'White Space' Tech Could Soon Bring Better Broadband to Rural America

On Feb 28 the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a new order paving the way for the expanded use of “white space broadband,” a promising technology that uses the spectrum freed from the shift to digital television to beam broadband into traditionally harder to reach rural areas. In 2017, Microsoft announced an ambitious plan to bring the technology to more than 2 million rural Americans across a dozen states by July 2022.

Consumer protection lawyer and wireless policy expert Harold Feld was quick to note while the new order is a good thing, delays by the FCC—and what he called a “deliberately sloppy” effort to repack remaining TV stations after white space spectrum was auctioned off—eroded much of the technology’s original potential. “The FCC basically threw everybody back together in a manner that in the more crowded urban markets meant that there isn’t a heck of a lot of space for TV white spaces to operate,” Feld said. He added that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai previously shot down more thoughtful repacking proposals. “If they’d done it the way we’d wanted to do it six or seven years ago, then it could have been a significant add on to urban broadband,” Feld said. “But you needed to have enough contiguous space in the urban areas to make that happen, which required the FCC to handle the repacking with care and precision—which they did not.” Once the technology no longer posed a threat to their urban dominance, incumbent broadband providers backed off their opposition to it. He added that the National Association of Broadcasters and Microsoft also sat down and crafted a spectrum sharing compromise to mitigate potential interference.

While white space broadband isn’t a silver bullet, it’s going to be a useful tool in the toolchest in addressing America’s stubborn broadband availability problems. And a lot of the advancements made during its meandering, decade-plus path to market should prove helpful in the development of other new technologies aimed at bridging the digital divide.