PCCW broadcasts real-time TV to 3G cellphones

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 May 2006 13:52

Business IT - Technology

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More major players go with Qualcomm's FLO

PCCW mobile has launched what it claims is the world's first commercial service broadcasting real-time TV over a 3G network,  using Cell Multimedia Broadcast (CMB) technology, developed by Huawei.

The service was demonstrated on May 17 by PCCW executive director Alex Arena during his keynote address to the 2006 Broadband World Forum Asia, being held in Hong Kong.

PCCW says it will broadcast programming from its IPTV service, now TV, to its 3G mobile trial customer base. The service is being progressively rolled out throughout Hong Kong. PCCW says deployment in Hong Kong's MTR underground railway system is nearly complete and deployment throughout Hong Kong will be completed by end-June, making mobile TV available to all 110,000 users on PCCW mobile's 3G trial.

According to PCCW, Cell Multimedia Broadcast technology can support large numbers of concurrent users with minimal impact on the network loading and is ideal for high density urban areas, including underground railways and other forms of public transport.

Initial programming over the mobile network will include now TV's Cantonese-language Business News Channel and other news and sports content. Other entertainment and infotainment programming will be added later.

PCCW's now TV, launched in August 2003, was the world's first commercially deployed IPTV network and, according to PCCW, is still the largest IPTV service in the world, with more than 550,000 customers, representing more than 25 percent of homes in Hong Kong.

PCCW also announced this week expanded partnerships with television sports providers to supply major sports content to PCCW mobile. Through ESPN STAR Sports, PCCW mobile will offer mobile ESPN content, which includes its SportsCenter news program, along with other key sports content.

PCCW mobile will also offer coverage of next season's Barclays English Premier League (2006/07) through a new partnership with Sportev, a mobile and broadband sports content providers.

PCCW mobile has also exclusively acquired England's FA Cup mobile content for the next two seasons (2006/07 and 2007/08).

Huawei's proprietary CMB is a precursor to Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) which is specified in 3GPP R6 using existing UMTS infrastructure.

The specification of MBMS was frozen in 2005 Q3 and commercial implementations are expected in late 2007, at the earliest.

Huawei says that CMB is based on existing UMTS infrastructure and real time streaming application protocol and requires only a software upgrade to existing UMTS infrastructure./

According to a Huawei technical presentation from October 2005, CMB will not affect MBMS deployment, cellular networks will be able to  support CMB and MBMS simultaneously and network resources will be able to be shared between CMB and MBMS.

Huawei says it will maintain CMB and help to smoothly migrate to MBMS, but that by deploying CMB ahead of MBMS, operators will gain the advantage of two years of experience in streaming service deployment.

Several types of Huawei handsets, including the U626, U526, can support CMB also, according to Huawei, Motorola plans to support CMB and other handset vendors have expressed interest.There are two other major competing technologies for  multimedia broadcasting to cellular handsets:  DVB-H which  uses broadcasts from TV transmitters in standard UHF TV frequencies using technology similar to terrestrial digital video broadcasting, and Qualcomm's MediaFlo.