Technologically, whats changed to make OS plausible?
When radios were invented, they were designed to do one thing only: receive as cheaply as possible. They were much less capable of processing the signals they were receiving. Our electronic and information processing technologies have advanced considerably since then: Today’s receivers are capable of separating signal from noise well enough that they don’t need “buffer zones” around the frequency they are receiving. Receivers and transmitters are smart enough to be able to switch frequencies as a particular band gets more congested. As with allowing cars to change lanes on the highway, this dramatically increases overall throughput. “Software-defined radios” (SDR) can do more with a signal than decode it as sounds to be played through speakers. SDRs can be programmed to treat these signals as encoding any conceivable type of data.
