GNU Radio

Headliner Wired article on GNU Radio:

"Matt Ettus and Eric Blossom's software-defined radio on the cheap is popping up in unexpected places, describing a very different radio world from the centralized model that has dominated radio history.

"Decentralized controls enable innovation at the edge -- it's closer to the computer model," says Blossom. "I think what we'll find is that people will come up with things we never really thought about."

Ettus is more concrete about the project's possibilities. Citing Wi-Fi as an example, he envisions "a world in which bandwidth is not an issue. People will create applications that will use that bandwidth, like complete telepresence."

GNU Radio from Wikipedia:

"GNU Radio is a signal processing package, which is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The goal is to give ordinary software people the ability to 'hack' the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, to understand the radio spectrum and think of clever ways to use it."