White Space Debate Intensifies As Vote Approaches

Ars Technica reports that the debate between broadcasters and white space supporters has intensified after each side recently made inflammatory comments and suggested that science would vindicate their position. Several organizations are pushing to delay the upcoming white space vote, in part because it takes place on the same day as the US presidential election. We recently discussed Google's claim that a test of this system was rigged to fail. From Ars: "The broadcasters contend that adjacent channel interference would be significant even at the 40 mW level proposed by Kevin Martin. In fact, they claim that such a device would interfere with digital television signals when the viewer is 25 miles from the television tower and the whitespace device is 10m or less from the TV set. At 50 miles from the television tower, a whitespace device within 50m from a set could allegedly cause interference. The broadcasters also want several safeguard requirements put on the technology that go beyond the new, lower-power transmission levels."

Comments

Re:Umm...

[Meshach]

This page may help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Spaces_Coalition

Re:Umm...

[jelton]

The flaw with that reasoning is that there are NO unused television frequencies. The entire east and west coast is densely-packed and every channel from 2 to 51 is assigned a station. In my area (near Philly) there's only 4 non-adjacent open channels (2,3,4, and 25). That's it. And only one of them is useful for small devices (25).

The only region of the United States that is truly "open" is west of the Mississippi River & east of the California border. There are lots of empty non-assigned channels (mostly 21-51), but very few people live in this area.

In the U.S., the FCC allocates spectrum for, among other things, broadcast television. When the FCC allocates spectrum for television, they do not license adjacent channels in the same geographic market. They also do not license out the same channel to broadcasters in adjacent geographic markets.

Historically, spectrum was licensed this way due to concerns that, within the same geographic market, broadcasts on adjacent channels would bleed into each other and cause interference or that, in rural areas located near the boundary between geographic markets, broadcasts on the same channel would interfere with each other.

So, in a saturated broadcast market, half of all channels lie fallow as buffer zones between broadcasters. The White Spaces Coalition advocates freeing up these buffer channels which currently lie fallow for internet access.