Will the White Spaces find their niche? We’ll answer that question this Thursday at the Wireless Innovation Forum’s conference in Washington, DC.
I’ve written quite a bit about the White Spaces, but most of that has been about the technology and the regulatory environment. With those two key requirements now (mostly, anyway) addressed, it’s time to turn our attention to applications and commercializing the White Spaces, the subject of a session I’m Chairing this Thursday within The Future of White Space Communications Workshop at the Wireless Innovation Forum’s SDR’11 – WinnComm conference. We’ve assembled a great panel to address this topic, which has received relatively little attention despite its vital importance to the justification of the very significant investment that’s going into the White Spaces in the form of databases, chips, and marketing on the part of large industry players like Google and Microsoft.
I’ll cover my biases here after the event on Thursday, but, in the interests of serving in my role as impartial moderator (to the degree that any analyst can be impartial, anyway), let me give you a taste of what I want to explore here. First, we need to consider the operational parameters of the White Spaces – rate (effective throughput), range, rate vs. range, availability (which varies quite dramatically mostly with population density), regulation, and other basic requirements. Next, is there a horizontal market for the White Spaces, akin to the role played by, for example, Wi-Fi and LTE? And, the other big question, what are the vertical market opportunities for the White Spaces? And, finally, what are the barriers to success here?
I hope you can attend – it’s not often that entirely new territory in wireless opens up, and it really is time to have this discussion.
