LG Electronics and Harris Corporation are using this week’s National Association of Broadcasters convention, in Las Vegas, to unveil mobile digital television that will enable as many as 16 different video programs on one television channel. Harris Corporation says their “Scalable Full-Channel Mobile Mode” can send 16 different video programs on the 6 MHz bandwidth utilized by TV broadcasters.

Developed in conjunction with LG Electronics, which gets royalities for their ghost-prone ATSC standard, it devotes most of the 19.4 Mbps bitstream in the 6 MHz TV channel for transmission of mobile programming. Full-Channel Mobile Mode is designed for compatibility with the ATSC A/153 Mobile DTV Standard, adopted last year by the NAB.

While the demonstration is a prototype, “the finished product will require nothing more than a software upgrade” for Harris Mobile DTV equipment owners, according to Jay Adrick, vice president of broadcast technology for Harris Corporation.

“We’re already working with a customer, and there are others operating in the 700 MHz spectrum who plan to launch mobile services that are compatible with the ATSC transmission system,” Adrick said. “We believe that Scalable Full-Channel Mobile Mode transmission will come to market rather quickly, once it is standardized.

Broadcasters, like cellular operators, are only interested in one thing. But Qualcomm’s Media FLO has had little impact on the market. “Mobile TV is just not as big a deal as we all thought it would be,” said Frank Dickson of Instat. Qualcomm has spent almost $1 billion trying to find the Mobile TV sweet spot, notes Rethink Research.

The ATSC-M/H standard (ATSC A/153), delivers a “hardened” bit stream to mobile devices. Unfortunately, the M/H standard will require considerable overhead (pdf). It is expected that only about 18-38 percent of the bits allocated to the service will be available for actual service payloads.

Harris says MPH typically delivers about 1.1 Mbps of payload in a 4.4 Mbps channel (pdf). That’s 25% efficient. So a 20 Mbps channel is capable of about 5 Mbps of mobile television, or about 20 channels of 250 Kbps each. Qualcomm claims to deliver more payload (pdf) on 6 MHz, with their new FLO-EV delivering a 3-5 dB improvement in performance.

While current TV broadcasters are required by the FCC to offer at least one standard-definition digital TV program, owners of other 700 MHz spectrum have more flexibility. A spectrum owner could convert 2-way broadband channels into one-way mobile broadcast television.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) is an alliance of U.S. commercial and public broadcasters formed to accelerate the development and rollout of mobile DTV products and services. The MPH (Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld) system, jointly developed by LG and Harris, won out in a shoot out with the A-VSB system jointly developed by Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz; and a third system jointly developed by Thomson and Micronas. Harris says they have provided mobile-DTV equipment for about 40 U.S. broadcasters, with 36 of them currently transmitting mobile DTV.

Japan is the largest mobile TV market in the world with over 80 million ISDB enabled handsets shipped. Many countries in South America also follow the ISDB standard. With FLO TV being available countrywide in the United States and a range of receivers being available (FLO TV receivers), this translates into an advantage for this technology for Pay mobile TV services which cannot be easily beaten by competition, say some analysts.

Swapping Qualcomm’s COFDM-based system for an inefficient ATSC-based system may be more about keeping ATSC royalities in-house than providing any useful service.

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Germany’s first auction of new mobile spectrum for a decade kicked-off today with all four of the country’s main operators expected to bid on spectrum (pdf). According to a Dow Jones Newswires report, the auction is the first of its kind in Europe and is likely to set a benchmark for similar auctions throughout the continent.

The Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and France are expected to hold auctions this year, with the U.K. expected to auction frequencies next year, says Business Week. Spain, Italy and Portugal have yet to say when their auctions will take place.

“Many European countries will follow our auction closely,” said Matthias Kurth, president of Bundesnetzagentur, the German telecoms regulator. Analysts expect the auction to generate between 3 billion and 7 billion euros, a far cry from the 50 billion raised in 2000.

Spectrum is being auctioned on four different bands: 800MHz, 1.8GHz, 2GHz and 2.6GHz and includes the ‘digital dividend’ spectrum freed up from the switch from analogue to digital TV.

