At the Imperial War Museum hangar in Duxford, UK, how a radio system box operating in UHF TV bands can connect to a TV white-space database to pinpoint which TV channels are available. From there, a Nokia smartphone can connect to the Internet via the TV white space and use an app to grab content. In the case of the museum demo, the content was information about the planes on display.

This type of arrangement would allow museum visitors, for example, to gain access to a vast amount of information about exhibits depending on where they are standing--far more than the museum could ever include on physical signage.

A similar system could be built out to push content to people in other places, such as retail locations; in this case, shoppers could receive offers and coupons, and participate in loyalty programs, just by walking around with an app on their phones.

That isn't going to happen overnight, however. Before services can use TV white spaces for location finding and content distribution, the necessary technology--including mass-produced chips inside phones and special wireless access points--must be standardized, which likely won't occur for at least a few years.

In addition, the system isn't terribly precise, as the accuracy is good only at 25 feet to 50 feet. "We can use several well-known methods to refine this coarse location, for example taking signal-strength measurements from several access points and then mathematically combining these signals to estimate the location of the phone a bit more accurately," says Scott Probasco, a senior manager at Nokia.