Japan's national ICT research institute NICT has claimed a world's first with a successful field trial of long-range broadband communications using TV white space spectrum.
NICT (the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology) and Hitachi Kokusai Electric achieved downstream and upstream data transmission at 12.7km distance, achieving speeds of 5.2 Mbps downlink and 4.5Mbps uplink.
Using two discontinuous TV channels, downlink speeds were improved to 15.5Mbps and upstream speeds to 9Mbp, albeit over a shorter distance of 6.3km.
The field trial was conducted using IEEE 802.22-based base station and customer premises equipment. A multihop network was also constructed using an IEEE 802.22 as a backbone link and IEEE 802.11af technology to expand the connection area.
According to the researchers, potential applications for the trialled technology include extending video monitoring of roads or video telephony services to mountainous areas where wired or wireless broadband connections are not available.
NICT and Hitachi Kokusai plan to provide more details about the trial at this week's Super WiFi Summit in Miami, Florida.