T-Mobile, Vodafone, KPN (E-Plus) and Telefonica’s O2 will bid on the frequencies. E-Plus and O2 – the two smaller players – took legal action against the regulator last year, arguing that the auction rules favour T-Mobile and Vodafone as they already own significant spectrum below 1GHz. While this action was rejected by the courts, Dow Jones Newswires notes that further legal steps are possible.

The 800 MHz frequencies come with specific terms attached. The winners commit to building a network to cover at least 90 percent of the population in rural towns and districts, starting with areas with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, before they can use these frequencies in more densely populated areas.

Meanwhile, nine telecoms firms are bidding for three pan India licences that cover 22 regions. Bids for 3G spectrum licenses in India’s biggest markets are approaching $1 billion apiece just three days into the two-week auction.

“The auction has started and it is going smoothly,” said a telecom ministry official.

Leading Indian operators such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar are among the applicants bidding for the spectrum, along with Tata DoCoMo. The government owned operators MTNL and BSNL, which already offer 3G services, will also pay the same price as the three winners of the auction for the pan-Indian licences.

Analysts say that the bidding for the 20-year 3G licenses will be aggressive and could push the total raised closer to $11bn. The total number of mobile phones sold in India has jumped nearly 300% over the past few years, from 35 million in 2005 to 130 million in 2009, says the Indian Cellular Association.

India’s broadband wireless spectrum auction could kick off in about two weeks, once the 3G sale ends, notes Caroline Gabriel. The WiMAX community is battling hard to keep all three of the 2.3GHz licenses in the face of a possible TD-LTE deployment, should a Qualcomm-led group win a license. If Qualcomm does win a license, the other two Indian operators will almost certainly both use WiMAX (state-owned BSNL is already deploying).

Aviat Network’s deployment with BSNL is the first commercial, urban mobile WiMAX 16e network in India. It’s starting in the state of Kerala with a population of more than 35 million. This mobile WiMAX rollout by BSNL will represent one of the largest Mobile WiMAX deployments in the world.

Taiwan, with a land area of a mere 32,260 square kilometres (13,892.0 sq mi), has no less than six WiMAX operators on the island using 2.5GHz WIMAX licenses awarded in July 2007 – three for the northern part of the island and three for the southern part.

Taiwan’s government has made WiMAX a priority to accelerate time-to-market, making Taiwan the worldwide IT test bed and application demonstration center.

The WiMAX operators include; First International Telecom (FiTel), Tatung InfoComm, Global Mobile, Vee Telecom Multimedia, VMAX, and Far EasTon.

VMAX (below), launched a free Wimax service to taxi passengers in Taipei last month while Global Mobile plans to roll out WiMAX throughout Taipei by the end 2010.

China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile network operator, signed a deal with Taiwanese operator Far EasTone to jointly develop a next generation TD-LTE mobile network in Taiwan for testing purposes, the companies said in a joint statement.

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Industry leaders announce the creation of the WiMAX 2 Collaboration Initiative (WCI) to accelerate WiMAX 2 development. The alliance includes original WiMAX supporters like Intel, Motorola, Samsung and ZTE, hope to get peak speeds over 300Mbps.

The group will issue detailed milestones and delivery schedules within the next 3-6 months with the goal to support the WiMAX Forum’s readiness to certify commercial products by late 2011. The new Mobile WiMax standard, 802.16m, will replace 802.16e and offer far faster download and upload speeds. Clearwire expects to implement 120Mbps WiMAX 2 sometime in 2011.

LTE and WiMAX are often called “4G”, but they are not “official” 4G standards, according to the ITU. The ITU requires 100 Mbps (mobile) and 1 Gbps (fixed) speeds, among other criteria, to qualify as true “4G”.

Wimax 2 meets the ITU requirements for 4G and allows for peak rates of more than 300 Mbps. Companies supporting the interoperability WiMAX 2.0 standard include; Alvarion, Beceem, GCT Semiconductor, Intel, Motorola, Samsung, Sequans, XRONet and ZTE.

There were some 640 million mobile broadband subs the end of 2009, driven by growing demand for smartphones, new applications and social networking services. That number will exceed 1 billion this year, according to ITU statistics. The number of mobile broadband subscriptions surpassed those for fixed broadband in 2008, according to the ITU.

