Mission

The OpenTVWS project will investigate the potential for use of open technologies in the provision of access to television white space spectrum.

What is White Space?

According to Wikipedia: “National and international bodies assign different frequencies for specific uses, and in most cases license the rights to broadcast over these frequencies. This frequency allocation process creates a bandplan, which for technical reasons assigns white space between used radio bands or channels to avoid interference.”…

Why is it important?

Some governments are working towards providing licence exempt access to TV white space frequencies, for use by special equipment that can make use of this without causing interference. This spectrum could be used to provide, amongst other things:

• rural broadband services;
• machine-to-machine communications;
• long-range wireless computer networking.

Opportunities

Include enabling access through the use of:

• open source software infrastructure;
• open source hardware radio equipment;
• open data resources for coordinating spectrum access.

For further information click here.

Status

It’s early days.

This website is a wiki which will be used for collecting information and there is a Google Group for general discussion.