There may be a gap in the market, the old adage goes, but is there a market in the gap? That's what Microsoft, BT, Samsung, Nokia and the BBC hope to find out in Cambridge, UK, over the next few weeks as they jointly test a wireless technology that's designed to exploit some of the most promising gaps on the planet: the unused "white spaces" between UHF digital TV frequencies.
They hope to show that these frequencies can be used to boost the range of wireless connections - offering a souped-up version of Wi-Fi that will keep laptops, smartphones and iPads online many hundreds of metres from our homes. The idea is that you switch on a white space router and it logs on to a database of the unused TV frequencies in your area. It then assigns your router a long-range UHF frequency you can use for a given time.
It sounds easy - but there could be problems.
Technically, slotting a signal into a given waveband is not easy unless expensive filter circuits ensure transmissions stay strictly within assigned slots. If they don't, our supposedly pristine digital TV pictures could suffer interference. Yet expensive electronics will jack up white space device prices.
Such are the issues the Cambridge TV White Space Consortium - which also includes white space pioneers Neul, Cambridge Consultants, Spectrum Bridge and TTP - will contend with in their trials which kick off tomorrow.
There may be a further problem brewing for this tech, however: over the last few months a quiet patent landgrab has taken place.
For instance Sony, Nokia and Microsoft have filed for US patents on seemingly basic white space functions such as interference suppression, spectrum reservation and frequency assignment respectively.
Hopefully the players in this field will pool their patents - as they did for MPEG-2 video - but if they don't we may well see a handful of tech majors cornering the white space router market.
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Paul Marks, New Scientist