Toward enabling broadband for a billion plus population with TV white spaces

One of the major impediments to providing broadband connectivity in semi-urban and rural India is the lack of robust and affordable backhaul. Fiber connectivity in terms of backhaul that is being planned (or provided) by the Government of India would reach only up to the rural offices (called Gram Panchayat) in Indian villages. In this exposition, we articulate how TV white space can address the challenge in providing broadband connectivity to a billion plus population within India. The villages can form local Wi-Fi clusters. The problem of connecting the Wi-Fi clusters to the optical fiber points can be addressed using a TV white space based backhaul (middle mile) network. The amount of TV white space present in India is very large when compared to the developed world. Therefore, we discuss a backhaul architecture for rural India that utilizes TV white spaces. We also present results from our TV white space testbed that support the effectiveness of backhaul by using TV white spaces. Our testbed provides a broadband access network to rural populations in seven villages. The testbed is deployed over an area of 25 km
²
, and extends seamless broadband connectivity from optical fiber locations or Internet gateways to remote (difficult to connect) rural regions. We also discuss standards and TV white space regulations, which are pertinent to the backhaul architecture mentioned above.