TMCnet Feature

White spaces advocates came together at ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2012/the Super WiFi Summit today in Miami to talk about the innovation and wealth that the availability of unlicensed spectrum has allowed to be created to date. And they said that unleashing TV white spaces for unlicensed use could lead to the creation of innovation and wealth on an even grander scale.

To allow that to happen, Congress should affirm the FCC’s (News - Alert) decision to make white spaces available, and ensure that the unlicensed model receives no less than one-sixth of any future high-quality spectrum between 500mHz and 1gHz that is cleared by relocating TV broadcasters.

That’s a prescription provided by Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, who presented the paper “How Congress Can Avoid Making Another 100-year Mistake in Spectrum Allocation” at today’s event, which was hosted by the Wireless Innovation (News - Alert) Alliance and the White Space Alliance.

The spectrum known as white spaces exists in little slivers between existing TV spectrum. But there’s long been a movement both by the FCC and various interests in the tech world to make that unused spectrum available for unlicensed uses. However, a few months ago talks began about repacking the TV spectrum to make more new spectrum available for incentive auctions, which would allow the federal government to move TV broadcasters to other spectrum, auction that spectrum for licensed use in an effort to give the broadcasters remuneration for the move and – more importantly – to fund federal government initiatives and lower the national debt, among other things. The problem with that is this spectrum repacking, if done the wrong way, could eliminate or significantly lessen the white spaces spectrum available for unlicensed use.

So, in an effort to gather support for the survival of white spaces for unlicensed use, the white spaces contingent – which includes both give names like Google (News - Alert) and much smaller outfits – continues to push the message of the benefits of unlicensed spectrum in general and white spaces spectrum in particular.

Right now, there are bills in both the U.S. House (JOBS Act) and Senate (S-911) that talk about these incentive auctions that could impact white spaces. (Given a choice between the two, the white spaces contingent seems to prefer S-911 over the House bill.) The incentive auction discussion is also in play related to the payroll tax extension work. But if the latter effort doesn’t happen in the next few weeks it’s unlikely legislation involving language on incentive auctions will pass this year, according to Google’s Rick Whitt.

In today’s presentation and in his paper, Cooper values the activity in the unlicensed space today at more than $50 billion.

“By the end of 2010 there were thousands more devices certified for use in the unlicensed spectrum than in the licensed spectrum,” Cooper writes. “The number of users of unlicensed spectrum in the United States exceeded the number of users of exclusive licensed spectrum for broadband data purposes by 30 percent.”

He went on to note that more than a third of cellular traffic today is being offloaded to unlicensed spectrum, allowing cellular wireless data providers to avoid adding more than 100,000 cell sites, which has resulted in cellular carrier savings on the order of $25 billion.

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