A Critique of FCC’S TV White Space Regulations

Broadband access constitutes the “oxygen” for the Internet Era, to which end, the issue of spectrum management is foundational. In this position paper, we present an overview of FCC’s pioneering work framing TV white space rules that allows unlicensed access by secondary users while protecting licensed primary users. The core contribution of this paper is an in-depth analysis of FCC’s TV white space regulations (often treated as a global template). We argue that FCC’s current white space regulations does not achieve the desired balance between effectively promoting unlicensed secondary access and providing adequate protection of the primary. As more countries around the world look at framing white space regulations, we argue for incorporating a more flexible design that can catalyze a white space device ecosystem to flourish, similar to Wi-Fi.