Microsoft FarmBeats Pt 1

Microsoft FarmBeats Pt 1

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. Demand for food is expected to double by 2050. But, data-driven techniques could help us meet that demand by increasing farm productivity by as much as 67% while cutting agricultural losses.

That's why Microsoft is working to fix the disconnect for 20-million rural Americans...

DEEPAK VASISHT ... "As you rightly said, there's 20-million people in rural American who do not have access to broadband today and Microsoft's goal is to not have that. We want to expand broadband to rural areas. And, one of our initiatives is to bring broadband to 2-million people over the next five years. And, the key technology that we're pushing forward is something called TV White Spaces."

Microsoft Research Fellow Deepak Vasisht says it's a matter of expanding connectivity ...

DEEPAK VASISHT ... "On a very high level, the way to think of TV White Spaces is to take a Wifi connection and instead of expanding it to 10's of meters for which it works today, expand it to 10's of miles. And, the way to do that is to use something called Empty TV Spectrum. Essentially, when you turn on the TV there are some channels with nothing on them, there's just white noise that you don't see anything. And, those are exactly the channels that we want to use to transmit Wifi data over."

Deepak says it covers a range of uses ...

DEEPAK VASISHT ... "So, by doing that, you can get very long-range connectivity at very high speeds. So, you can stream videos, camera data from the farm, all the sensing data that you can think of, drones can be enabled by that. So, all of that could be enabled using this TV White Space technology and we're pushing forward for that."

Listen tomorrow when he tells us more about the game changing technology and when we might see it.

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