White spaces are the gaps in between broadcast TV channels in the radio spectrum. These gaps are left empty as buffers, in order to avoid the TV channels bleeding into each other, but they also have the capacity to carry wireless broadband. And, because the spectrum we’re talking about is quite low-frequency, it is very good at carrying that wireless broadband over great distances – hence the technology’s promise for mostly rural areas that lack good fixed-line broadband (Google has been trialling white space broadband in the rural U.S. since 2010).

The Cape Town trial, launched on Monday, is experimenting with white spaces as a way of bringing connectivity to schools. The base stations are being sited on the Tygerberg hill, which is next to several heavily-populated areas (I’m from Cape Town, as it happens), so the trial should provide a good idea of how white space broadband interferes – or hopefully doesn’t – with licensed spectrum holders in the vicinity.

Google’s involvement extends to sponsorship and the use of its newly-launched spectrum database, while others taking part include the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET) and of course the local telecoms regulator, ICASA. The equipment comes from Neul and Carlson Wireless.

The trial will last six months. According to TENET’s explanation, each of the 10 schools involved will get a “dedicated 2.5Mbps service with failover to ADSL” – hardly impressive speeds, but this is still an experiment after all.

According to Fortune Mgwili-Sibanda, Google’s public policy manager in South Africa, Google’s intention here is partly to drive regulatory change there. Like Wi-Fi spectrum, white space spectrum can be used license-free in the U.S. This may also happen in the UK, depending on what the regulator Ofcom decides. “We hope the results of the trial will drive similar regulatory developments in South Africa and other African countries,” Mgwili-Sibanda wrote in a blog post.

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This year’s booth is very different

I toured the booth today and while I didn’t measure it exactly, I’d estimate that 97 percent of the floor space wasn’t used to show off phones or tablets. Instead, Verizon is highlighting its Innovations Center, which it opened up in 2011, Since then, Verizon worked to get the building blocks in place so it could help partners with connected device ideas. And that’s what CES 2013 is all about for the company.

So what kind of partners and products — Verizon prefers to call them “solutions” — are in the spotlight? Through a partnership with Delphi, I saw a small OBD or on-board diagnostic module, for cars. By plugging the small device into a vehicle, it can gather heaps of data from the car ranging from engine settings to tire pressures to details about the electrical system.

A smarter connected car – no phone required

There are wired readers for such OBD modules, but why not add cellular connectivity? Without wires, a car rental agency could place these in their entire fleet of cars, for example, to monitor the vehicles for safety and maintenance.

As each car transmits its data, then, it could be aggregated in a centralized dashboard at the rental agency’s headquarters; you can’t easily do that with wires unless you want to pull every module daily and dock it.

Let’s get more efficient with our recycling pickups

I also got a glimpse at the BigBelly Solar recycling bin; not something you’d equate with a wireless company, right? It turns out that these public recycling bins — which use solar power for energy to compress waste — benefit from a cellular connection.

Each bin has sensors to monitor the level of recycled materials that are inside. With an M2M connection, the bins each report their waste capacity levels to the central recycling collection company.

If a bin is half-full or less, for example, the company doesn’t have to waste time or fuel to empty it right away. The collection company can see all of its bins on a map with green, yellow and red indicators — each representing the fullness of each bin — and route trucks only to the bins it needs to.

Look out Project Glass!

Speaking of trucks, you should soon see a new Verizon commercial with fire-trucks in it, if you haven’t already. One of the fireman in the piece is wearing a connected headset, similar to Google’s Project Glass. Because it’s connected, he can see a map or floor plan of the building on fire, presumably to help him navigate through the smoke.

This isn’t an application you’d want to use by tethering the goggles to a phone; this benefits from a dedicated wireless connection. And while it may sound far-fetched, one of Verizon’s Innovation Center partners was demonstrating a similar product meant not for consumers (darn!) but for public safety and industrial workers.

The network is waiting for connected devices of the future

I could go on and on describing what was on display: A connected athlete helmet with sensors to track hits in a football game; running shoes that upload their own data; even a smart meter that’s super smart: It can track and report energy consumption down to the individual circuit level. Oh there were some phones and traditional consumer products on display too. But they were on one small circular table that saw far fewer foot traffic during my time there.

Does everything need a dedicated cellular connection then? Certainly not and the smartphone is sure to be our hub of connectivity for some time to come. The Innovations Center, however, is enabling partners to “connectify” their products. Verizon’s just there to provide the connection itself and to help with the wireless integration. It’s up to the visionaries outside of Verizon to imagine how products and solutions can benefit from a robust wireless network.

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Ericsson tested a LTE/4G internet connection on board of a jet plane flying at speeds of 700 kilometers per hour (435 mph) at low altitiudes (300 meters above ground) and were able to get about 19 megabits per second. Given that commercial planes fly at over approximately 9100 meters (or about 30,000 feet), the test is no where near the real life, but still notable.

The test was conducted on two laptops with LTE dongles. A web cam was connected to the PCs and the video was streamed to the ground team. The video stream worked well, barring a few incidents when the connections were handed over from one base-station to another. The handover from two base stations was pretty good even at 500 km/h.

Clearly, we are not going to see this in commercial deployments anytime soon, but there is one upside to it all: LTE/4G will work really well on ultra high-speed trains especially the kind in Europe and Japan.

