The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
According to Javaid MBMS is a sub-optimal solution. "There are two issues with MBMS it is a pretty expensive way to do things and it is a narrowband solution. Do people want two or three channels or do they want an experience that is more like pay TV? We think a proper pay TV service is about 20-40 channels. Our vision for the service is a proper interactive television experience.
However MBMS is attractive because it does not require investment in an additional network or spectrum and can be applied selectively in networks that are already offering a mix of video on-demand and broadcast content to ease the load in areas where video traffic is high and capacity constrained. MBMS however, is not yet commercially available. Both network equipment and handsets are expected in 2008.
Javaid sees the rollout of MediaFLO networks in other parts of the world as being primarily rolling out of a new pay TV operation with cellular operators as resellers. "At one end of the spectrum we can operate solely as a technology vendor. The other model we are very interested in is going in as joint venture partners...There are many countries in the world where we could do that... What we created in the US was...basically a wholesale pay TV business and we think that is a powerful business model, but that does not mean it wil happen that way in other parts of the world."
Whether Qualcomm succeeds with MediaFLO will depend on many factors, but after several years of development and a demonstrably viable technology it is certainly in the right place at the right time, if market forecasts are anywhere near the mark. Market analyst Datamonitor predicts that the number of mobile broadcast TV subscribers will grow from a mere 4.4 million today to an estimated 155.6 million by the end of 2012. Stuart Corner travelled to CommunicAsia in Singapore as a guest of Qualcomm.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
