LTE could carry TV on 28 percent of the spectrum, says Ericsson

Stuart Corner
Friday, 27 May 2011 16:08

Business IT - Technology

Ericsson has told a who's who of spectrum specialists from the telecoms and broadcasting industries at the ACMA's Radcomms 2011 conference that digital TV broadcasts, which in the US take up 300MHz of spectrum, could be delivered over LTE networks using Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) technology in just 28 percent of this spectrum.

"This is just for a bit of fun," said Kursten Liens, general manager strategy for Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, as he put up a slide outlining the technology, in a wide-ranging presentation to the conference.

He explained: "Ericsson responded to a call from the FCC in the US to look at more spectrally efficient ways of dealing with distribution of TV broadcast services using cellular, and this is our response. The submission is publicly available."

Members of the broadcast community in the audience would likely not be much amused by Liens' "bit of fun" and he was quick to add: "I am not advocating that the broadcasters would want to do this right now. This is more to illustrate the capability and the evolution through the R&D we put into telecom services year after year as an industry to show that we can do a lot more with spectrum than we do today'¦It is of course very much in the theoretical domain."

Theoretical it may be, and even were the technology near to commercialisation, the barriers to its implementation would be enormous, but its eventual adoption may be inevitable.

Aas Nicholas Negroponte famously observed in what has become known as the Negroponte switch. "As more mobile devices need connections to the data network, and bandwidths required and deliverable in wired or fibre-optic systems grow, it becomes steadily less sensible to use wireless broadcast as a way of communicating with static installations."

The ACMA's planning out to 2020, is forecasting mobile data volumes 1000 times greater those in 2007, and the need for an additional 300MHz of spectrum to carry it, notwithstanding expected increases in spectral efficiency that will come from LTE and, beyond that LTE Advanced.

The Ericsson paper the FCC notes that, in the US, "The scarcity of radio spectrum has led the US FCC rule that additional 500MHz of spectrum are to be identified for mobile broadband systems in the next decade - out of which 120MHz are to come from the TV band in the next five years."

CONTINUED