AIR.U Promotes Use of TV White Spaces at Broadband-Deprived Colleges
A consortium of high-tech companies, higher education associations and public interest groups announced a partnership Tuesday to spur the deployment of high-speed Internet using the TV white spaces at colleges and universities across the U.S. through what they're calling AIR.U (for Advanced Internet Regions). The white spaces market has been slow to get rolling, especially since the FCC has taken years to approve all of the rules for use of the spectrum.
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Plans are to launch AIR.U next year at institutions located in small towns and rural areas that have little or no broadband access, using, at least in part, donated equipment. Robert Nichols, CEO of Declaration Networks Group, said the goal is to get about six pilots up and running in the first quarter of 2013. “Beyond that, we're looking to move as fast as we can, depending on equipment availability,” he said. “Now that the regulatory environment is solidified, we can move quickly to identify where the demand is."
Officials promoting AIR.U acknowledged on a call with reporters many questions remain about the TV white spaces, especially about the availability of equipment and about where the white spaces will be on the band, following an incentive auction of broadcast spectrum and the TV band reconfiguration which is scheduled to follow.
"The equipment is both good news and a limiting factor to some degree,” said Michael Calabrese with the New American Foundation. “There are already, I believe, five equipment makers that are producing base stations and … customer premises equipment for white space networking. The ones that we've been speaking to the most seriously about this, what’s great is they can tune these to use whatever white spaces are available.”
"As Wayne Gretzky so wonderfully said, ‘Always skate toward where the puck is going, not where it is,'” said Blair Levin, executive director of Gig.U and architect of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. “This is a project that is designed to skate toward where the puck is going in terms of that equipment and those chips. … To get there at the right time, now is the right place to start.”
Levin said the idea for AIR.U came about when various smaller schools asked about joining GIG.U, launched last year by research universities aimed at building ultra-high speed broadband networks. The smaller schools said they were looking for broadband connections, not super-fast ones. “They said, ‘We have a bigger problem then the problem you're trying to solve,'” Levin said. “I said that’s a really interesting problem. It’s a big problem, but it’s not the one I'm working on.”
Founding partners include Microsoft and Google, the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation and the Appalachian Regional Commission. The United Negro College Fund, the New England Board of Higher Education, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education and Gig.U also signed on.