In his testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecom, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai reiterated the vital need to close America’s digital divide. During his remarks, the chairman projected that broadband auctions would allocate $6.5 billion for rural broadband expansion over the next decade, a small price to pay for the huge opportunities and efficiencies afforded by increased connectivity. ACT | The App Association supports the FCC’s focus on improved availability of broadband in new and innovative ways that will unleash the power of the dynamic app ecosystem for all Americans. For example, we strongly believe unused spectrum in under-leveraged television white spaces (TVWS) is an important way to provide fast and reliable wireless connectivity to rural communities, and allow rural Americans to enjoy our members’ innovations that support industries driving local economies and jobs.
We’ve outlined the exciting opportunity provided by TVWS to enable telehealth solutions to tackle our country’s diabetes epidemic. Now we’re exploring the incredible ways unused spectrum can support the agricultural foundation in our heartland.
Apples AND Oranges
With increased connectivity and real-time access to localized data, TVWS can bring new efficiencies to our country’s oldest industry. Agriculture drives the rural American economy, contributing $136.7 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2015; it should be a national priority to provide farmers across the country with all available resources and innovations to help them succeed domestically and internationally. Remarkably, a handful of organizations purporting to represent rural agricultural interests are working to prevent access to innovative TVWS-driven agriculture solutions and maintain an unbalanced, divided status quo that does not serve the best interests of American farmers and ranchers.
When discussing TVWS for agriculture projects, critics like the National Association of Broadcasters present access to this beneficial resource as a false choice. They argue that if unused unlicensed spectrum bands are allocated to TVWS, local farmers and ranchers will lose their access to local broadcast stations and be left in the dark on important news that affects their crops. The problem with this argument is that it is not an either local broadcast or TVWS question. With TVWS, farmers can harvest their crop and eat it too.
The use of unlicensed TVWS bands will not interfere with regular broadcast airwaves, nor will it harm farmers’ ability to gather information on their crops. In fact, rural farmers and ranchers could rely on one-way periodic television broadcasts to receive local news or information about fast-moving weather emergencies and have on-demand, 24-hour access to an entire ecosystem of two-way interactive mobile app tools to access the information they need through wireless broadband. Why pigeonhole America’s farmers and ranchers to one resource when clearly, more is more?
More is More
Simply put, it is a fallacy to claim that America’s farmers and ranchers will lose a valuable resource if unlicensed spectrum is allocated for TVWS use. We challenge detractors of expanded TVWS use in agriculture to demonstrate how a one-way, one-time television broadcast is more valuable than the real-time interactive products and services available over wireless broadband, particularly when neither are mutually exclusive. U.S. farmers and ranchers must be able to leverage these valuable resources, particularly when they are underutilized, for the communities that need them most. To supplement the vital information provided by local broadcasters on trends that impact an agriculture community, TVWS can unlock important avenues that would provide farmers and ranchers with hyper-local, hyper-accurate data about their own crops and outputs that one-to-many television broadcasts simply do not, and cannot, provide. The connection of macro- and micro-focused data brought through wireless broadband connectivity would empower farmers, ranchers, and growers to make more timely and better-informed decisions about their harvests and better support their livelihoods.
By using a single channel of unlicensed spectrum, innovators and app developers can provide a variety of solutions for agriculture industries across the country. Using sensors, drone technology, and broadband-connected devices, farm communities can gather data on air quality, soil nutrition, crop maturity, and other factors that impact agricultural output. Innovations in computer vision can allow farmers to take photos of their crops and have machine learning assess its health and maturity, which can better predict and prevent crop-harming diseases. In addition to tuning into local weather forecasts to start the day, utilizing unused spectrum to its highest potential would allow farmers to receive real-time, farm-specific meteorology reports, or personalized almanacs for crop outputs and projections.
In a world where technology has revolutionized and improved nearly every aspect of our lives, we can’t ignore the innovations that can support our agricultural industries. It is important to cut through the static to remember TVWS-supported broadband deployment is a not a zero-sum game. Farming communities that leverage local TV broadcasts to inform their agricultural decisions will be able to make better and more accurate decisions with the innovative technologies and precision agriculture solutions that only a robust wireless broadband connection can provide. If we continue to focus on the false choice of TVWS deployment, we rob rural agriculture communities of their ability to increase their outputs and improve their livelihoods, and instead leave them in the dust.