Malawi's TV white space regulations:: A review and comparison with FCC and Ofcom regulations

Regulators are in the process of framing regulations to allow secondary use of vacant TV channels while protecting TV broadcast services from harmful interference. While the US and UK regulators have already passed such regulations in 2008 and 2015 respectively, other countries are still in drafting stages and the underlying circumstances in these countries could be different from those of the US and UK. Malawi released its final draft regulations in 2016. While the US and UK legislate for dynamic spectrum access and licence-exemption for secondary users, Malawi's draft regulations require such users to apply for a licence for assigned TV white space spectrum. This paper provides an analytical review of Malawi's regulations and a comparison with FCC and Ofcom regulations, which new regulations can build on. This analysis will also inform future work on network management tools that can enable practical deployment and coexistence of large-scale TV white space networks in a dynamic spectrum access environment in Africa.