Dave Horvath
12 Feb 2008 11:50
Two prominent wireless companies have joined forces to try and bring television to the mobile masses in London. T-Mobile and Orange have decided to try a short venture in which they will offer subscribers "high-resolution" television channels (24 video and 10 audio) over it's existing 3G network. The companies have announced that they will attempt this service on a trial basis to determine the marketability of it.
The two companies will use a technology called Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) to deploy the service. MBMS is part of the 3G architecture, however its not widely supported as little equipment is available for it. The broadcast signal is sent out as one stream from the server, and that stream is then split repeatedly until one stream arrives at each base station from which it is broadcast. By using existing 3G infrastructure the deployment costs should be much lower than DVB-H, which until recently was heavily supported by EU standards.
The companies will use unused areas of the 3G infrastructure that was once scheduled to be used for the TDD (Time Division Duplex) services, but never was deployed. Cost of deploying this television service should be much lower because they don't have to develop any new infrastructure to support it.
It still remains to be seen whether or not subscribers will adopt this type of service. Earlier attempts have cited poor quality and unreliable reception as potential reasons not to tune in, but a correct price point could sway some viewers into the market.