Israeli WiFi video specialist Celeno let the veil slip slightly at the IP &TV World Forum this week when it confessed that Deutsche Telekom’s T-Entertain services would soon be using devices with Celeno’s chips in them. The specific device is thought to be a Point to Multipoint video bridge that uses the breakthrough 6 antenna MIMO WiFi chip, which Celeno claims can deliver HD video with virtually ‘zero visual artifacts.’
The company has already signed deals with companies providing devices to China Telecom and CEO Gilad Rozen told Faultline that ‘the China Telecom deal is now shipping in the low tens of thousands,’ already. That deal came to light back in August and Celeno followed that up at IBC in September by being selected within the Liberty Global Horizon hybrid cable-OTT set top. That device will now not ship until very late this year.
New deals also announced by Celeno included a deal with Israel’s leading satellite TV provider Yes, using the chips in a home network trial allowing HD VoD movies to be streamed over the internet and then over WiFi. The service distributes video content to customers’ home gateway over the public internet. Celeno also announced that Sweden’s Inteno has selected Celeno to power its ZAP100 Wi-Fi video bridge. Inteno is one of the leading suppliers of CPE equipment to service providers in the Nordic market. Celeno says that there are now 50 smaller service providers deploying devices with its chips in the US and Europe, plus these big three. No shipment dates or terms were given on the Deutsche Telekom deal, but we also know that Celeno is also trialing with Orange in France, which would be an even more significant deal, given its high subscriber numbers.
Celeno says that its devices can create multiple implicit beams simultaneously and can target WiFi receivers which do not have MIMO antennas and said that other rival approaches which use less antennas, such as Turkey’s Airties, required a MIMO chip at both ends, so wouldn’t work well in installations where there was existing equipment. Airties has told us in the past that while it does prefer the same chip at each end, they are only off the shelf Broadcom 2 x 2 MIMO chips and so unlikely to cost what the Celeno chips do. Celeno counters that only one such chip is needed in the home and then it can just as easily target an iPad or a wireless DTV. The Celeno chips offer dynamic 40 MHz or 20MHz utilization, and PHY-level interference detection as well as seamless channel hopping.