India should work on policy to use white spaces for rural internet access: Rohan Murty

Murty said embracing white space could help address crucial gap in digital access where it is unviable for companies to build fibre network or cellphone towers

Rohan Murty, son of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy, says India's policy makers and regulators should work on a policy to allow use of unused spectrum and whitespaces to enable access to affordable internet across the country.

Murty, whose PhD thesis in Harvard, was on white spaces - the first Indian to work on the topic says US and UK are altering their policies to allow technology to access whitespaces and India should not lag behind. It should instead embrace the emerging technology with the right policies.

"Globally, most of the spectrum is unutilised. It is the same with India, spectrum is used only during specific periods," says Murty. "Look at the economic opportunity in utilising these white spaces. It can allow governments to enable internet access to rural areas at very low costs."

He cited how Wi-Fi has taken off globally because there is no licensing of the spectrum and embracing white space could help address the crucial gap in digital access where it is unviable for companies to build fibre network or cellphone towers.

"A good analogy is a pipe and data is water. As you are consuming data or more water. You saturate the pipe, you need more pipes. In the wireless world, you are given a fixed spectrum. It is like a highway, you have no room to expand no matter what you do," says Murty.

Murty, who got his computer science doctorate from Harvard University, worked on the so called White Spaces or WhiteFi and Senseless, the database that allows high utilisation of data in whitespace without interfering the data usage of spectrum holders. He travelled over 1500 miles around the US, across large and small cities, to demonstrate the technology he was working on. Since his paper got published, he has also been approached by the UK government on how they can utilise whitespaces to improve internet access to rural parts of the country.

"We need be opportunistic in using the white spaces. The policy should allow use of spectrum opportunistically when it is being unutilised and let the spectrum holder get access when it wants," Murty said.

He said India had the opportunity to tweak its policy even as the technology matures to allow white space access to improve data access to rural parts of the country.