White Spaces networks reaching across Singapore

Singapore has millions of mobile devices connecting to the Internet every day. As data traffic increases, the Government and regulators have been looking at how they can increase access network performance. Since a substantial fraction of traffic is borne by Wi-Fi, the Singapore Government has been interested in making spectrum available for enhancing Wi-Fi performance. As well as the 5 GHz band, in the future, Wi-Fi will be able to make use of unused TV frequencies to increase both capacity and coverage.

The city has also been the site for a TV white space pilot, being supported by group called Singapore White Spaces Pilot Group (SWSPG). Key members of this group include I2R (a government research institute), Microsoft, Neul and StarHub (an ISP and access network provider). Initially, the pilot network applications included:

  • supply of Wi-Fi in a country club and to boats in the city’s harbour
  • smart metering – automatically recovering energy meter readings over the white spaces network

The pilot is now being extended to include residential building applications and to provide Wi-Fi coverage in a new large-scale ecological park Gardens by the Bay and in local island resort Sentosa.

Formed in April 2012 the SWSPG now includes the following member companies: A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, Adaptrum, Microsoft Singapore, StarHub. Neul, Power Automation, the Singapore Island Country Club, Spectrum Bridge, ZDW, Grid Communications, Terrabit Networks, NICT, Eurokars Group, Sentosa, the Housing and Development Board, NexWave, iconectiv and ST (Info-Comm Systems).

An Innovations-report.com article providing further information can be found here.

White spaces come to the library

A group of public libraries in the US, called the Gigabit Library Network, have decided to try TV white space technology as way of distributing broadband access economically, in under-connected communities where they are located. This seems to be a variant of the Community Hub concept, where a high performance link is provided to a public building in a remote/rural area and then community networks distribute the access around the area. As a low cost wide area networking technology, TV white spaces seems to fit the requirements well. What is interesting about this particular project is that it embraced libraries in urban as well as rural areas.

One of the communities chosen was Skokie, Ill. – a Chicago suburb which is far from being rural. Skokie apparently has an active entrepreneurial community and one of the first Digital Media Labs in its public library. It is also home to a large immigrant population, and has a high socioeconomic diversity.

More details can be found in this Telcompetitor.com article.

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