White spaces and happy faces: TV stations drop lawsuit against "super WiFi"

White spaces and happy faces: TV stations drop lawsuit against “super WiFi”

The National Association of Broadcasters has dropped its lawsuit against the FCC.

Timothy B. Lee – May 3, 2012 3:00 pm | 15

The National Association of Broadcasters has withdrawn its legal objection to the FCC’s “white spaces” proposal, removing a key source of uncertainty about the technology’s future.

White space devices can use prime spectrum in the television band that is not currently being used by TV stations, spectrum that varies by local market, and they can do so without a license. (Think “WiFi on steroids.”) Until now, broadcasters have been “relentlessly hostile” to the proposal, pointing to the risk of interference with adjacent television broadcasts. And the NAB, which represents the broadcasters, has a lot of clout inside the beltway, so its objections carried a lot of weight.

Yet the technology progressed despite the NAB’s objections. The FCC first gave its approval to the concept in 2008, but the first whitespaces device was not approved until late last year—and then only in Wilmington, NC.

The NAB sued the FCC in 2009 to stop the white spaces rollout, and the case has been working through the courts ever since. The trade group argued that white spaces technology “will have a direct adverse impact on… NAB’s members because it will allow harmful interference with reception of their broadcast signals.”

But on Thursday, the NAB filed a motion asking the courts to dismiss its own case. The organization said that the FCC addressed its concerns in a recent order, making the lawsuit unnecessary. We asked the NAB for more details, but they haven’t gotten back to us yet.

“NAB should be congratulated for withdrawing its court challenge to the FCC’s white space order,” said the Wireless Innovation Alliance in a statement, calling the move a “major step forward.”

Now the remaining obstacles to widespread adoption of white spaces technology are mostly technical. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge told us that supporters of the technology are working on building the databases needed to track which television channels are available for use at any particular time and location. He said the databases are being set up on a “market-by-market basis. When they hit a critical mass of markets, or can accommodate multiple markets, this technology will take off much more strongly.”