The use of so-called White Spaces within the broadcast spectrum could bring broadband services to 2 million premises currently left unserved.
Richard Walker, Head of Wireless at TTP, one of the companies involved in the Cambridge TV White Spaces Consortium trials said this was ultimately worth £10 billion to the UK economy.
The 10 month trial also involved the BBC, Arqiva, DTG and Microsoft. 10 months of testing took place in urban and rural Cambridge.
“Entire rural communities could be rapidly connected using low-cost hardware operating in unlicensed TV white space,” Walker told the consortium conference on Wednesday.
As part of the Consortium trials, TTP in collaboration with Neul, delivered a broadband service of 8Mbps over a single 8MHz TV channel, via a white space link between its headquarters in Melbourn, south of Cambridge, to the remote village of Orwell 5.5 km away. TTP believes it is possible to achieve speeds of 20Mbps or more using future generations of hardware over a single channel link, compared to wired ADSL broadband that struggles to achieve 2Mbps across less than half the range.
“The cost of deployment is significantly lower and faster than fibre over long distances in remote areas,” said TTP’s Walker. “Consumers will simply have to purchase a second TV aerial along with a white space router similar in size and price to existing home routers, while we would expect service charges to be similar to current ADSL costs. The main barrier to entry today is regulation, however with the UK Government committed to delivering broadband to all and Ofcom driving the legislation, we may see deployment of white space systems and applications as early as 2013,” explains Walker.
TTP has been ensuring that the white space devices do not interfere with primary users such as TV receivers. This is managed by real time intelligence in the devices, which know their locations and access information from central databases that tell them which frequencies and powers they can use to avoid licensed users.