ViaSat-1 has already won numerous praise as satellite marvel, boasting a total capacity of 140 Gbps, which it uses to provide its Exede broadband service in remote and rural areas in the U.S. as well as to supply internet connectivity to JetBlue airplanes. The new satellite, aptly named ViaSat-2, is expected to double ViaSat-1’s capacity and greatly expand the provider’s coverage in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America (ViaSat-1’s beams today skip over large parts of the Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains).

The satellite hasn’t been without controversy, though, as ViaSat is switching out suppliers. Space Systems/Loral built ViaSat-1, but the two became embroiled in litigation after ViaSat accused the aerospace company of absconding with its intellectual property when it built a competing satellite for Hughes Network Systems.

That satellite became EchoStar 17, doesn’t have quite the capacity of ViaSat-1, but Hughes is using it to go head to head with ViaSat in the rural broadband market. Its Gen4 service offers speeds of 10-15 Mbps to customers, while ViaSat’s Exede service clocks in at about 12 Mbps.

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In other words, the UK is now gearing up for a proper rollout next year (if everything goes well in the trial), with potential uses including rural broadband and the internet of things. Here’s what Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said in a statement on Friday:

“Ofcom is preparing for a future where consumers’ demand for data services will experience huge growth. This will be fuelled by smartphones, tablets and other new wireless applications.

“White space technology is one creative way that this demand can be met. We are aiming to facilitate this important innovation by working closely with industry.”

The term “white spaces” refers to the gaps between heavily-used radio frequency bands. These are buffer zones that were deliberately left empty in order to stop the services using these various bands – generally TV broadcast services — from interfering with one another.

However, a few years ago people started playing around with the idea of using white spaces for digital communications. They tend to be low-frequency, which makes them ideal for sending data over long distances, and their exploitation now seems quite viable, depending on which bands are already in use in a particular geographical area.

This is why databases of frequencies and coverage are absolutely crucial to white space usage – unlike with Wi-Fi, which can be used anywhere without a license, Ofcom wants to make sure that devices using white space frequencies only do so when they can avoid interfering with surrounding bands. The devices, which will generally use cognitive radio technology in order to hop between frequencies as needed, will therefore need to get clearance from an Ofcom-approved database before they can start transmitting.

Those of you who have been following white space technology will know that Google is compiling its own database of frequency usage, and this is the sort of database that Ofcom might theoretically approve for official use in the UK.

Google’s database is currently being tested in the U.S. by the FCC, the American counterpart to Ofcom, and is also being deployed in a white space trial in Cape Town, South Africa. Meanwhile, Microsoft has already conducted tests in the UK (the Cambridge pilot) and Singapore, and is now active in Kenya. Other, similar initiatives are underway in Finland, Ireland and France.

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The final approval is largely a formality, since Weightless SIG members such as Neul, CSR, Cable & Wireless, ARM and Google have already begun working with the technology. Neul has developed its first commercial Weightless chip, and has launched an experimental smart grid network in Cambridge. Google has begun using the technology in broadband trials in South Africa.

But the approval does cement the standard, allowing the SIG’s membership to begin developing products without worrying about technical specs shifting from under them. As defined, version 1.0 of the standard is pretty flexible, allowing it to be used for any kind of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications network, whether it aggregates tiny transmissions from millions of nodes, such as in a smart grid, or utilizes a more traditional high-speed mobile data connection.

The SIG is also making some pretty astonishing claims about the technology’s capabilities: a range of up to 10 km (6.2 miles), allowing for far-flung networks; device battery life for up 10 years, which means monitoring devices could be deployed in the field for long periods of time without maintenance; and chipset costs of less $2, making the barrier of entry for including Weightless in a device extremely low.

Those three specs make up the holy trinity of wide-area M2M communications and would make the technology feasible for all but the cheapest devices in the future internet of things. But it remains to be seen whether Weightless can live up to those promises.

White spaces broadband in the U.K. is taking a different shape than in the U.S. On this side of the Atlantic, white spaces are viewed more as unlicensed broadband wireless technology — sometimes dubbed “Super Wi-Fi”. White spaces are the unused frequencies between TV transmissions, and since the TV airwaves are much more crowded in urban areas, white spaces likely will be most useful for rural broadband in the U.S.

