The FCC’s work on the TV white spaces may prove...

the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project. Many questions remain about the use of the TV band for “super Wi-Fi,” since TV spectrum will be reconfigured as a result of the pending incentive auction, he said at the International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies conference late Wednesday. “The relevance and, really, importance of the TV band white spaces is the TV bands database, more than the actual spectrum, which right now there’s a cloud of uncertainty, to be honest, over how much TV white space capacity there will be after these incentive auctions,” Calabrese said. “There’s still tremendous policy importance because this can be the platform and the proving ground for governance and control mechanisms for other white space, for federal white space, for fallow bands in other areas.” Calabrese noted that the amount of spectrum that will be available for unlicensed use varies widely by market. In Wilmington, N.C., the site of a white spaces test, 25 white spaces channels and 150 MHz were available, he said. At the University of Kentucky, 28 nonadjacent and 15 contiguous channels were available, for 90 MHz of white spaces spectrum, he said. In big cities including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, there are almost no unused channels in the TV band, he said. How the TV band is reconfigured by the FCC will be critical to future use of the white spaces, he said. “There'll be a duplex gap, presumably in the middle, between the uplink and downlink channels, and possibly a guardband between the bottom and broadcasting” that could be used by white spaces devices, Calabrese said. “But the width, how much contiguous, unlicensed spectrum is available nationwide has to be technically reasonable [under the February spectrum law]. So we have to figure out what that means. That’s very important … you have very little white space in markets like, New York, Washington, and so a contiguous nationwide band will at least allow nationwide markets for equipment.” No questions remain about “technical feasibility” of using the white spaces for broadband, he said. “It’s been tested … since 2008 for rural broadband, smart grid, mobile health, the smart city deployment in Wilmington.” Calabrese noted that 80 percent of the automated meter infrastructure in the U.S. uses unlicensed spectrum, mainly in the 900 MHz band, compared to Europe, where utilities use licensed cellular spectrum. “Two-thirds currently is Wi-Fi or Bluetooth,” he said. The same is true for machine-to-machine communications, including “smarthome, mobile payments, inventory, that’s mostly unlicensed in the U.S.,” Calabrese said. The white spaces also offer a “a cautionary tale of how it can take a decade” to bring more spectrum online, he said.