argued for over the past few years is that the government releases more spectrum to their efforts to allow the "publics" to create their own non-commercial networks (eg. by allocating the soon-to-be available analogue telly broadcast spectrum). Unfortunately, said community is a loosely connected patchwork of organisations...My feeling is that eventually they will loose out to commercial powers like Google/telcos etc. (and perhaps one could say they already have)
But here's what I REALLY wanted to show - a piece of graphic that made a big impression on me 3 years ago. Click here to view a diagram of US spectrum allocation. Now try and see if you can track down where what we commonly refer to by its commercialized moniker "WiFi" sits (hint: it's quite small!) - this being the patch of spectrum which was de-regulated years back as it was considered a "junkspace" within the spectrum - messy and noisy as it was, being in the wavelenghts of microwaves, garage door openers and whatnot. Yet, WiFi took off in a big way perhaps even making possible the "nomadic" laptop lifestyles we now take for granted.
Something that was hinted to me back in those days was how convenient it would be if we (architects) put antennas into window frames....But I'll leave it at that for for now.
Have a look at some more graphs here and here.
Comments are welcome...