News

IP Wireless goes for Orange trial of mobile TV in the UK

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 16 February 2006

IPWireless and Orange moved into mobile TV today, announcing that Orange would be "the first UMTS operator in the world to trial TDtv" - a technology which is being sold as a way of upgrading a 3G network to cope with high bandwidth streaming for lower cost than HSDPA.

Streaming is an application which requires backbone bandwidth, not low latency, and is therefore seen as IPWireless's best chance of beating Qualcomm's new subsidiary, Flarion, into the next generation upgrade cycle. Flarion's fast-response Flash-OFDM technology would probably offer nothing to TV viewers, and might well be power-hungry, said one observer today.

The official Orange statement said: "This news builds upon two partnership announcements IPWireless made last week with mobile content provider MobiTV and Vidiator, a mobile multimedia streaming company, to develop next-generation mobile TV delivery solutions."

Orange will launch this technical trial in the UK in its unpaired 3G spectrum, starting mid-2006.

Executives at RF specialist, Sequoia, said that the choice of IP Wireless's TD-CDMA technology was power-efficient. "Any sort of OFDM coding is power hungry. Wideband CDMA is power hungry, but OFDM is like WCDMA on steroids," commented CEO David Shepard at 3GSM's exhibition hall at 3GSM today.

Shephard was rolling out his new multi-mode RF product, a WEDGE RF transceiver today, which scores a breakthrough in power consumption standards for WCDMA handsets by going non-linear, using Polar technology.

"Flarion may well be ideal for PC cards, wanting high speed wireless broadband," said Shepard, "but for now, it won't be right for handsets."

Orange trials in the UK do not presage an official product launch any time soon, said insiders this week. "It could be at least two or three years, before we're ready to translate the results of our tests into a consumer offering," said one executive. "But we do think it looks promising, which is why we're doing the trials."

Tags: 3GSM , IPWireless and Mobile TV