White space for wireless broadband

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is opting for white spaces or radio airwaves to be used for wireless Internet connections, provided that the devices use spectrum sensing and geo-location techniques, says Media Post.

The FCC says: "At this juncture, we believe that the burden of 'proof of concept' has been met and we are satisfied that spectrum sensing in combination with geo-location and database access techniques can be used to authorise equipment today under appropriate technical standards."

Broadband access advocates, including Google and Microsoft, have been pushing the FCC for this approval, saying that using white spaces for Web access will increase the availability of broadband, but television broadcasters warn that wireless broadband on white spaces could interfere with TV signals.

The Nigerian communication and information minister John Odey says it is imperative for Nigeria to switch over to digital broadcasting technology, reports AllAfrica.com.

Odey says the nation should consider the drastic consequences of not switching over to digital.

He says: "If we do not follow the trend, our country will become a dumping ground for analogue equipment apart from losing other benefits associated with digitalisation."

NDS, a technology solutions provider for digital pay-TV, is providing core conditional access security infrastructure for the first commercial trial of the OMA BCAST SCP standard, a standard for mobile TV content protection in Singapore, says TradingMarkets.com.

Alcatel-Lucent's Mobile Interactive TV solution powers the Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld platform for the three-month trial, which includes mobile devices from Samsung and smart card profile-compliant SIM cards from Gemalto.

The NDS solution is based on NDS unified architecture, which provides single point of rights management for all video broadcasts, irrespective of the delivery networks or the rendering devices.