This story originally ran in the Monday, October 18, 2010 edition of the Blue Ridge Business Journal. The Journal ceased publication in December 2010. Visit roanoke.com/bizjournal to browse an archive of BRBJ stories. For business coverage from The Roanoke Times, visit roanoke.com/business.

BY ANNIE JOHNSON | BRBJ

(540) 981-3229 l annie.johnson@bizjournal.com

When television made its grand switch to digital, a spectrum of space was freed.

Nearly a year ago, officials and technology experts in the small Patrick County community of Claudville were granted an experimental license from the Federal Communications Commission to determine if those unused frequencies could be used to bounce wireless signals to some of the most isolated parts of Virginia.

The project was successful.

In September, the FCC approved the widespread use of these unused television frequencies, known as white space, for broadband connection.

A pet project of U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who has been following broadband issues for nearly 20 years, the technology has the potential to create jobs and complete rural Virginia's long-running efforts to have high-speed Internet access.

Boucher talked recently about how the process worked, and where white space could go from here.

?When did you first hear about using white space for broadband?

I'm very involved in information technology policy matters here in the Congress. ... I have been involved over 20 years in all of the major matters that effect broadcasting, the telecommunications industry and the Internet. And so I have known for a long time about the potential to use the unused television channels for wireless broadband. We have been discussing the possibility of doing this for about the last six years. And companies like Microsoft, Intel and then online companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay have for the last three or four years been actively promoting the use of white space for broadband, primarily in rural areas.

I was able to obtain from the FCC permission for a demonstration project for the use of white space and decided to place that demonstration in Claudville in Patrick County. We launched that demonstration project, the first one in the nation, a little more than year ago.

During the period of that demonstration, our goal was to find out if it could work effectively. So there were a number of questions we wanted to answer. The first of those was: Are the white spaces, in fact, a good medium for the transmission of wireless broadband? And the answer to that question is yes -- it has worked very well in Claudville and has been highly used.

The second question we wanted to ask is ... when the white spaces are used for wireless broadband, is there any interference with regard to the ability to get television signals on the nearby channels? The answer to that question has been no. There have been no complaints of interference.

And so based on that very successful demonstration, I have urged, as have others, that the FCC adopt a general order permitting white spaces to be used nationwide.

?Talk about the impact of white space on rural communities.

The primary places where the use of white spaces for wireless broadband will be of great value will be in rural areas. In rural areas there are a number of unused television channels that are not being used for television broadcasts, and that is very different from the situation in the urban areas where all the television channels are occupied

But in rural areas you have a lot of channel vacancies. ... This is a very high-quality spectrum; it has very strong signal propagation characteristics. The signals can penetrate walls, they have the same kind of penetration characteristics that television signals have. These are typically low frequencies which means they can travel a long way and have good penetration characteristics. ... And so these frequencies are very well suited to a rural environment both because there are vacancies there where you don't have television signals and because they have these good long-range propagation characteristics.

I anticipate a very broad usage of white spaces in rural areas as one of our solutions for how we are going to bring broadband to communities that are small, that may be in a mountainous area and that may be very expensive to serve with traditional wired broadband because of the distances involved and because the terrain in the region may be challenging.

I think white space has become a significant way in which we can provide broadband and high-speed Internet access in rural communities. ... Broadband today is essential to economic development -- it is as important to business growth and success today as electricity service and telephone services were at the time they were introduced about 100 years ago. Any business today, of whatever size, needs to have high-speed Internet access in order to compete successfully.

?At what point did you realize using white space was going to work?

We knew of no reason it would not work. We knew that these were terrific slices of spectrum. ... We also knew that there were significant numbers of vacant channels and that the potential for interference would be very low.

But we had to perform the tests in order to prove the absence of interference because the broadcasters had been opposed to doing this. The National Association of Broadcasters had strongly opposed any use of white spaces for anything other than television broadcasting. They did not want wireless broadband in that space. And so getting this ... was a major victory and did not come easy. The demonstration project we had in Claudville was key.

?What about congressional attempts to stop blocking devices that would attempt to stop white space from being used for broadband?

That cannot be done; [people] would not be able to put a blocking device in a spectrum over which they have no official control.

?This is something you've focused on for a long time, and it seems to be coming to an end. What's next for rural broadband?

What is next, I think, is the use of white spaces for broadband in rural areas throughout the nation, and I think you're going to see service providers finding a way to deploy white space in order to expand their offerings. I would anticipate that in the wake of the FCC order ... that new businesses will form, built on the provision of broadband using the white spaces. So I think you're going to see more wireless broadband providers and that means the creation of new jobs.

Read more about white space technology at bizjournal.com/news/technology.