Port City could soon dominate airwaves
January 22, 2010By Alison Lee Satake
Wilmington led the nation’s shift to digital television broadcast. Now, the Port City wants to blaze the trail into white space.
What is white space?
White space is a powerful, short wave length signal that can collect and transmit information through brick walls, groves of trees and buildings clearly.
“It’s like wi-fi on steroids,” Mayor Bill Saffo said.
It also has a farther reach than current wireless technology. “The [traditional] wireless radio are on the terms of hundreds of yards, whereas this could go a mile,” said Laurence Bergman, IT director for the city of Wilmington.
“White space technology is using existing radio wave lengths that was used for analog TV,” Bergman said. Since the digital television conversion, transmitting data through the analog white space is now possible. Now, new applications are in development to utilize the white space spectrum.
This past fall a company called TV Band Service LLC with offices in New York and North Carolina approached the city of Wilmington to be a test-site for using white space to enhance city services.
“(We) chose Wilmington because of (its) successful contribution to the DTV transition and the fact that they were the only DTV market in the U.S. for 8 months until the national transition in June 2009,” wrote Bill Seiz, spokesman for TV Band Service LLC in a memo to the Business Journal.
Seiz’ group met with the mayor, city staff and New Hanover County staff to brainstorm ideas of types of services – from traffic monitoring to energy savings – that TV Band Service could help improve through its access of white space with its FCC Experimental License.
“We’ve got all of this spectrum that’s freed up now. So what are we doing with it? I want to use it somehow to help municipal or county government to improve upon the way we deliver services,” Saffo said.
When it receives access to white space, New Hanover County has chosen to extend wireless service to Hugh MacRae Park as a pilot project. They also plan to install surveillance cameras in the park that would transmit surveillance video footage to monitor the children’s play area and picnic area through white space. “With the old way we would have had to run cable or use some of the more traditional wireless technology that doesn’t have the range that the white space does,” said Leslie Stanfield, IT director for New Hanover County.
Wilmington plans to test the transmission of data using white space by installing one or two surveillance cameras on traffic signals in areas that are currently not covered. Surveillance camera footage on traffic signals currently is transmitted to a central hub where it is monitored at the traffic office on River Road. Transmitting the traffic video footage using white space would test the technology while utilizing the city’s existing infrastructure.
“We are still bench testing the radios, but hope to have a notable demonstration by March/April,” wrote Seiz.
The county wants to test to see if the bandwidth is sufficient and is interested in comparing the cost to traditional wireless, Stanfield said. Providing public wireless outdoors has been cost prohibitive until now, she said.
So far, only one town in the country has utilized the white space spectrum. Rural Claudville, Virginia tapped into the white space network to provide wireless Internet access to its population of about 916 people. Spectrum Bridge provided the access and technology. TV Band Service plans to use the radio prototypes developed by Spectrum Bridge in Wilmington. Once the technology falls into place, Wilmington would be the next city in the country to harness this new white space technology.