LTE was a major theme at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain, where a number of new user devices supporting LTE were announced or demonstrated. Over twenty LTE networks are planned to enter commercial service by the end of 2010. But LTE does not meet “4G” specs as defined by the ITU.

WiMAX 2, based on IEEE 802.16m, will meet the International Telecommunications Union’s “IMT-Advanced” requirements, as will LTE Advanced.

The WiMAX Forum currently tracks 559 WiMAX deployments in 147 countries cover some 620 million people across the globe.

In other news, the WiMAX Forum Congress Asia meets in Taipei, Taiwan from April 12-14 to discuss a variety of WiMAX topics that matter to the Asia Pacific region.

Taiwan has become an important WiMAX market with Far EastTon, Tatung and VMAX all launching networks, mostly focused in Taipei and Hsinchu City.

Samsung plans to deploy WiMax 2 in 2011, although it did not name their operator customer. Samsung’s WiMax customers include Clearwire, UQ Communications, in Japan, Yota in Russia, and YTL Communications in Malaysia.

Related DailyWireless stories include; IEEE Submits 802.16m to ITU for 4G , LTE-Advanced Submitted to ITU, CTIA 2010, LTE-TDD & WiMAX: Two Peas in a Pod?, Blowback on 2.6 GHz, Towards a REAL “4G” Standard, Unified “4G” Standard Proposed, Japan Sub-channels WiMAX, Samsung WiMAXes MWC, Verizon: LTE in 25 to 30 Markets By 2010, Motorola Testing LTE in UK, Qualcomm: Our UMB Standard? Furgetaboutit.

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Jeff Jarvis: Reboxing the iPad

It’s not out of dogmatism but because I simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use.

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Neither mobile WiMAX nor LTE are, strictly speaking, “4G”, but Sprint is still the only mobile carrier in the USA to provide “4G-like” services (if you don’t count T-Mobile’s HSPA+). Clear’s Mobile WiMAX is only for data, so far. The first “4G” phone, their HTC EVO, due this summer, has two cameras, HD video recording and a 4.3-inch touch screen.

Compete wanted to see what consumers really understood about “4G”. As part of Compete’s quarterly Smartphone Intelligence report, they asked Smartphone owners about their knowledge of 3G and 4G network availability, resulting in some interesting findings:

• Most Smartphone owners incorrectly believe that 4G technologies are available on certain phones
• Smartphone owners are more likely to be correct when asked about 3G functionality and availability
• Almost half of Smartphone owners do not know if 4G is being offered

The majority of Smartphone owners think that 4G is available on some smart phones, although it is not available (yet) on any U.S. phone. That will change this summer. LTE phones are expected to arrive in a year or two.

Clearwire plans to bring Mobile WiMax to 120 Million people in 2010. Markets getting WiMAX in 2010 include Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, New York City, Houston, Boston, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Denver, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg now says there’s plenty of spectrum after all. He thinks the FCC should butt out and let big business manage spectrum.

The National Broadband Plan recommended that the FCC make 300 megahertz available for mobile use within 5 years. That was in lockstep with industry demands (see Dailywireless: Battle of the Bands and Cellcos: One Thing – Bandwidth).

CTIA President Steve Largent told Congress just four months ago:

“With more than 276 million subscribers in the U.S., it is vital for our industry to secure at least 800 MHz of additional spectrum within the next six years. Without this additional spectrum, our industry will cease to provide U.S. consumers with the most innovative and most competitive wireless offerings in the world.”

Broadcasting and Cable backs Seidenberg’s view that the government shouldn’t provide new spectrum:

Asked by an audience member how he thought the FCC’s effort to get broadcasters to give up 120MHz of spectrum would shake out, he said the answer would probably come as a surprise.

“If I took the self-serving approach,” he said, “it would be: ‘Okay, screw the broadcasters. Let’s get their spectrum and we can put it to use in our wireless and cellular business or broadband business.’” But he said his reaction was, instead, that the FCC should let the marketplace work it out without intervention. “I don’t think the FCC should tinker with this,” he said. “I think the market’s going to settle this. So in the long term, if we can’t show that we have applications and services to utilize that spectrum better than the broadcasters, then the broadcasters will keep the spectrum.”

