Second ‘White Spaces’ Device Presented to FCC

Many in the press (NYT, AP) are commenting this morning about on how Google on Monday encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to design their forthcoming auction of radio-frequencies to take advantage of real-time airwaves auctions. It’s one more bit of news emerging from the 700 Megahertz (MHz) auction, which the FCC must begin before January 2008. In the words of telecom analyst Blair Levin, of Stifel Nicolaus, it is shaping up to be “a pivotal auction” that could provide “new blood for broadband… or [a] telco/cable sweep.”

But there was another noteworthy filing at the FCC on Monday. The White Spaces Coalition — whose members include Dell, EarthLink, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft and Philips Electronics — met with commission officials and provided them with a prototype device for operating in vacant television broadcast channels. Philips’ devices joins one previously submitted by Microsoft. (Look at page 3 for a picture of the “Microsoft TV White Spaces Development Platform.”)

Just as the 700 MHz band offers new hope for telecom and video competition, many technology companies are looking to the vacant TV bands. The reason is simple: television channels so scattered, principally because they were designed around the 1940s-era NTSC standard, named after the National Television Standard Committee. As a look at the broadcast band for the ZIP code 20006 demonstrates, using FCC metrics, no more than four of the 21 channels between 30 and 50 are occupied: 32, 45, 47 and 50. That leaves 17 available within the “white spaces” between the frequencies where those stations broadcast. The occupied channel numbers will vary from city to city, which is why advanced sensing capabilities are needed to even begin to complete utilizing the spectrum in the television zone for something other than broadcasting.

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http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/telecomwatch.aspx?eid=2940

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