Europe Looked To for Loose White-Spaces Rules to Build Hardware Economies of Scale
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Hopes for building a market for white-spaces devices rest in significant part on EU regulators’ following the expected lead of their U.K. counterparts with very flexible rules for use of vacant TV channels for broadband service, said a technology executive involved in wireless regulatory and standards work for about two decades. “I think the U.K. will come out with some very nice rules” soon, “and that will allow some very nice products,” said the executive, Jim Lansford, standards architect at CSR Technology of Cambridge, England. The company develops and sells platforms for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other technologies.
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By contrast, in the U.S. white-spaces rules, “the FCC whacked us with the spectral mask” to prevent interference with broadcasting, Lansford said late Thursday at a Telecom Council of Silicon Valley forum, where a Google representative emphasized white-spaces opportunities while a Qualcomm executive stressed obstacles to getting demand up and hardware prices down to mass-market levels. The rules prevented white-spaces development from building on current wireless standards as much as had been hoped, Lansford said. He was a co-chair of the IEEE’s high-speed ultra-wideband (UWB) group and chair of the Wireless Coexistence Technical Advisory Group, a contributor to 802.15.2 and 802.11g standards work, a developer of adaptive frequency hopping for Bluetooth and the leader of Alereon’s UWB cognitive-radio development.
Boosters of white-spaces use “will try to get the spectral mask relaxed,” Lansford said. Alan Norman, access-team principal in Google Business Operations & Strategy, said of the FCC, “I think they're open to making the rules more flexible.” The commission is “being superconservative in getting this up and running” because it’s terrified of any headlines about disruption of TV reception, he said.
On the upside, “the database approach” for lookups that the FCC adopted to avoid interference “is going to be very workable” in other spectrum bands, Lansford said. It enables, along with “dynamic spectrum access,” dynamic regulation in place of the traditional “glacier-like pace” of policymaking that has produced “a lot of underused spectrum,” he said. “It’s not fixed regulation any more. It’s using regulatory knobs that they can turn to change the rules.”
The FCC can reduce the exclusion zone for white-spaces use based on experience with the database for lookups to prevent interference, Lansford said. The commission approved all nine companies that applied as administrators of databases, and Microsoft has jumped in to try to join them, Norman noted. But it’s not clear how many will follow through, he said.
Qualcomm isn’t convinced that white-spaces devices will go mainstream before the second half of the decade, said Geoff Shippee, the company’s vice president of engineering for wireless connectivity. “The standards, unfortunately, are moving very slowly on this.” The “tipping point” for “broad-based products” is probably “three to five years out,” he said.
Qualcomm is still looking for a need that would produce widescale use of the white spaces -- “the killer app” -- and a “company that will step out boldly and capitalize on it,” Shippee said. “Until that happens, what I'm a little fearful of is, we're going to have a bunch of niche products” for the frequencies, keeping prices up by precluding economies of scale. Meanwhile, the main benefit of the technology -- that “it connects devices that can’t otherwise be connected” because of physical barriers and transmission-range limitations -- will be realized in extending rural broadband and penetrating walls within buildings, Shippee said.
"There are some very difficult technical problems” meeting the FCC’s requirements so as to offer cellular offload in urban areas, Shippee stressed. “A lot of innovation” would be needed, including in antenna design and in devices’ knowing where they are before transmitting, he said.
"We're very excited by this technology,” Shippee clarified. “The question we're trying to answer is, ‘Will the companies create the value that we think it needs?’ … There’s a lot of opportunity for a lot of companies."
The use of devices in offices and homes is “very amenable” to white-spaces connectivity, Google’s Norman agreed. Access over the white spaces works for “portable” devices, in stationary and slow-moving use, rather than for “mobile” ones at regular vehicle speeds, he said.
"We're going to find a way to support this business and make it happen,” Norman said. He said he expects the white spaces next year to find uses that support higher costs: Rural broadband and connectivity throughout homes with hard-to-reach spots. Broader uses will come in 2013, Norman predicted: Cellular offloading, smart grid, and home networking. But that forecast reflects “the most optimistic view,” he conceded. “This could all drag out.” And “the math may not work” in urban areas, where the channels aren’t as available as elsewhere, Norman conceded.