Enter White Spaces for better Internet

There is one thing we need to accept. When it comes to Internet connectivity in Kenya, no amount of profits or praises can mask the underlying reality.

We have failed to achieve realistic Internet connectivity as a country, and we are now realising that it will take more than rhetoric to deliver on this one.

There are many stories to this: from the supposed number of connected people against the actual number of connected people and the reality that there are not as many people on broadband as there should be.

The real story is out in the public and all you need is to look around to realise that accessibility is yet to improve and reach low-income individuals and the rural areas.

The future of connectivity might not necessarily lie with 3G or 4G or even Wimax, due to the cost of deployment and management of these services.

But there is an unlikely candidate that is proving to work. White Spaces.

White Spaces are the frequencies used in broadcasting of television services, but they themselves are not used. They are a sort of guard band between different frequencies and are now proving that they can deliver Internet connectivity at costs lower than what we have right now. Coupled with WiFi, wWhite Spaces are clearly the future for Africa.

Google and Microsoft, alongside Indigo Telecom Kenya, have been pushing the fight for this unlicensed spectrum to be used for connectivity. Indigo has been trying Mawingu in Kenya, while Google has been piloting in South Africa.

White spaces overcome the problems that are inherently besieging the current carriers, from administrative issues such as regulatory affairs, as well as financial barriers required for other services.

Kenya, unfortunately, replicated the European model of auctioning spectrum to the providers for GSM services. The problem with that was that the financial barriers were high and the providers were unable to reduce the costs of connectivity as they recouped their initial investment.

It meant that overall, while there might have been a good plan, it was not going to realistically work due to the fact that the initial investment plus the overheads for rolling out the actual networks was high ,and not all the providers have recouped their investment.

Furthermore, in some places, the service was unusable due to terrain and business realities. In the end, many people have never accessed broadband services.

White Spaces, on the other hand, resolve a lot of issues. They are ideal for rural areas in that they do not require line of sight. They thus overcome building and terrain challenges, and they have a good coverage area per base station.

If you are able to watch analogue TV using the antenna on your roof, you can very likely access White Spaces. So, the coverage is pretty much there. No reallocation of spectrum is required since White Spaces have already been allocated as guard bands. They do not interfere with any pre-existing services. Should that happen, it is easy to switch over to another channel that does not interfere with the primary user.

But they do not operate well on their own. They need a solid backbone.

White Spaces are a good candidate for last mile connectivity, but they need to have solid backhaul. That comes in the form of the fibre-optic networks that are being carried on the electricity poles or dug into the ground. There is a lot of capacity using fibre, but there are last mile issues. This could be the best fix available.

Regulators, operators, and other technologists met in Dakar, Senegal, last week, to explore the realistic use of this technology. The aspects discovered were interesting.

The reality is very simple. White Spaces can deliver unlimited Internet connectivity nationally to the general public at very high speeds for about $1 (Sh85) per customer. While there are a lot of things to be done to ensure that it works in the long term, White Spaces is slowly creeping up on the current operators, and the regulator is working hard to understand and permit the use of the technology.

Indigo has just completed a successful trial and will begin commercial services in Kenya soon. So we can hope that connectivity will improve and prices drop.

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