The NICT in Japan has been looking at how opportunistic access to unused channels in UHF bands (the TV White Spaces) could be used for public communications. Spurred on by the Fukushima disaster, the institute has identified a role for such opportunistic access in enabling ad-hoc infrastructures which could be deployed quickly in difficult circumstances. In a disaster, established networks may be seriously damaged or rendered completely inoperable, so it is dangerous to rely on them.

Until now, white space technology vendors have focused on transceivers that could be coupled into systems and connected to end-user devices. However they had not yet attempted an integrated device, probably because of the early stage of the technology’s introduction to the market. This has meant that white spaces demonstrations typically needed to use Wi-Fi to link to end user devices – at least allowing access to a vast range of devices which are already in the market, including laptops, tablet computers, smart phones, games machines etc.

NICT wanted to create realistic end-user devices that could tap directly into TV white spaces network coverage. So they have integrated a TV white spaces radio directly into a tablet computer. [The white spaces radio is a Wi-Fi module which has been down clocked from 2.4 GHz into the UHF band. The tablet can find out which white space channels are available for use in its location (determined using GPS), by requesting the data from a geolocation database, which NICT has also created.

Details of the white spaces tablets can found here and a FierceBroadbandWireless article here.