How Disruptive is Whitespace?

The recent ruling by the FCC to open up "Whitespace" spectrum, which live in the guard bands of TV broadcast spectrm between 54-862MHz, is creating a lot of buzz (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/206071/fcc_approves_white_space_wifi_on_steroids.html).  Prior to last week's decision, devices could only operate on a non-interfering basis and had to be able to sense and adjust to other local signals to avoid intereference using something like the 802.22 WRAN specification.  Companies like Spectrumn Bridge (http://www.spectrumbridge.com/Home.aspx) have been developing small-scale solutions in this space, but to build larger scale solutions beyond a few devices is very complex and requires true cognitive radios which are still several years from being truly economical.  However, the recent decisions allows any device to use Whitespace spectrum by simply looking up against a database of available whitespace in their local area based on providing their coordinates.  This is a much easier solution and will allow device vendors to take advantage of this new spectrum in the near term.  Given the tremendous pressure to offload stressed 3G mobile data networks, whitespace empowers users to create their own nomadic offload capability where WiFi is not readily available if their device can operate across whitespace frequencies.  This could certainly be disruptive is the carriers do not proactively move to help users integrate whitespace with other network resource options to drive a seamless experience.  If WiFi is any indicator, it will take lots of consumer pressure and innovation to make this happen.