Google, having lost the bid for a different set of airwaves, is now vying for so called ‘white space’ between the television broadcast channels.  This so-called “grossly underutilized” space would be ideal for low-cost wireless internet.  Google sees a great spectrum which could provide widespread access to mobile phones and hence a much larger mobile advertising space.  Broadcasters of course think it might interfere with their current television operations–and I’m sure they’re going to stall and try and figure out how they could/should use the spectrum themselves.  They’ve kicked around concern of it interfering but it seems like this won’t be an issue given the switch to digital broadcast…but I don’t actually know if that uses the same spectrum or not.Having a large set of secured airwaves would be a great boost to Google’s Android mobile OS and would allow paid-content to be more easily pushed to the devices, especially if Google could use the airwaves as a lower-cost alternative to current cellular data networks.


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