The FCC plans to vote on rules to govern use of “white spaces” in spectrum between TV stations to enable high-bandwidth wireless broadband
It’s been years coming, but the Federal Communications Commission appears ready to vote on regulations governing the use of spectrum gaps so they can be used for high-bandwidth mobile services, kind of a “super Wi-Fi.” The regulatory framework would approve the use of devices that operate in spectrum space normally reserved for television—so long as those devices don’t interfere with broadcast television or technologies like wireless microphones, they would be able to offer high-bandwidth wireless services.
Not only planning – as of Sept 24, they do! Interestingly enough the FCC has (wisely) come to the conclusion that sensing is not working (see also the VTC2009 paper below) and will now rely on database lookup only. This a) lowers the spectrum availability since margins have to be large, but b) will provide a centralized, easy to change regulation compared to say build in a sensing procedure in millions of devices.
It will be interesting to see how the database solution will be implemented and how much legal issues it will involve.
http://www.wireless.kth.se/images/stories/Documents/Research_papers/ZanderVTC2009.pdf