Alcatel-Lucent has thrown a US lifeline this week to the DVB mobile TV technologies which seemed to have been routed in the US, by the strategy of Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.
However it is not the terrestrial only DVB-H that Alcatel is looking to proliferate through the US, but its own 2 GHz S-Band satellite terrestrial hybrid, dubbed DVB-SH and approved by the DVB Project as the standard for a hybrid satellite system working in conjunction with terrestrial repeaters. The system can also work alongside smaller localized DVB-H services working in UHF or other spectrum.
The ICO Global Communications satellite vehicle which will trial, and potentially deploy, a US wide mobile TV service is controlled by Eagle River Investments, the Craig McCaw owned investment arm which invested $577 million to help bring the company out of Chapter XI bankruptcy back in 2000. The prospect of the Alcatel technology being used to provide the broadcast video element of a mobile a triple play for McCaw’s Clearwire is clearly once option for McCaw to consider in setting up the deal.
Already the Alcatel system is expected to begin deployment in Europe during 2007, despite the fact that a satellite for it won’t go up for another two years in 2009, this is because although S-Band is allocated for satellite use in Europe, there is a waiver to allow joint satellite and terrestrial use of the same spectrum, and ICO has similar usage agreed with the FCC.
So this makes the potential for a US launch is more imminent. This will now be trialed in the 2GHz spectrum owned by ICO for its Mobile Interactive Media (MIM) services. ICO has a Loral built satellite nearing completion, which is planning to hitch a ride on a Lockheed Martin Atlas V launch craft due to fly in November this year.
Deployment will take until December and trials of the mobile TV system will run in early 2008, and if any mobile or broadcast operator decides to launch a service based on it, such as Clearwire, the system will have a US wide footprint from around the same time that MediaFLO achieves it, because MediaFLO is a terrestrial system that has to be built out a city at a time.
Of course mobile TV without the terrestrial repeaters will only get you so far in terms of in-building penetration, although it will work fine for cars and pedestrians, and one or two storey rural buildings, and ICO says that it plans the deployment of a terrestrial network in two cities during 2008, to demonstrate that the ICO hybrid approach will work for mobile TV.It will also demonstrate the emergency two way voice and messaging networks which it has a duty to deliver under the terms of its license, as well as location based services, for navigation, live traffic and weather.
In total ICO has 20MHz of spectrum, which is enough for anything up to 50 mobile TV channels, and reckons it will get it network operational ahead of rivals who won the other licenses, TerreStar, MSV and TMI Communications, which anyhow seem focused on more of a rural access market, rather than mobile TV applications, though this may change once they see this deal.
If Craig McCaw chooses to market the mobile TV services alongside Clearwire, which is already using the AOL brand heavily to deliver its services (see separate story), this could provide a natural route to market, though perhaps not the only one. ICO might also tempt Sprint, which has said that it will offer multicast WiMAX for TV, and any of hundreds of local incumbent telcos and mobile operators in the US which ply their trade underneath the huge market shadows of Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of whom have signed to work with MediaFLO.
At present ICO has around $240 million of cash and cash equivalents, which is probably enough to get quite a few cities built out, with terrestrial repeaters, and needs to services around $650 million of debt, which has quite a few years to run. The hybrid approach to mobile TV means that it would have a US wide footprint straight away, which means it could begin servicing rural America as early as this time next Summer, and it can build out repeaters in Cities to bring in-building penetration gradually. The GEO is a Loral 1300 satellite optimized for video, which has a 15-year service life that will reach all 50 states in the US, plus Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The company has spent $310 million so far on its satellite and launch programs.
Alcatel can now secure the use of its technology in Europe, through is previous deal with SES Astra and Eutelsat and will likely be planning something similar in parts of Asia, potentially helping the Chinese out with its own similar hybrid satellite technology standard.
One of the biggest problems with terrestrial systems is that if they offer a very high Effective Radiated Power at their antenna sites, they can potentially interfere with other services, even though the radio signal is in fine shape when it arrives for use at a handset miles away.
In satellite, huge static aerial systems can deliver a massive power hike to transmissions, which by the time they arrive at the planet’s surface offer a uniform and acceptable radio power across a continent sized footprint.
That European satellite is actually being built by Alcatel Alenia Space Systems, a company that was, in the most part acquired by both Italian Finmecanica and French Thales last year from Alcatel, but the seeds of the mobile TV strategy must have already been sown, prior to Alcatel giving up control of the company.
That satellite will cost €130 million ($166 million) and allow Alcatel and its partners to offer services into France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the UK.
The Alcatel system uses QPSK for the satellite signal, but 16QAM for the terrestrial signal because in the given spectrum, the transmitters will have to be far closer together than most other mobile TV systems, giving better in-building reception. But therein lies its weakness, the pure number of transmitters required to build such a system.
The system is very similar to DVB-H apart from the spectrum – its gap filler strategy is in line with cellular networks so that no new physical sites are required for implementation; and it uses the same OFDM physical layer, with time interleaving, frequency interleaving and forward error correction built into the DVB IP Datacast content delivery structure. It will also use the same electronic service guide and digital rights management standards.
By electing to use a similar spectrum to cellular systems, there is virtually no radio planning required, as all the transmitters can be placed on existing cellular towers. Alcatel is promising that each base station needs the addition of about a $20,000 transmitter and reckons that despite using S-Band its system could be about 40% cheaper to deploy than a DVB-H or MediaFLO network using UHF spectrum.
ICO says that it will provide high-quality mobile video to large-screen user devices, by which we assume these are similar to the new generation of mobile handsets being used for MediaFLO and DVB-H which have 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch screens.
Alcatel-Lucent and ICO are in final negotiations for Alcatel-Lucent to be the end-to-end network integrator for both the satellite and terrestrial networks and to provide corresponding installation and network integration services.
ICO will also provide full-duplex, IP data communication services between customer devices and satellite base station equipment using Hughes’ GMR (Geostationary Mobile Radio) air interface technology. Hughes will also provide devices that will offer Internet access and VoIP, as well as mobile TV