Microsoft is expanding the push for so-called "white spaces" broadband to South Africa, where it will help to deploy the technology in a pilot project serving five primary and secondary schools.
The pilot project is aimed at getting schools in rural parts of the country's northeastern Limpopo province connected to the Internet. If successful, it could give South Africa a tool that would help the country reach its goal of affordable broadband for 80 percent of the population by 2020.
White spaces are unused frequencies in TV bands, which Microsoft, Google, and others advocate making available on an unlicensed basis for wireless broadband. Advocates won approval for that use in 2008 in the U.S., which was the first country to authorize white spaces. To ensure the new networks use only the slivers of spectrum in between licensed uses, devices need to have a database of licensed users and sensors to detect other activity in the band.
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