COGNEA -- a Consortium of Companies for Utilizing the Whitespaces

With the advent of commercially available white spaces in the spectrum, a consortium has formed to help drive the definition and adoption of industry-wide standards for low-power personal and portable wireless devices to operate over the TV white spaces. The consortium board consists of ETRI, HP, Philips and Samsung, with contributions from Motorola and Georgia Institute of Technology. The consortia is named CogNeA for Cognitive Networking Alliance.

The group was born out of the IEEE-802.22 standards effort. In the blog post by Mobie Sands, the author argues that 802.22 will only be competitive in the rural areas and that the interesting standards work now resides in CogNea. Cognea contributed to the standard through ECMA for interference-avoidance mechanisms.

In addition to the usual challenges of creating a standard and driving adoption, the consortium must also wrestle with limited spectrum. While there are available channels in the "whitespaces" left by the move of the TV channels, there's still a limited number of slots. You can use this site called ShowMyWhiteSpaces to locate the open channels in your zip code.


Best regards,

Hall T.