The Television White Spaces Opportunity
Backgrounder
Today, a significant percentage of the world’s population communicates with one another over
wireless connections, primarily using mobile phones, but also using laptops, tablets, game consoles
and other connected devices. And increasingly, wirelessly connected devices, used for remote
monitoring and many other applications, will communicate with each other, known as the “Internet
of Things”. Radio spectrum, which hosts the invisible electromagnetic waves that carry voice, video
and data transmissions through the air, is used to connect all of these devices.
A Brief History
Governments create rules designating how radio frequencies can be used and, over the years, have
assigned radio and television stations to certain blocks or “channels” of frequency in the spectrum.
Limitations in transmission technology and the high costs to cover rural populations have led to
gaps in the TV broadcasting bands. For decades, the hiss of “white noise” was familiar to anyone
tuning a television from one channel to another — traversing the empty “white spaces” between TV
broadcast frequencies.
This situation remains today. While some white spaces in the TV band are dedicated for uses such
as radio-frequency telescopes, other spaces lie vacant.
On the other hand, the radio spectrum used by mobile phones and other wireless communications
devices is becoming overpopulated. Growth in demand for applications, such as TV streaming,
internet access, voice calling, music services and video downloads, are overloading the spectrum
used by wireless communications devices.

Total mobile data traffic generated by smartphones, feature phones and tablets is expected to
exceed 14,000 petabytes by 2015.1

Wireless devices for the first time will use more bandwidth than wired devices in 2015, and WiFi will take up 46.2 per cent of all Internet Protocol (IP) traffic in 2015, up from 36 per cent of
all IP traffic in 2010.2

In 2015, there are expected to be 15 billion devices wirelessly connecting to the internet.3 This
new generation of embedded, connected systems in cars, appliances, energy meters, retail signs,
infrastructure and other locations, known as the emerging “Internet of Things”, will
exponentially increase demand for wireless spectrum capacity.
1
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/relief-ahead-mobile-data-networks-as-63-traffic-move-onto-fixednetworks-via-wifi-femtocells-1503808.htm
2
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html
3
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/new-thinking/market-growth/internet-of-things.html
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To continue to serve this steadily rising need for mobile connectivity, new ways to harness
available spectrum must be found.
The Benefits of TV White Spaces
TV white spaces networks — wireless networks built to use TV frequencies — work in much the
same way as conventional Wi-Fi, but because the signals travel over longer distances and better
penetrate walls and other obstacles than those in the current Wi-Fi frequencies, they require fewer
access points to serve multiple square kilometres with a strong, reliable signal. The use of TV white
spaces has the potential to help close the broadband performance gap between cities and the
countryside.
It helps in more densely populated areas too. TV white spaces spectrum is less impacted by
obstructions such as masonry and concrete walls. This greatly improves the flexibility, range and
effectiveness of wireless networks, allowing TV white spaces networks to serve users across a
wider area. As with any radio system, interference avoidance will need to be addressed.
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The TV white spaces networks are designed to protect incumbent licensees from interference while
adaptively and efficiently utilising available spectrum. These networks can be accessed using smart,
radio-enabled devices that report their location to an internet database. The database will tell the
device which TV white spaces channels, and at what power level, it is permitted to operate on in its
current location.
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As spectrum becomes available, white spaces devices will dynamically shift frequencies without
disrupting applications or creating interference to broadcasters and other incumbent licensees. The
database has a list of all protected TV stations and frequencies across the country, so the devices
can avoid causing interference to TV broadcasts and wireless microphone signals. This win-win
translates to greater network capacity and allows a greater number of users in a given area, while
at the same time protecting television reception from interference. All of this engineering will be
invisible to the consumer, who will simply experience more ubiquitous broadband connectivity.
TV white spaces also represent a significant opportunity for internet providers to address their
consumers’ growing bandwidth needs while providing additional wireless coverage around the
home and office. By taking advantage of white spaces technologies, internet providers will be able
to provide more throughput in more places to more consumers. This will be of particular benefit to
mobile data providers looking to offload capacity from 3G or 4G networks.
The Need: Public Policy to Facilitate Innovation
Assuming favourable regulations are put in place, consumers will notice the introduction of a range
of devices, applications and services that make use of TV white spaces to deliver faster and more
reliable internet connections in many more places than they currently experience. In the U.S., for
example, the first TV white spaces databases and devices have begun entering the market. The first
commercial white spaces network launched in Wilmington, NC, in January 2012.
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