A number of lawmakers and professional sports organizations have been urging the Federal Communications Commission to delay their vote on approving the use of the portions of unused spectrum called “White Space” for unlicensed use.

The Sports Technology Alliance, which is a trade group representing eight major sports leagues, among them included the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) have petitioned the FCC to halt voting on the white space proposal so that a sixty day ‘comment period’ may be opened up.

Aside from the STA, several members of congress, among them a group of eight who signed a single letter to the FCC, as well as House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, have also asked the FCC to delay the vote, which is scheduled for November 4.

These two groups have joined with the National Association of Broadcasters in requesting that a 60-day comment period be imposed on the proposal, to allow the groups to argue to the FCC that assigning the white spaces may interfere with their own transmission.

White spaces are small portions of unused radio spectrum in between licensed broadcast channels in the 150MHz to MHz spectrum bands. Several proof-of-concept devices have been tested by the FCC this summer to determine if companies who would use these spaces could develop technology that uses the portions of spectrum without interfering or overlapping with licensed spectrum services in these bands.

The results were published last week in a report by the FCC’s Office of Engineering technology. They summed up that devices using geolocation and sensing technology could safely use the white space spectrum without any interference to broadcast TV channels. Less successful were tests with wireless microphone devices, which also operate without an FCC license in white space bands. Results with these devices were mixed.

A good portent for the fate of the white space project is the fact that the FCC’s own chairman Kevin Martin supports the idea. He has circulated a proposal for a set of rules on white space use. The FCC will vote on the rules at their opening meeting on November 4.

Among supporters of the project are tech companies like Microsoft, Google (first time these two agree on something) and Motorola who see the unused spectrum as a means to deliver wireless broadband internet service with much wider availability than previously possible.

Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counselor wrote a post in Google’s official blog earlier this week, calling out for people to write to the FCC and ask that the vote remains set for November 4. He called the opposing petitions to the FCC stall tactics meant to “derail the technology before the rules of the road are even written.”

"The enormous promise of white spaces is simply too great to get bogged down now in politics," Whitt went on to say. "We're less than two weeks away from a vote that could transform the way we connect to the Internet. The time for study and talk is over."