Could the analogue TV spectrum help to provide rural internet?
29-05-2021 | By Robin Mitchell
Rural internet is still a concern for both residence and internet service providers, and unless satellite internet improves, this problem won’t go away. So why is it challenging to provide internet to rural areas, what properties does older analogue TV have, and could it provide internet services?
What challenges does rural internet provide?
As technology improves, so does the lives of those that use it. For example, the plough introduction helped farmers increase crop yields, thereby providing more food for consumption, and the introduction of the telephone enabled people to have conversations at a great distance.
However, as technology becomes more integrated into everyday life, the more essential it. For example, having internet access in the early 2000s was not a requirement to function; bills would be sent by letter. The landline phone was sufficient to keep in contact, and many companies offered mail-order items for those too far from a store. But fast forward to 2021, and you will find that not having internet access is akin to not having access to water, a road, or public transport.
Providing internet services to city and towns is a relatively straightforward problem; ensure that the installed infrastructure is sufficient for demand, determine the cost per user, multiply by a profit margin, and charge this number. However, this model does not work in rural areas simply because of the few people that live in rural areas.
Installing a high-speed fibre line in a city is economical due to the millions of people it will potentially serve, but installing even the simplest cable for a house of 3 and their mum involves staggering costs. If the cable is buried, then digging equipment is required. If the cable is overhead, poles are needed. If only one house is going to use the connection, then all those costs fall on the one house.
What properties do older analogue TV signals have?
Analogue TV, which has now been replaced with digital TV, was a technology that used analogue RF signals to transmit picture and sound. While digital TV offers thousands of channels with on-demand services, Analog TV would give viewers a handful of channels of sub-par quality and be highly susceptible to interference.
However, while Analog TV did have several disadvantages, it did come with some advantages that digital TV services can still struggle with. One of these advantages is that the spectrum used by analogue TV is of a lower wavelength (in the VHF to UHF spectrum). As such can travel further while being able to penetrate obstructions such as buildings, trees, etc even diffract around hills. A good example of this is communities that live in valleys; they typically struggle to get any cellphone reception while being able to get analogue TV (when it was available).
Could TV whitespace solve rural internet issues?
Now that the analogue TV frequencies are no longer used (now referred to as white space), there is a real opportunity for internet service providers to extend internet coverage to even the most remote of places. Microsoft has already done numerous experiments on the matter to demonstrate how TV whitespace can be used for the internet. For example, in 2011, Microsoft was able to Livestream Xbox HD footage using a custom link using TV whitespace. While transmitting such information may seem rudimentary, the setup was made intentionally challenging with a 120dB loss between the receiver and transmitter (a result of buildings, furniture, people, and vegetation), to demonstrate the practicality of TV whitespace.
Fast forward to 2021, and Microsoft has announced that their trial of using TV whitespace for everyday internet use has been a success. The experiment setup internet services to Co Cavan, Ireland, and local users found a significant boost in quality of service and speed. For example, one user of the service lived 3km from the town where broadband was not available, and even if broadband was installed, the service would be poor. Using the new Airband technology from Microsoft, the homeowner is now able to have more than 6 people simultaneously using the internet.
It is clear that TV whitespace could be an ideal candidate for providing internet services to far-out places. Still, there are other technologies that can provide internet services to rural areas. One of those is satellite; dedicated satellites in orbit provide a constant and uninterruptable link via a ground-based dish. However, satellite internet is expensive and suffers from large ping (due to the distance), and is therefore unusable for gaming and video calls. StarLink is a technology that may solve the ping issue with satellites orbiting at a much lower orbit. Still, until it is put into practice and made available, it will continue to be out-of-reach.
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