
Malawi and South Africa Pioneer Unused TV Frequencies for Rural Broadband - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/malawi-and-south-africa-pioneer-unused-tv-frequencies-for-rural-broadband
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Animats
They're having trouble finding available spectrum in rural Africa? Who's using
it?

The problem may simply be that the country doesn't have organized frequency
coordination for point to point links. If you want to set up a point to point
link in the US, you make a request of the FCC and they check against a
database which has all the other point to point links and knows about terrain
obstacles.[1] This will be easy if you're in Outer Nowhere and difficult if
you want to link a Manhattan skyscraper to New Jersey. But apparently some
countries are still allocating frequencies countrywide, which means a lot of
bandwidth is wasted far from the transmitter.

If you've got line of sight, microwave is the way to go. There's lots of gear
available. Down in the VHF and UHF bands, you can get slightly beyond line of
sight, but get less bandwidth. A TV channel is only 6MHz wide.

[1]
[http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/index.htm?job=service_home&...](http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/index.htm?job=service_home&id=microwave)

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sah2ed
> Down in the VHF and UHF bands, you can get slightly beyond line of sight,
> but get less bandwidth. A TV channel is only 6MHz wide.

From the article:

"Once the TV white space network was established, even the school farthest
from its base station, 6.5 km away, achieved a throughput of 12 Mb/s on the
downlink and 8 Mb/s on the uplink in a single 8-MHz TV channel."

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Joof
This is a hell of a lot more useful than using it for TV.

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aaron695
No, no it's not.

TV is a know vector of change. It educates, empowers women and a lot of other
thing.

It does not require the ability to read and write to use.

It's free once you have the device, a device that lasts 40 years.

The internet on the other hand so far has been shit at helping the poor.
Expensive. Breaks. Is hard to use.

Point is, this is using unused TV bandwidth, in a way that might be more
efficient that other ways, although I'd be surprised if this was true.

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_ao789
This is very cool. Hopefully they can get this working for themselves as
Internet access in most parts of Africa is very expensive and often doesn't
work if not provided by mobile signal. I used to work as a web developer there
and it was just painful.

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joezydeco
So what happened to the US trials back in 2009?

[http://whitespaces.microsoftspectrum.com/](http://whitespaces.microsoftspectrum.com/)