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By analyzing data from a live 3G network in a major city, the mobile network analytics and optimization specialist has found that only 5% of iPads are used outdoors and whilst iPads account for just 1% of data sessions, they use four times more data than an average 3G device. Key findings from the study were:

• iPads account for less than 1% of all data sessions but make up 5% of total traffic.
• 95% of iPad usage is indoors.
• 90% of traffic from the iPhone 4 and 80% from Blackberry devices is from indoor use.

This isn’t surprising. Apparently 9-out-of-10 iPads being sold are WiFi only. I use my iPad to watch Netflix and Vimeo, but not over 3G. The networks are pokey and bandwidth is expensive.

But I bet this changes with the availability of LTE-based iPads, despite the expensive price tag on the data plans. Thanks to better speeds on the networks and ease with which I can access data instantly, I have stopped carrying my MacBook Air and instead never leave home without the LTE-version of iPad and the Apple keyboard just in case I need to draft something longer.

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So for those of you planning a road trip, a move or who might want to avoid the lure of the web while on holiday, the map gives a big picture view at how much physical area of the U.S. isn’t connected via 3G –something that isn’t always apparent because carriers measure their coverage in terms of the percent of the population covered.

For an overview of some of the other measures the FCC is taking with regards to getting the 18 million rural Americans online who don’t have access to real broadband, check out the FCC’s blog posting on the topic. The final paragraph is probably worth noting for all you startups because it means your free conference call services that so hack off Ma Bell and even Google are protected.

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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

Ignoring the threats by Congress to kill off white spaces, on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission green-lighted commercial operations of the first networks and devices to tap into the airwave gaps between TV broadcasts, potentially setting off a whole new wave of innovation in unlicensed wireless broadband access akin to that produced by Wi-Fi.

The FCC is starting out small with operations limited to Wilmington, N.C., beginning Jan. 26. The commission wants to ensure there are no interference problems between new white space networks and the wireless microphones that currently access the spectrum at big performance venues.

Mics and broadband devices will essentially be sharing the airwaves, so the FCC has set up a database, run by Spectrum Bridge, (see disclosure below), where concert venues or theaters can register their events. Any white spaces devices accessing those airwaves will periodically check in with that database, which would then assign those device channels not being used for performances.

The FCC also approved the first white spaces device, a radio receiver from Koos Technical Services designed to provide a last-mile link for outdoor surveillance cameras and telemetry systems. It may not be as sexy as a tablet, but commercial gadget makers won’t start building devices until white spaces are fully tested and become a viable frequency band nationwide.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski certainly didn’t downplay the significance of the launch in his statement today:

With today’s approval of the first TV white spaces database and device, we are taking an important step towards enabling a new wave of wireless innovation.  Unleashing white spaces spectrum has the potential to exceed even the many billions of dollars in economic benefit from Wi-Fi, the last significant release of unlicensed spectrum, and drive private investment and job creation.

White spaces could be used to create a form of Super Wi-Fi, greatly expanding the number of cheap or even free wireless access options on the market. White spaces advocates have said the airwaves not only could be used to build greatly expanded public hotspots, but also as the primary broadband connection for homes in rural communities and as the connective glue linking smart grids together.

The technology still faces some obstacles. Broadcasters’ channels are interleaved with white space channels, so TV stations worry new, unlicensed, wireless broadband services will interfere with their transmissions. Performers are concerned their wireless mics won’t be protected even with the database in place. But the biggest threat could be Congress, which is reluctant to agree to creating any more unlicensed frequencies.

The House passed a spectrum bill last week that would prevent the FCC from designating any future TV spectrum it gets from broadcasters for unlicensed use. Instead, they would have to turn those airwaves into mobile broadband licenses, which they would then auction off to the highest bidder. As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote last week, such a move from Congress, while predictable, could stifle innovation:

In the end this could cost consumers, in the form of higher mobile broadband bills, and stymie the mobile app ecosystem as bandwidth becomes more expensive and is controlled by carriers. In general Congress isn’t trying to utterly crush the tech industry, but it is hard for it to give up the potential billions that auctioning off that spectrum to the highest bidder would entail. As taxpayers, we too should ask ourselves if unlicensed spectrum and more players getting licensed airwaves is worth the loss of a few billion in potential revenue in the government coffers. Unfortunately, few people will think of the debate in these terms.

Disclosure: Spectrum Bridge is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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A quick look at the WI chart may give folks some ease because the majority of the LTE networks are using 700 MHz spectrum. But there are two problems. First, the 67 percent of LTE networks using 700 MHz is for this year. A look at the inner ring shows 700 MHz is still the preferred frequency for networks running in 2015, but only for 16 percent of the operators.

The second issue is that even within a range of like spectrum, carriers can use slightly different frequencies, effectively removing the ability to move a device from one network to another. This type of fragmentation is already evident in the U.S. LTE networks currently in deployment. AT&T and Verizon are both using 700 MHz blocks, but with a slight variance: Verizon’s network will use 746-787MHz, while AT&T’s is opting for 704-746MHz.

Clearing the same spectrum in every country around the world is obviously a Herculean effort, especially since regions have been using certain frequencies for years. Perhaps it isn’t even possible to do so at this point. But it’s a disappointment, as the mobile web is empowering users to think global instead of just local.

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