White Spaces Coalition

The White Spaces Coalition is a group of companies working together to win FCC approval for use in the United States of devices that use the frequencies in between DTV broadcasts, the so-called "white spaces" where no channel is being broadcast, for wireless communication. To date, one device tested by the U.S. regulatory agency has failed, causing interference with existing (licensed) frequencies in the process. A second device has been submitted to the FCC, and is currently being tested. Although it's also had problems operating correctly, unlike the first test unit it hasn't interfered with existing broadcasts when it's broken down, and therefore is still being considered by regulators.

Proponents of white space networking claim that it could be used to allow broadband internet connections of up to 80Gbps (80 billion bits per second), or 10GBps (10 billion bytes per second).

Companies in the White Spaces Coalition:

• Dell
• Earthlink
• Google
• Hewlett-Packard
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Philips
• Samsung Electro-Mechanics

Opposition

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