The outlook is improving that the TV white spaces will...
The outlook is improving that the TV white spaces will become the super Wi-Fi promised by the FCC, Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute said. The white space provisions in the February spectrum law turned out…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
better than expected, he told us. “It’s certainly better than we expected when the legislation was first introduced.” Calabrese conceded there’s still some uncertainty. “Both standard development and initial deployments and device and data base certifications are all proceeding apace so there’s a lot of activity developing,” he said. “There is some uncertainty because we need to see what the take up will be among broadcasters and how much white space will be lost and where. On the other hand, a very hopeful sign is in the FCC’s [notice of proposed rulemaking] because they do propose to have a minimum amount of contiguous, nationwide unlicensed spectrum in the guard bands.” The two guard bands, as proposed by the FCC in an Oct. 2 NPRM (http://xrl.us/bnvzq5) should each offer 6-10 MHz of unlicensed spectrum, Calabrese said. “There are a few markets, including Los Angeles, where there are really no white spaces channels available today so this would give us at least a few channels in every market,” he said. “Secondly, today all the channels are fragmented geographically and this would mean the same channels being available nationwide."