TV white spaces enabling a 'digital India'

Speakers at the recent WhiteSpace Alliance Global Summit on Digital India explored the increasing role that TV white-space solutions will play in expanding access to broadband services throughout the country.

The WhiteSpace Alliance (WSA) is a global industry organisation that enables sharing of underutilised broadcast spectrum (‘white space’) to allow for economical internet access to underserved populations around the world.

The summit, held in New Delhi from 27–29 October, featured presentations and panel discussions by vendors, service providers, academia, telecommunications regulators and government on broadband access as a key component of global development.

Agencies discussed the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for ending poverty and how white space use for internet connectivity is ideal for countries such as India.

The country’s nationwide initiative to make digital services available to all its citizens within the next five years hinges on its plan to provide broadband access to 2.5 million villages, as well as next-generation services such as e-health and e-education.

This is a major challenge — especially considering the fact that 70% of the Indian population is distributed across 500,000 small villages, with 80% containing less than 1000 persons. The combination of large geography, low population density and low incomes also makes traditional methods of internet access too expensive to deploy.

Corporate giants like Microsoft, however, noted that white-space solutions deliver three times the coverage of microwave installations at greatly reduced cost, while white-space devices are easy to install, require relatively little power and are reliable in difficult environmental conditions.

Summit attendees heard from representatives of the India Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, who presented compelling distance, bandwidth and latency data from pilot implementations spanning several villages in the district of Palghar.

White space was used to provide backhaul communication to 10 Wi-Fi hotspots supporting multiple tablet users, kiosks and an automated teller machine.

The field trials demonstrated bandwidth of 11 Mbps over a non-line-of-sight distance of 7.2 m with latency of 1 ms.

IIT Bombay calculated that India currently has 100 MHz of unused UHF broadcast spectrum, which could be employed to provide white-space broadband services.

Saankhya Labs also showcased the industry’s first IEEE 802.22 Standard chipset for wireless regional area networks using TV band spectrum, while the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance provided results of several white-space pilot deployments.

“Our global summit clearly demonstrated both the potential and the reality of using TV band spectrum to dramatically expand access to broadband services across India,” said Dr Apurva N Mody, chairman of WSA.

“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Ministry of Communications and applying solutions from our members and partners to make ‘digital India’ a reality.”

For more information on WSA, go to www.whitespacealliance.org.