Hardware-in-loop simulation of a White-Fi system utilizing the TV white spaces in india enabling cost-effective rural broadband to ensure total internet adoption

“The world-wide web still isn't all that worldwide”. This line by the Washington Post is a staggering facthard to believe, but unfortunately very true. An exhaustive study by McKinsey and Company [1] regarding the challenges of worldwide Internet connectivity reveals a surprising reality: Almost 4 billion people still aren't connected to the Internet and this fact amounts to a huge disparity between the technologically privileged and their underprivileged counterparts. Around 1 billion people in India are not connected to the Internet and this makes up for almost a quarter of the world's offline population. The majority of people still unconnected to the Internet reside in the country's largely neglected rural communities and this puts them at a considerable disadvantage. They are denied quality healthcare, education and government services which would undoubtedly make their lives much easier. Sheer neglect for our villages, technical difficulties faced while deploying connectivity services to seemingly geographically hard-to-reach localities and monetary obstacles are the primary reasons for the lack of broadband penetration in the country. There is a tremendous technological gap between the country's urban and rural areas. While, people in the metropolitan areas enjoy seamless connectivity, people in the villages and suburbs lack basic infrastructure to facilitate fundamental connectivity. In this era of Networked Society, the unconnected people suffer a great deal in terms of a plethora of privileges their connected counterparts enjoy. In order to bridge the connectivity divide in India we have proposed an innovative long-range broadband service that aims to reach the otherwise unreachable rural areas of the country. The proposed solution involves the controlled use of the white spaces in the terrestrial TV spectrum to provide Wi-Fi enabled connectivity, which would ensure cheap, efficient and relevant Internet services to the country's rural offline population. “White Spaces” are segments/regions of the spectrum licensed by competent authorities, which primary users (licensees) do not use all of the time or in all geographic locations. Several communications entities and network operators are planning to allow unlicensed use of these unused bands provided their primary use is not adversely affected. This enables the use of these white spaces for applications which promote the nation's development.