Feature image courtesy of Cillian Storm.

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As a secured creditor, the government will be one of the first in line for repayment of its loans although, it’s uncertain how much OpenRange’s assets would be worth, given it was building out a WiMax network. There’s not a huge market for WiMax equipment in the U.S. as Clearwire ( s clwr) and Sprint abandon the technology.

Paul Kapustka, over at Sidecut Reports has done a lot of digging on the story and has written a solid analysis of the loan situation. He explains it’s not as bad as it could be:

The good news for U.S. taxpayers is that Open Range Communications, the now-bankrupt startup that was trying to build rural wireless networks, never received the full amount of the $267 million loan it won from the U.S. Department of Agriculture back in 2008. The bad news is — according to research into Open Range’s agreement with the USDA — Open Range did receive $78 million from the USDA and has only paid back $4.5 million, leaving the government at the top of the creditors’ list of the Chapter 11-ed Open Range.

So OpenRange is on the hook for $73.5 million back to the government (and the taxpayers) while rural areas of the U.S. are still without mobile broadband coverage. Part of the drama in this particular case appear to be an issue with the satellite spectrum that OpenRange had hoped to use from Globalstar, which was later  revoked. The much-trumpeted deal with LightSquared that was announced this year was never finalized — possibly since LightSquared’s network is being held up.

While many will focus on the government loan in this situation, I think a more important lesson to take away from the OpenRange debacle is that building networks are hard. It takes a lot of money, the right technology bets, and the time and stamina to roll with the federal policy issues that always arise when spectrum is in play.

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My calls to the Greenwood Village, Colo.-based company were not returned. We covered the company in 2008 when it was approved for a $267 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Utilities Program to provide wireless broadband to 500 communities in 17 states. It was the largest loan in USDA history at the time, and Open Range also scored an additional $100 million investment from One Equity Partners, the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co. It began offering WiMAX service in 2009.

The company was in the news earlier this year for reaching a deal with LightSquared, the non-network that the government is hoping will deliver a competitive form of wireless broadband. LightSquared has its own problems that are coming back to haunt the government, and now the reported failure of Open Range may end up giving the U.S. and the FCC another black eye as it tries to deliver acceptable broadband to rural America.

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It's communal broadband, man.

A Boston company wants to offer people free access to a communal broadband network if a user pays for about $300 in equipment, according to an interesting summary over at Stop the Cap. The site profiled NetBlazr, which hopes to deliver free broadband with speeds of up to 60 Mbps to companies that will share that access with others in range while turning over management of the gear to NetBlazr. From the post:

NetBlazr starts with gigabit fiber from Cogent Communications, and then delivers free or low-cost access to any customer willing to do two things:

Spend $299 for the basic installation kit, which includes a high-speed router, three antennas, and some cabling;
Use the included equipment to receive service from NetBlazr and agree to share it with anyone in range of the wireless antennas included in the kit.
Reception of the wireless broadband signal, comparable to Business Class DSL, comes with no ongoing fees. If you want dedicated, guaranteed speeds, NetBlazr will sell them to you at an added cost. The more customers exchanging signals, the more robust and faster the network becomes, says NetBlazr CEO Jim Hanley.

This is a pretty cool idea (seriously go to Stop the Cap and watch the video), although it doesn’t look like it would help with the rural broadband problem. What’s cooler is Hanley’s idea that services like this could commoditize broadband. Has he talked to Google yet?

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“We have three main goals for Chattanooga’s broadband network,” says EPB President Harold DePriest, who oversaw the public utility’s $300 million investment in the network. “Use it to modernize our electric power infrastructure. Generate enough revenue for the network to pay for itself and be a catalyst for economic development.”

After spending two days in Chattanooga meeting with various stakeholders, it’s easy to see the network exceeding those goals.

EPB’s new smart grid, enabled by a gigabit of digital horsepower, can reduce hour-long power interruptions down to a few seconds. When eight twisters hit Chattanooga within 24 hours, the smart grid saved an estimated 730,000 outage minutes, as well as 250 unnecessary truck rolls. Financially, the network launched in September 2009 and had its first profitable month 18 months later. With all investment variables aside, it should start generating enough revenue to sustain operations by 2012. What’s more, EPB will capture millions of dollars is cost savings thanks to significant operational improvements.

