NHC Commissioner Thompson to address FCC panel regarding “white space”

(New Hanover County)— New Hanover County Commission Chairman Jason Thompson, and Information Technology Department Director Leslie Stanfield, are to address a panel of experts in Washington DC next week on the use of TV White Spaces. Thompson will be a panelist at the Wireless Innovation Forum’s TV White Spaces Summit on Tuesday, June 15.

The summit is a day-long event to discuss the progress on finalizing rules for the use of the spectrum “left over” from the Digital TV transition. New Hanover County has been a pioneer in testing the use of the white spaces and is noted in the FCC’s National Broadband plan as a model of the usability of the spectrum.

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin recently formed the International TV White Spaces Fellowship and Training Initiative. The Fellowship and Training Initiative will provide a platform for the FCC to work with international regulators and their spectrum experts on technical issues associated with the use of TV white spaces and further build on our momentum on the developing technology.

New Hanover County is one of only two communities in the nation using the new technology and is the only community in the country to use the spectrum for something other than Internet service. In addition to providing public wireless Internet at the Hugh MacRae Park, white space spectrum is also used locally for video surveillance at the park and at Wilmington’s Creekwood Housing Development.

New Hanover County also recently began using white spaces to monitor water quality in Page’s Creek. Periodic water sampling required the county to send a person to collect readings and samples in our tidal creeks to which we had to react. With the use of the new spectrum, real-time monitoring and the ability to gather that data remotely allows the county to look for trends that could indicate the presence of problems and work to find underlying causes.

The TV White Spaces Summit will be moderated by FCC Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker.

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