When operators and investors ask us about NextWave, and whether or not its vision can be turned into reality, creating a new wireless powerhouse, the question in always answered with another question ‘ yes, if it can if can attract tier 1 partners ‘ either operators or equipment suppliers. Well this week NextWave subsidiary IP Wireless (please call us NextWave ‘ we’ve dropped the IP Wireless name) made a significant first step in signing up heavy hitting Mobile TV partners, attracting both Huawei and Alcatel Lucent to its bold new MXtv WiMAX multicasting mobile TV technology and it hopes to sign further WiMAX base station suppliers to take the entire WiMAX mobile TV market in one fell swoop.
What the company has done is a software implementation of MBS, the IEE802.16e version of a multicast system, and on top of this it has dropped in the kind of mobile TV function that it has put into its TDtv Time Division Duplexing (TDD) cellular mobile TV service.
That system had its breakthrough at Mobile World Congress, when after years of trials Orange and T-Mobile agreed to move to a 2,000 user commercial trial covering a good chunk of central London, in the UK.
Legendary Sprint Nextel CTO, Barry West, when selecting a mobile TV strategy for the new Xohm Sprint network said of the NextWave (back then it was IP Wireless) technology, ‘Impressive technology, and we probably would have gone with it, if it had enough of an eco-system around it,’ and then he announced instead that the company would go with WiMAX base stations from Nokia Siemens, Samsung and Motorola, without hinting at all just how it would go about offering mobile TV.
Now Sprint may have the opportunity to look at the technology once again if NextWave can convince one or more of those base station suppliers to take its MXtv software and bundle it, as Huawei and Alcatel have done, with their base stations.
The system will deliver as many as 45 mobile TV channels in Quarter VGA at 30 frames a second, each taking up around 300 Kbps, in a single 10 MHz WiMAX channel. It also offers channel switching times of under 2 seconds. Most operators won’t have a full 10MHz of spectrum to throw at this, and Jon Hambidge, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NextWave Network Products, told us, ‘If people want to offer 20 TV channels, then they will still have around 60% of their mobile broadband capacity left, which is fine for year one or year two of a new WiMAX network, and after that they can think about using more spectrum.’
The system is entirely flexible on how much of the spectrum it dedicates to Mobile TV, and how much it uses for other applications.
More Unicast streamed video can also be sent over the mobile broadband capacity to customers on a one to one basis, creating the possibility for a wide range of mobile TV bouquets with MXtv, just as in TDtv on a cellular network.
The system can dynamically allocate spectrum to TV services based on content availability, time-of-day requirements, user demand, and the availability of ‘must see’ live events such as sports, concerts, interactive reality shows or emergency broadcasts.
MXtv is based on what are being called ‘wave 2’ WiMAX base stations which implement the MBS (Mobile Broadcast Services) part of the 802.16e standard. ‘All of the new ranges of WiMAX devices that are coming out now, and all those that Sprint has installed to date, are all wave 2 compliant,’ Hambidge explained.
But NextWave has added 3 or 4 things extra to the basic MBS services, one of which creates spectral diversity benefits, even though WiMAX base stations tend to operate as a three way (or more) triangle of radios, with each one using a different channel of spectrum to ensure it does not interfere with its neighbor.
The MXtv idea is to create the equivalent of a single frequency network, and each of the radio segments in a base station will select an OFDM frame to broadcast the TV services. So a client devices gets one TV signal from a nearby base station, and another copy of the same signal (from slightly varying spectrum) from a neighboring base station, and the NextWave mobile CPE chip combines the two signals to get a signal lift out of them, to improve reception (see diagram).
Another thing that NextWave can bring to the party is the Packet Video Media Fusion Platform, which provides handset side and server side ESG data, search and navigation, and a dynamically constructed electronic service guide. Media Fusion is also being given the job of solving how to handle addressable advertising.
Packet Video at the Mobile World Congress in February also launched a matchbox-sized device which can receive mobile TV signals and either plug straight into a handset or convert them to Wi-Fi so that any Wi-Fi enabled player can view mobile TV broadcasts. This includes the iPod Touch and the iPhone, as well as the Nokia N Series and Windows Mobile devices. The idea is to allow mobile subscribers to upgrade to advanced mobile TV services without changing their handset and these and specialist handsets will be used for the TDtv trial in the UK. Presumably it will now offer a WiMAX MBS version of this devices as well, which is perhaps why NextWave is suggesting that its chip can be used to create Mobile TV devices which are not mobile two way handsets, making room for consumer devices like personal media players, handheld gaming or navigational devices and DVD players, within the scheme.
The company is also offering its own Content Delivery Network and its own version of an MBS controller. Further backwards into the core, it can use the identical video software that is used for its TDtv services.
Although NextWave is selling base stations itself, and has just launched its own Wave 2 compliant system, because this is all delivered in a software layer, it can easily be offered to rival base station suppliers, but then because of the lift from effectively creating a Single Frequency Network, the handset vendors will all have to work with the NextWave NW2000 MXtv-enabled WiMAX System-on-a-Chip (SoC) to offer Mobile TV.
The SoC also allows roaming across worldwide WiMAX frequencies and profiles, as well as being able to work with Wi-Fi. It is built in 65 nm CMOS and the company says it is optimized for VoIP, real-time streaming or gaming.
The deal with Huawei was announced a day ahead of the Alcatel deal, and under the agreement, Huawei will integrate MXtv Macro-Diversity Multicast and Broadcast technology into its own base station platform and ASN-GW network platforms.
The two companies have already completed initial design and are undergoing integration and interoperability testing and the Huawei’s plus NextWave’s system should be with us commercially at the end of second quarter 2008.
NextWave followed up with an immediate duplicate agreement with Alcatel-Lucent and they plan to perform interoperability tests with Alcatel-Lucent’s commercial WiMAX infrastructure starting in the second quarter of 2008.