The FCC, in a blog post, notes that Verizon often complained about lack of spectrum:

Many have noted recent comments by the CEO of Verizon Ivan Seidenberg casting doubt on the need to allocate additional spectrum for mobile broadband, a key recommendation in the National Broadband Plan. The fact is, Verizon played a major role in building an overwhelming record in support of more mobile broadband spectrum, consistently expressing its official view that the country faces a looming spectrum crisis that could undermine the country’s global competitiveness.

• In Verizon’s June 9, 2009, filing:
  “Verizon Wireless believes that a more important goal of any spectrum inventory should be to identify any underused spectrum that can be repurposed to auction for broadband use. The government has the responsibility to identify and license spectrum to serve the public interest.”
• In Verizon’s September 30, 2009 filing:
  “The Commission has identified only 50 megahertz of additional spectrum for next generation wireless growth. This total lags behind both the United States’ competitor nations as well as the ever increasing demand for mobile broadband services. Verizon Wireless therefore urges the Commission to undertake a targeted examination of spectrum to identify additional bands.”

Verizon’s goal is probably spectrum scarcity. To further that end, Ivan Seidenberg and AT&T Wireless CEO, Randall Stephenson were nudging the Feds to take some kind of action against Sprint’s spectrum advantage. If they got Sprint’s spectrum, it would reduce competition. Their plan backfired.

Another 300 MHz just increases competition. That’s the last thing Verizon wants.

Seidenberg had one beef with the feds that seems legit:

“Cable companies have bought spectrum over the last 10 or 15 years that’s been lying fallow,” he said. “So, here the FCC is out running around looking for new sources of spectrum, and we’ve got probably 150 megahertz of spectrum sitting out there that people own that aren’t being built on. I don’t get that. This annoys me.”

SpectrumCo, an AWS bidding consortium with Cox, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, picked up 137 licenses in 2006’s Advanced Wireless Services auction (at 1.7/2.1 GHz). SpectrumCo won a total of 137 AWS licenses for $2.37 billion. Comcast’s share was $1.29 billion, followed by Time Warner Cable’s $632.2 million, and Cox’s $248.3 million. (See SpectrumCo Gets Licenses). Cox paid $248.3 million for AWS licenses in 2006, and transfered those licenses out of SpectrumCo and directly to Cox.

Cable operators are sitting on their 19 MHz (not “150 megahertz”). Instead of AWS, Comcast and Time Warner are using Clear’s Mobile WiMAX which won’t require them to build voice infrastructure and delivers better mobile video performance.

Perhaps the FCC should tell cable operators to “use it or loose it.” And while they’re at it, the FCC could change their AWS-3 plan. Instead of selling that orphaned 20 MHz (at 2.1GHz) to Verizon or AT&T, they ought to make it “lightly licensed” – like the 3.65 GHz band – and make it available at no charge for municipal broadband.

By the way – what’s the deal with spectrum pairing?

Everyone knows data will dominate LTE/WiMAX networks. But the FCC persists on selling most spectrum using wasteful FDD pairs – because that’s where the money is — with voice-centric cellular operators. But cellular operators are now jumping on board TDD-LTE for voice and data. One channel isn’t wasted “listening”. The FCC seems unresponsive to this approach. It’s bad policy.

Related Dailywireless articles include; The National Broadband Plan, Cellcos: One Thing – Bandwidth, T-Mobile Eyeing Clear Spectrum, FCC Considers Auctioning Off TV Frequencies, FCC Okays Terrestrial LTE for SkyTerra, Battle of the Bands Goes to Congress, D-Block: It’s Done; Congress Pays, LTE: Cox Cable Calling , White Spaces Trialed in North Carolina, FCC: Change for Broadcasting & USF, FCC Moves Forward with White Space Databases, Comcast Goes Mobile with WiMAX, Time-Warner Adding Mobile WiMAX Service,Free Internet Access Proposed by FCC, National Broadband Plan Previewed, D-Block: It’s Done; Congress Pays, FCC “Finds” 500MHz?, FCC Floats “100 Squared” Initiative, FCC to Auction TV Airwaves?, Google: Fiber to the Home?, Smart Grids, Spectrum in Budget, White Spaces Heating Up

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