LampPost founders want to use the gigabit network to encourage entrepreneurs in Chattanooga.

And it seems everywhere one looks, incubators, associations and regular businesses are all pulling together to make Chattanooga the place to be for forward-looking companies.

When you analyze the more than 130 communities running successful broadband networks, a common thread uniting them is strong leadership from top elected officials. Prior to Chattanooga’s network launch, incumbents in the area ran 2,600 ads attacking the project and asking citizens to write City Hall to protest the project. Thirty-eight people did. In response to the ads, one citizen wrote a letter to the editor asking neighbors to call City Hall if they felt EPB should build the network. Nearly 600 calls were logged supporting the project. Chattanooga’s mayor deserves much of the credit for rallying citizens behind the network project.

A Focus on Applications, Not Just Fiber

“This network is as important as anything we’ve done,” says Mayor Ron Littlefield. “The community itself is catching on to the value of the network in bits and pieces.” And how do you rally constituents to support an initiative involving technology many don’t understand? “We started by showing people how to solve common problems. That engages them. Then we show them how to tackle specialized problems. This makes them loyal supporters.”

Community stakeholders brainstorm for new gigabit application ideas.

EPB expands and strengthens community support with frequent briefing and brainstorming meetings with various stakeholders. Constituents keep up to date on developments and contribute a steady stream of ideas for network applications. These tactics cement customer loyalty even under an onslaught of competitive assaults. It’s impressive listening ideas build on each other as people hear about a particular feature or new application. The level of buy-in and word-of-mouth translate into significant revenue.

So what else has Chattanooga done? First, the city’s fiber overcomes one of muni Wi-Fi’s biggest original flaws: The mesh access points didn’t have enough horsepower for robust mobile applications and high data traffic. Chattanooga’s mesh design links a fiber strand to every third access point. The city could afford this because they built a set of mobile and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that qualified them for six different grants. Rather than focus on “building a network,” the city focused on creating applications, won big pots of money that was pooled together and then built a superior wireless network that delivers 16 Mbps both upstream and downstream.

The city bought wireless radios that can be programmed to deliver WiMAX, should the city be so inclined, and it can incorporate existing local towers into the network to deliver LTE service in rural areas. Though this network is just for local governments in EPB’s 600-square-mile service area to share, other communities in the U.S. can put aspects of Chattanooga’s approach into play for consumer and business subscribers.

The Revenue Is in Applications, But the Returns Are in Economic Development

Economic development, though, is where long-term returns are. A common theme in discussions with business leaders and entrepreneurs was that the economic impact of the network is challenging to forecast, but easier to assess. According to Chris Daly, director of technology development and transfer for the Enterprise Center — which drives city economic development initiatives — “The difficulty is that the timeline you need to evaluate broadband’s impact on the local economy is so long, maybe two years or more, and so you have to review data retroactively. However, we know that when we look back, we’re going to see many changes to the local economy, because we’re seeing them already.”

SimCenter Enterprises CEO explains how gigabit networks can accelerate simulation development.

This makes evaluating the need for a gigabit network the ultimate “what if” exercise. What if a city had screaming fast outdoor wireless connectivity? What if the most disadvantaged youth could access a gigabit distance learning application at Harvard? What if local businesses could get real-time mentoring on global marketing from executives in China, Germany and Brazil?

SimCenter Enterprises in Chattanooga embodies this spirit. It’s a modeling and simulation company that uses high-performance computing to create or re-create scenarios to help predict the future. High-end modeling and simulation is a bandwidth hog if you want to loop in people working at other locations into the “what if” process. However, a gigabit network enables a small company in a mid-sized city to become the center of a world of supercomputers, international research teams and corporate giants.

Spending time in Chattanooga was a trip to see up close and personal what happens when a community asks, “What if we had a gigabit? What could we create, what can we change, how do we produce a stronger economy?” Chattanooga, along with many of the other communities that own their own broadband networks, are just beginning to find answers to a whole range of “what if” questions. Others, such Tacoma, Wash. and Santa Monica, Calif. have been answering the question for years. Undoubtedly, many more will follow them.

Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and Co-Director of Communities United for Broadband and can be found at @cjsettles on Twitter.

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Working with researchers at Harvard University, Microsoft developed a set of protocols for wireless Internet networks using “white space,” the unlicensed spectrum previously used for broadcast television signals, in a manner similar to today’s Wi-Fi systems. They call it “White-Fi.” Redmond has been working on such technology for more than two years and was one of several companies to get a license from the Federal Communications Commission to create prototype white-space devices. Google, Dell, HP, Philips and Intel have all voiced plans to develop white-space devices, with many seeing the former TV spectrum as a way to bypass the last-mile networks of incumbent broadband providers like AT&T and Qwest Communications. In addition, the white-space spectrum Microsoft is using (between 512 megahertz and 698 MHz) offers a longer range than today’s 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks, promising greater reach in rural areas.

One of the key obstacles for Microsoft was creating a technological fix that would comply with the FCC’s strict white-space regulations that ban anyone using the spectrum from interfering with its primary existing user, usually a TV broadcaster. And it’s not easy to predict which part of the spectrum that incumbent is using at any given time. It’s also tricky because wireless microphones, which operate in the same spectrum, can suddenly become active without warning, and even a single-packet transmission can cause audible interference.

Microsoft dealt with this by creating an “adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm” with which devices measure the spectrum around them and work with other gadgets to find available frequencies, much like laptops search for and identify Wi-Fi networks. If interference occurs, the devices move to a backup channel in a different frequency range. In Microsoft’s experiment, its devices would switch to the backup channel within 3 seconds of a wireless microphone being turned on.

Other researchers have already focused on the first step: finding a way to establish a single link between an access point and user device without interference. Microsoft made the next move, designing an entire network with an access point and multiple clients (like Wi-Fi), leaving for another day the task of tackling multiple access points.

White-Fi won’t yield as much bandwidth as WiMAX or LTE networks, and its speed will depend on how much spectrum is available in each particular area. (It could be comparable to Wi-Fi but with a much longer range.) But unlike WiMAX or LTE, which will be deployed in urban areas, the spectrum isn’t owned by major carriers, so it lets new providers get in the game, and because no one has to buy the spectrum, the network’s cost would be lower as well. Of course, whoever is providing the service will still have to pay for the backhaul to connect the White-Fi network back to the Internet.

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That means bandwidth-sucking applications such as peer-to-peer file transfers and even HD video downloads may be blocked or limited on wireless networks. There are valid technical reasons why carriers need to control such bandwidth-heavy apps over their wireless networks, but a blanket rejection of net neutrality could result in anti-competitive actions. Those actions may include blocking television redirection services from providers like Sling Media, which may be viewed as anti-competitive since carriers resell their own brand of over-the-air television from Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.

The wireless industry trade group CTIA argued in an April 13 filing to the FCC that wireless carriers should not have to abide by the FCC’s Broadband Policy Statement issued back in 2005 that promotes net neutrality. In the same filing, the CTIA asserted that mobile broadband should be considered an adequate replacement for wired broadband. Verizon is also trying to convince the FCC that wireless broadband should be counted when the FCC assesses nationwide broadband penetration. From Verizon’s April 10 filing with the FCC:

The Commission’s survey of the broadband marketplaces in foreign countries should
include all of the various competitive alternatives that consumers and businesses may be using for broadband access, and in particular should capture wireless broadband services (a set of services often omitted from past international comparisons).

As carriers roll out faster, fourth-generation Long Term Evolution Networks with speeds that can range between 5 Mbps and 20 Mbps, wireless may be a viable option for rural broadband (provided those areas actually get LTE). However, if operators succeed in ditching network neutrality for their wireless networks, we would be left with a two-tiered system of broadband access, with a wireless tier that’s devoid of net neutrality. And if the FCC decides to let wireless broadband subscriptions substitute for wired broadband access in some areas of the country, those areas will still face a digital divide. But this time the divide won’t be distinguished by a lack of access or slow speeds, but by the limitations on applications and services running over the network.

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