Towards Enabling Broadband for a Billon Plus Population with TV White Spaces

TL;DR

This paper explores using TV white space spectrum to provide affordable broadband backhaul for rural India, enabling connectivity for over a billion people through a novel architecture and testbed deployment.

Contribution

It proposes a TV white space based backhaul architecture tailored for rural India and demonstrates its effectiveness through a real-world testbed deployment covering 13 villages.

Findings

Testbed successfully provides broadband to 13 villages over 25 km².

TV white space offers ample spectrum for rural backhaul needs.

The architecture supports seamless connectivity from fiber points to remote regions.

Abstract

One of the major impediments to providing broadband connectivity in semi-urban and rural India is the lack of robust and affordable backhaul. Fiber connectivity in terms of backhaul that is being planned (or provided) by the Government of India would reach only till rural offices (named Gram Panchayat) in the Indian rural areas. In this exposition, we articulate how TV white space can address the challenge in providing broadband connectivity to a billion plus population within India. The villages can form local Wi-Fi clusters. The problem of connecting the Wi-Fi clusters to the optical fiber points can be addressed using a TV white space based backhaul (middle-mile) network. The amount of TV white space present in India is very large when compared with the developed world. Therefore, we discuss a backhaul architecture for rural India, which utilizes TV white spaces. We also showcase results from our TV white space testbed, which support the effectiveness of backhaul by using TV white spaces. Our testbed provides a broadband access network to rural population in thirteen villages. The testbed is deployed over an area of $25$km$^2$, and extends seamless broadband connectivity from optical fiber locations or Internet gateways to remote (difficult to connect) rural regions. We also discuss standards and TV white space regulations, which are pertinent to the backhaul architecture mentioned above.