TV White Spaces have been magical in promise and tragic in reality. It isn’t that the technology has been a failure, but the fact that policy has been tied up by delusions of budget-balancing spectrum auctions. As the delusion gets worse the complications have increased, making the spectrum that gave us broadcast television for over 50 years the least-liked spectrum in the market. Even with the spectrum being stuck in mid-air, though, the TV White Space concept has been a fertile ground for precedence-setting strategies.
The concept of sharing the spectrum with cognitive radios and databases of usage has now moved to the 3.5 GHz proceedings at the FCC. Combined with the concepts from the 2012 Report by the President’s Committee on Science and Technology [PCAST], the 3.5 proceedings are implementing a more open market for Wireless spectrum usage.
The system features two important concepts.
The first concept is that the spectrum is shareable, which means that all users have full access to the same technology, and thus the chip manufacturers job is made easy and the components they produce economically viable. The spectrum is prioritized in three tiers. The first and primary tier is the federal use of the spectrum; the second gets priority access because it pays for the use of the system; and the third tier gets the benefit of the spectrum when it is not being used by tiers one and two. In effect it’s like the best effort of the Internet brought to frequencies.
The second concept results in spectrum that is not being used, but that is still available for the equivalent of unlicensed applications.
When the order is passed in the FCC, I believe the small cell community — never my favorite market — will boom. Suddenly the small cell/femto enterprise deployments are able to become a PBX-like solution in which IT can run internal solutions as well as support carrier deployments. This, combined with recent redesign of repeater rules, results in a market developed for campuses, complexes and municipalities that has not existed to date.
I would say you heard it here first, but perhaps we should first await the order.
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