As Google and Facebook Race to Bring Indians Online, Microsoft's Efforts Hit

As global giants push to make affordable Internet available to more Indians in an attempt to get the country’s population online for the first time, one major company's ambitions may have hit a roadblock.

Microsoft's White Space initiative in India, on which the company has been working for more than three years, has reportedly failed to win the spectrum band for commercial deployment from the government.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has been testing the White Space technology, for which it uses the unused TV spectrum to beam Internet-carrying signals to several villages across India. Earlier this year, the company piloted the project in Harisal, a small village in Maharashtra, crippled with several infrastructural issues such as power cuts that stretch over 10 hours a day.

Months later, Microsoft quietly stopped the project in Harisal after its temporary license to run pilots expired and the government refused to renew the spectrum band for commercial deployment,according to Hindu, which visited the village. Microsoft declined to comment on Gadgets 360’s queries.

The development puts Microsoft’s major ambitions in India on hold. The company had pledged to bring affordable Internet connectivity to over 500,000 villages in the country in 2015

"We believe that lost-cost broadband connectivity coupled with the scale of cloud computing intelligence that can be harnessed from data can help drive creativity, efficiency and productivity across governments and businesses of all sizes," CEO Nadella had said at the time.

White Space remains a promising technology that taps the unused TV spectrum to beam Internet to a radius of 20km, and through "solid objects and foliage." Deployment of only a few such mobile stations — via towers or balloons — could bring Internet to an entire village, a pitch Microsoft executives have long been making in the country.

It’s also affordable, Microsoft says on its website. "Clearly, the most powerful argument for TV White Space in India is the affordability factor," it says. Though the company hasn’t elaborated how affordable its internet solution might be, it says the project is aimed to empower the common man in India.☺