About Gram Marg in Information Networks Lab, IIT Bombay, Mumbai

Presently, there are large areas in India where Internet access is slow or even non-existent.
This is particularly true in rural areas, where sparse populations and irregular landscapes
(water bodies, mountains etc.) often make it difficult or expensive to roll out high-speed
Internet connections. Settlements in the rural areas are often situated several kilometers
away from the nearest location with access to high speed Internet. Even in the case of
wireless technologies, the sparse distribution of homes in the rural areas makes it difficult
for wireless signals to propagate in every home.

Recent studies on the utilization of different frequency bands have shown that in most
frequency bands, large portions of the wireless spectrum is heavily under-utilized. The licensed TV band is highly underutilized in India. The UHF TV band (470 − 806 MHz) has good propagation and building penetration
characteristics. This potentially makes the TV White Spaces ideal for use in rural broadband
applications, where transmission links may be several kilometers in length and may
involve challenging terrain such as hills, foliage, and water.

Refer to the following papers for more information:
1..Quantitative assessment of TV white space in India http://tinyurl.com/tvwsQA
2. OpenPAWS: An open source PAWS and UHF TV White Space database implementation for India http://tinyurl.com/tvwsiitb

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