The battle lines between device makers are already starting to be drawn. Motorola’s congratulatory statement also included some marketing positioning. Motorola has declared itself a leader in some of the technology that will be used by the devices:
“As part of the FCC’s decision, power limits have been imposed on TVWS devices to ensure there is no interference to television signals and other permitted users within the television band. In particular, the FCC is requiring the first group of approved devices to include geo-location technology. Geo-location devices provide extremely accurate protection by using a database to determine available channels based on the precise location of the device. Motorola has been a leader in successfully developing and implementing the geo-location technology approved by the FCC. During the FCC’s eight-month laboratory and field testing, Motorola’s device was 100 percent successful in identifying television signals and preventing interference.”
Microsoft, for its part, has been working on what it calls “cognitive radio” under a research project code-named “KNOWS.” Cognitive radio will look for white spaces, find an available spectrum and automatically use it. Microsoft is additionally creating a new “spectrum-aware access protocol” that would maximize the total throughput. Microsoft describes the project like this:
“The KNOWS prototype consists of a scanner and a reconfigurable radio. The scanner periodically searches for open frequency bands (white spaces) in the TV spectrum. Neighboring KNOWS systems collaborate by exchanging local scanning results for detecting white spaces. When a open frequency band is located, the parameters of the reconfigurable radio (such as frequency, bandwidth, and power) are tuned in less than 50 microseconds and the system begins operating in that band. Access to the white space is controlled by bSMART, a distributed, spectrum-aware medium access control protocol. Each node running bSMART maintains a dynamic table to track the overall spectrum usage. It uses this table to decide the portion of spectrum it should operate in. Through theretical analysis and simulations we have shown that bSMART achieves near-optimal throughput.”
The KNOWS project is a joint collaboration between several Microsoft research areas: the Networking Research Group, the Communications and Collaboration Systems Group, the Wireless Incubation Group, the Hardware Devices Group and Windows PC Ecosystem Technologies Group.
We at Microsoft Subnet say let the battle for devices begin! It is especially interesting that this vote happened on the same day as a historic presential election. The presidential election had been characterized as “hope vs. fear” and the same can be said for the white spaces battle. Just as the U.S. choose to follow a message of “hope” in the political arena, the FCC chose hope over fear, too.
If there is one thing that the success of companies like Microsoft and Intel have taught us is that the future hinges on our ability to remain open to disruptive change. Whenever the power set becomes more interested in maintaining its status quo than in finding innovative solutions to problems, economic vibrancy dies. As Mundie points out, this vote is a hopeful sign that economic possibilities are alive and well.
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