Nearpoints

Craig Mathias

Previous Article Next Article

The Real Value of the TV White Spaces

A conference session yesterday led me (and I think most in the audience) to the conclusion that applications for the White Spaces are real, and markets should develop – although one big potential showstopper remains on the horizon. But their real value regardless is in influencing future spectrum policy and allocations going forward.

By Craig Mathias on Fri, 12/02/11 - 7:58pm.

. What's this?

My session on Commercializing the White Spaces yesterday at the Wireless Innovation Forum's SDR'11-WinnComm conference was very well received. We had a great panel and packed a lot of information into just 40 minutes. The bottom line here is that there really are applications for White Spaces radios. In the horizontal/WISP case, there was some consensus that distribution and backhaul would be the preferred model, with access remaining Wi-Fi (think: the femtocell/router model), but with some direct end-user access for horizontal applications in venues like farms, ranches, and other rural areas where long reach is important. Since the White Spaces are by definition unused TV channels, there are a lot more of these in rural areas, so this looks like a win/win.

White Spaces systems should also do well in vertical markets like government (surveillance, law enforcement, municipal utilities, etc.), other security/surveillance applications, industrial apps, agriculture, M2M, manufacturing, logistics, and mining/petroleum/natural resource/etc. The big question is when the chip guys will produce components integrated enough for the systems guys to build finished goods suitable for end-user applications. I would guess at this point that we'll know over the next year or two.

The potential showstopper is the possibility of "incentive auctions" that could reduce the availability of White Spaces spectrum, and thus make this whole space significantly less promising. I have argued since the initial proposals for spectrum auctions (the early 1990s) that auctions are bad policy and possibly unconstitutional. They're a hidden tax. And auctioning off unused TV channels will most certainly lower interest in the White Spaces, making this whole effort likely for naught.

But all is not lost - the real interest here, I still believe, should be directed towards applying the database-driven cognitive radio concept into other spectrum-refarming exercises. There are at present ten (!) firms that want to supply White-Spaces database services; think DNS and registrars as we know them today and the idea is simple and thus low risk in concept; we'll have to see, of course, how well it works in practice, but I have little doubt that this is one great idea no matter what. Of course, if the White Spaces don't catch fire, we may never know, and that's the ultimate risk to commercialization of what could be very valuable spectrum - even if it's not "Super Wi-Fi".