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ARTICLE · 16 NOVEMBER 2011

Ofcom To Open Up "White Spaces" In Spectrum

Eversheds Sutherland
Explore more from Eversheds Sutherland

Ofcom has announced that it will make "white space" available for use by operators of location-aware wireless devices.

United KingdomMedia, Telecoms, IT, Entertainment
James Walsh
James Walsh
Charlotte Walker-Osborn
Charlotte Walker-Osborn

What? Ofcom has announced that it will make "white space" available for use by operators of location-aware wireless devices.

So what?

The technology

White spaces (also known as "interleaved spectrum") are the currently unused parts of spectrum within the bands that have been reserved for TV broadcasts. High-power TV broadcasts using the same frequency as other such broadcasts need to leave gaps between each other to avoid interference.

Allowing less powerful devices to use this TV white space spectrum, which includes frequencies between 470 and 790MHz is expected to create an amount of usable spectrum comparable to the amount of spectrum currently available for 3G services.

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