We have suggested in the past that the Chinese CMMB STiMi system might break out of China and create a mobile TV export market, and even hinted that S2M in Africa might use the system, but the buzz about the African-Middle East start up at last week’s Mobile Broadcasting Forum in Amsterdam was that the decision has already been made.
Nowhere on the company’s marketing materials is there any mention of the STiMi decision, and the diagram which it uses to describe its system looks more like an Alcatel DVB-SH depiction, but it makes references to all the satellite based mobile TV systems around the world ‘ Korea’s S-DMB, Alcatel’s DVB-SH, the US Satellite Radio networks as well as China’s system, in preparing the way for its own services ‘ due to start this quarter.
The confusion comes because the company is insisting that it will use S-Band from a satellite, and that terrestrial gap fillers fill also be in S-Band. The Chinese system uses S-Band from a satellite (specifically 2.5GHz) and UHF (around 700 MHz) on the ground, which gives far better propagation properties and requires a lower cost network build out.
But it is pretty clear that 700 MHz licenses in the African and Middle East regions would be too expensive and would need to be harmonized also for Mobile TV use ‘ so what S2M is doing instead is borrowing from the Alcatel approach and using S-Band from end to end. While this means that ground transmitters and gap fillers will achieve less distance ‘ more like 5 or 6 kilometers radius rather than the 20 to 25 km or so which 700 MHz can usually reach, it is still optimal for a part of the world where there are few dense urban sprawls to block the signal.
The devices and chips built for the Chinese system are already set up to use either an S-Band signal or a UHF signal and should work relatively well without modification.
But the critical thing is that the modulation, the codecs and the FEC approach, as well as the chip designs, will all borrow from the Chinese CMMB STiMi effort sponsored by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) regulator. That means that the economies of scale being driven into chips and handsets there will make the S2M system cheaper. China said recently that it expects to ship 10 million devices in 2009 and 50 million in 2010. While these numbers appear to us to be exaggerated by around double the real numbers, they still represent significant volumes.
If Africa finds this attractive and S2M manages to convince local regulators that its plans are worth supporting, STiMi services could claim a second continent in a single year. Right now S2M is only selling terrestrial systems targeting Algeria, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and the Yemen.
Only 2 or 3 of these areas are already working on rival technologies, notably DVB-H with trials in Qatar and EUE. Success by S2M could stop DVB-H in its tracks in the region.
So far there is no date for a satellite launch that has been published by S2M, but it has entered into a contract with Loral for a satellite based on its 1300 platform. So S2M knows when it is likely to launch a satellite, even if it has not made it public, and given the time when it announced this, we would hazard a guess that it will be late 2009 or early 2010. The satellite should have a 15 year life and deliver 20kW of transmit power.
But for now S2M should be on the verge of announcing where its first terrestrial transmitters are, and in the process of ensuring that it has rights to the S-Band spectrum in all or some of those countries.
Given the rate at which S-Band has become a premium spectrum in other countries, for instance Europe moving it from a ‘first come, first served’ basis to an auction, S2M may find that it cannot keep this market to itself, and a rival may offer one of the other technologies. However if it gains a volume manufacturing advantage from using Chinese devices, it may already have an unassailable lead, price wise.
S2M is headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has its own Broadcasting Center and will use traditional satellite Ku-band to uplink to the satellite.
The big question is whether or not this kind of move will unseat Nokia’s confidence in DVB-H. To date it has said that it will not make phones for any other mobile TV technology except DVB-H. But if it continues to hold that view, then it will be cut out of tens of millions of STiMi phones in China, and if other countries adopt it elsewhere, even more devices.
The big worry for Nokia is that the winner of the Indian satellite mobile TV spectrum auction may also choose to use STiMi, unless Alcatel can muster a win in the region. If that happens, then every phone that is sold attached to such a mobile TV system is a customer Nokia will lose, because in India it has an 80% market share, and it would be bound to offer India support if it went down that route (although just as certainly it will be bound to add considerable financial support to the DVB-H efforts in India to ensure that those are the systems which take off in popularity not a rival satellite service).