Now don't worry about your favorite UHF station. It won't disappear; it will just move to a different frequency. Your digital TV or converter box will find it the first time you turn it on. And the new system definitely has advantages: Besides allowing high-definition TV signals, it allows each broadcaster to provide additional channels.
With the spectrum auction out of the way, a group of heavyweights known as the Wireless Innovation Alliance is pushing the FCC to allow unlicensed use of white spaces in the TV band after the Feb. 17, 2009, switchover. The group includes Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and a variety of computer industry and public interest groups.
They see a future with new Internet service providers who transmit directly from towers into homes and businesses at high speed - over distances much greater than current WI-Fi technology allows. They argue that it will provide more competition and cheaper service, particularly in rural areas under served by cable, DSL and fiber.
This month they trotted out no less a personage than Microsoft founder Bill Gates to make that argument to a Washington trade group.
Although the alliance has serious congressional support, so does the opposition: the National Association of Broadcasters, which is worried about possible interference with its broadcasts.
The broadcast industry may have some reason for concern. Nobody in the industry wants to talk about this yet, but I suspect that that a lot of people with over-the-air TVs won't be able to get some of their current channels after the switchover. It's more likely to be a problem with sets that have rabbit-ear antennas than powered rooftop models, but it's going to be ugly. Any interference at all from white space transmissions could make the problem worse. But this is pure speculation.
A lesser problem: The ubiquitous wireless microphones used by everyone from clergymen to rock stars are licensed to use the same part of the spectrum. So interference could be an issue in those quarters, too.
So the first thing white space backers will have to prove is that it's possible to avoid the kind of interference that worries the broadcasting association. Twice Microsoft has delivered devices to the FCC that can transmit in the white spaces but are designed to sense TV or wireless microphone broadcasts and work around them.
Twice those devices have failed - although from defects that had nothing to do with proving or disproving the concept.
