Government Launches project to test TV White Space technology

The Indian government is taking all the right steps to make India truly digital across its length and breadth. Many of rural hinterlands still don’t figure in the digital landscape of the country and to rectify this, the government has decided to conduct experiments on TV white space technology and has allotted 127 MHz spectrum to eight organizations that will improve connectivity in the thousands of villages.

According to Indian Minister for Telecommunications Ravi Shankar Prasad, this experiment includes self-governing body under the Telecom Ministry ERNET India (60 MHz); Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (20 MHz); Indian Institute of Technologies at Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad; 10 MHz or less to each of the International Institute for Information Technology at Bengaluru and Tata Advanced Systems; and another 10 MHz to Collector and Magistrate at Amravati.

TV white space technology utilizes the part of the spectrum that remains unutilized while transferring broadcast signals. The technology is believed to have the capacity to overcome the hassles compared with Wi-Fi signals which cannot infiltrate beyond a few walls.

If this experiment succeeds, it would bring an exceptional level of connectivity services not only to the rural and interior areas but also in multi-storied complexes and basements.

Microsoft had requested the government a couple of months back to allocate it the unused spectrum to let it provide last mile connectivity in the remote regions of the country. However, the government rejected the plea under the pressure from telecommunication firms that demanded that spectrum should not be given free to any organization.

As much as 100MHz of the available spectrum in the 470-585MHz band has been lying unutilised in India at present, including for analogue TV transmission. Since one white space base station covers twice the footprint of 800 MHz LTE eNode and 20 times footprint of a single 2.6GHz eNode, the capital expenditure on infrastructure will be reduced drastically.

Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA) executive director Prof H Nwana said, "India has a rural population of 833 million (69 percent) inhabiting over 641,000 villages. The rural teledensity is only 48.66 compared with the urban teledensity of 149.7 and there is a huge gap of 101.04. The usage of TV white space technology will help in bridging this gap."