What's Google Doing with White Spaces? A Quick Synopsis of their Recent FCC Filing.

A lot of folks have been asking me for my take on the recent Google ex parte filing at the FCC.

Google put in its ex parte on Friday, March 21, 2008. The final draft of the document does reflect some of the input that the New America Foundation provided, but still offers proposals that are particularly discouraging for ad-hoc (decentralized networking).

Here's a brief synopsis:

1. Google (and 30+ other major corporations) are developing an open stack mobile system (a.k.a., the Android phone) as a part of the Open Handset Alliance and want to use the white space as a medium for these new technologies.

2. Google is offering, "to provide, at no cost to third parties, the technical support necessary to make these plans happen; this could include intellectual property and reference designs for underlying technologies, open geo-databases maintained by Google, and other supporting infrastructure."

3. Google is backing Motorola's plan for "a combination of geo-location (to protect broadcast TV) and beacons (to protect wireless microphones)."

4. Google is proposing a safe harbor on channels 36-38 for wireless microphones.

5. Google states that "the combination of geo-location, beacons, and 'safe harbors' is more than sufficient to ensure the protection of all licensed uses."

6. Google reiterates that the technology has already been proofed out in the Darpa XG project and that DARPA XG systems are now in use by the military (the field deployment was new information): "widely used 802.11a-based WiFi currently supports spectrum sensing to protect military radar from interference. Moreover, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) neXt Generation (XG) program has graduated from lab experiments to field use of the technology. Both examples represent an important existence proof for the viability of spectrum sensing, where the risks of failure inarguably are far greater than those potentially posed to broadcast TV and wireless microphones."

7. Google asks for the creation of a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to explore the geolocational/beacon solution.

You can read the March 21, 2008 Google ex parte here.