It’s a bit late for Rohde and Schwarz to begin issuing press releases about the Qtel DVB-H project in Qatar finally being up and running, as it was set up to run as a trial only until April and had to be ready in time for the Asian Games, which were held there last December.
But that’s the way of official contracts, sometimes companies just don’t get a chance to report on them until they are almost history.
Rohde & Schwarz set up pilot project for Qtel, Qatar’s national mobile radio provider and it was one of the first DVB-H networks in the Middle East although there was a demo in Dubai during 2006 run by Etisalat and Nokia.
The DVB-H system was built using Rohde & Schwarz medium range transmitters, IP encapsulators and video encoders. T-Systems Media and Broadcast was responsible for planning the network and integrating the playout center and Samsung supplied handsets.
The system offered 13 video channels using H.264 video encoders but Rohde and Scwarz says it could manage up to 25 channels using statistical multiplexing.
There is no mention of whether or not Qatar Telecom (Qtel) will just let the trial skip into a fully blown service, but given that Qatar’s surface area is just 11,437 square kilometers, then spectrum permitting, this would relatively simple and not that expensive.