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Video plans for mobile phones reveal harsh realities of 3G services

It's always been one of those things "everybody knows" - that 3G phones will be magic, and will display movies for mobile users; but there is more than just a little work to do before that happens.

Reality is starting to show up in the world's plans for the next generation of mobile phones, as the people who will run 3G services start planning how they will provide video to mobile users. All the plans, unsurprisingly, anticipate that we will have pretty slow data connections.

The spotlight is on Korea, where most pioneering work seems to be going on, and which is sponsoring new video compression technology.

Video onto a cellphone at 28 kbits/second has been demonstrated by Korean innovator Office Noa. That speed is pretty fast compared with what the normal GSM phone user could get today at a standard 9.6 kbits/second data rate; but Orange users in the UK already have the option of using high-speed circuit-switched data services running at a maximum 28 kbits/second.

Office Noa has sold its technology to LG Telecom, which has 4.5 million subscribers. And LG Telecom has struck a deal with Thin Multimedia, which will provide the playback software for the video material which market research seems to say mobile users in Korea want, and will pay for.

The news will probably puzzle anybody who has been reading of high-speed third-generation phone networks running at a data rate of ten times faster, with many headlines predicting 300 kbits/second for mobile phones.

Reality, as revealed by these video developments, is that even when the first 3G phones emerge, they will spend most of their time out of range of high-speed transmitters, falling back to standard GSM networks as soon as they move away from a few pioneering city areas.

Simply, that means that any video service offered over 3G will have to be able to carry on playing when the phone switched to GPRS connections, where the data rate will be much slower than 3G.

As the world's software experts focus on video compression at the exchange end, and de-compression in the phone end, it's widely expected that Microsoft will want to compete in this business.

Currently, although Microsoft's old Windows CE team is working furiously to get into the mobile phone business, its video expertise is being developed in the sitting room business of DVD players.

However, its "Corona" technology, announced last week, includes several features which could be very tempting for slower-speed carriers.

Corona is aimed at the people who sell cable video; it encodes and decodes video more efficiently than established cable software can do. But its main advantage is that it eliminates the need to wait for a video stream. Instead, cable customers can switch channels and immediately see the images, as if they had switched channels on a TV.

Very high definition video streams are normally buffered in the set-top box, building up a few seconds of video before it is sent to the screen. It's one option for ensuring better quality; Microsoft has found a way around it, with Corona.