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Thanks for the reply. The idea of using white space for rural Internet is still a valid idea. As you point out, there is some kind of problem with deployment.
I don't want to make some kind of political statement, but this kind of service have to be managed and organized by some state or county agency that will see to it that it works right. However, the broadcast band frequencies used for television are controlled by the FCC. So that makes for some difficulty with a practical political method of controlling the local usage of the whitespace frequencies.
In this context, the term whitespace, can mean whatever you have a TV channel that's just snow and noise and no visible picture information. A low level transponder on such a blank channel is not going to interfere with anything because there's nothing there to interfere with. That seemed to be so logical and clear, yet the SEC and other entities have difficulty in putting this concept into practice. A low-power transponder, say something like a 10 W transponder, is not going to cause interference to some television station that's over 100 miles away.
As you mentioned, such transponders would have to be elevated in order to get over some of the hills and mountains and wooded areas. This is a capital investment problem, building a tower over about 30 feet high above average crown gets to be rather expensive. And is also subject to rules by other agencies.
However, if fiber optic can be widely distributed, the whitespace could be used as what they call the last mile connection. If a fiber optic station is available within a mile of a household, then a whitespace transponder could be used to finish the last mile going 1 mile with a VHF transponder running less than 1 W of output power. Provided there is almost a line of sight path. The advantage of using VHF is that it does a good job of penetrated through foliage and obstacles on a short run.
However, at the present time those in power already have a full plate of lots of other things that need to be done. So it looks like the white space idea is just going to have to wait for another time.