White Spaces

"It was a tremendous waste of the very best airwaves," said Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation's Wireless Future Program. LINK

Yesterday will go down in history as a bellwether moment. Few among us will soon forget the excitement of Obama's election. But there was an equally historic vote yesterday that for geeks, policy analysts, and technologists represents an entirely new trajectory in telecommunications. In essence, the FCC has begun the transition from command-and-control, single-user spectrum licensure to a more distributed system that holds the potential to eliminate the artificial scarcity that prevented widespread access to the public airwaves since 1927.

Yesterday, the FCC ruled that unlicensed white… more

The white space battle has made progress in part because of the advocacy of groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, and the Media Access Project. LINK

Over the past week, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has bombarded Congress with a flurry of doomsday pronouncements, claiming broadcast television is under attack by the FCC and advocates seeking to open unused TV channels (TV white spaces) for wireless broadband and mobile Wi-Fi devices.    If all of this sounds a bit familiar, that's because broadcasters always scream "interference!" when faced… more

The coalition "is very definitely still interested in avoiding any unjustified cannibalization of TV white space by broadcast licensees unless they can demonstrate they need to do this to continue coverage to households within their" market who could lose access to DTV signals after the analog cutoff, New America Foundation Vice President Michael Calabrese told us. "We reiterated those concerns to commissioners" Friday. LINK (subscription required)

In an October 2007 letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), executives from the four largest TV networks told the Commission that proposals to allow low-power Wi-Fi type devices to operate on vacant TV channels, “could cause permanent damage to over-the-air digital television reception." Such a dire warning would ring alarm bells for policymakers, if not for the fact that similar nightmare scenarios have been predicted before.

Proponents of making fallow TV frequencies available for Wi-Fi include Google Inc., Motorola Inc., Microsoft Corp., Phillips Electronics and other high-tech companies large and small. The New America Foundation, a think tank, also has been an influential voice in pushing for unlicensed wireless operations in TV white spaces. LINK

The technology is ready for smart radios to prevent interference by portable devices for wireless broadband, and in a few years a second phase of the DTV transition should get TV off the air, speakers said Tuesday at a conference held by the New America Foundation and Google at the company's headquarters. "Take TV off the air" in a few years, said Michael Calabrese, director of the foundation's Wireless Future Program, since 2002 an advocate of opening the TV… more

Among the panel speakers was New America Foundation scholar Michael Calabrese, who addressed an otherwise neglected argument offered against white spaces by broadcasters: The claim that auctioning white spaces for licensed use could provide a financial windfall to a cash-strapped government. Drawing on a freshly-released NAF working paper, Calabrese argued that industry estimates of some $10 billion in revenues from a white space auction were based on a flawed comparison between the "Swiss cheese" of white space bands and bands in the 700 MHz range, which are suitable… more

Take the question of spectral availability. While this might seem one of the easiest to settle-is more than half of US TV spectrum lying fallow or is it not?—the answer isn't obvious. The New America Foundation, a think tank that supports white space devices, claims that 25 to 80 percent of TV bandwidth is unused, depending on where you look. When the group hosted Google co-founder Larry Page at a DC event a few months back, Page also spoke of… more