The war over DVB-T versus DVB-H is raging, and will rage for some time to come, and the HSPA datacard is a real weapon in this war. What is quite funny is that it is only in Germany, where the cellular operators were denied the license to operate the DVB-H platform that they have actively pushed the delivery of DVB-T free to air TV on a handset.
The reason that’s funny is that Germany has hardly any takers for its DVB-T digital terrestrial service, unlike the UK, France, Italy and Spain, which have decent penetration or better, and where it is considered the main TV service. Germany has too many pay TV platforms, satellite, cable and IPTV and so it can pretend that the DVB-T service is really for handset owners.
But the right way of bringing this to market, is probably not on a handset at all, but on a USB datacard which attaches to a laptop. PC users are addicted to having the internet and use it to do real work or to stave off boredom while they are out of touch from their usual broadband connections. Much the same can be said of watching TV.
So when one of the leading suppliers of USB datacard dongles, in the form of Huawei, teams up with a DVB-T chip supplier like DiBcom, its another round in the war between the two TV formats, and while we cannot imagine that Vodafone or O2 (all who use Huawei dongles) would introduce such a device in say France or Spain, they area almost certain to introduce them where they operate in Germany, and may even add them in countries like the UK, which has no DVB-H service and not much likelihood of getting one soon, due to spectrum issues.
The Huawei E510 uses the DiBcom DIB9080-H which has a tuner and a demodulator all in one for both DVB-T and DVB-H, and offers HSPA at speeds up to 7.2 Mbps, and is plug and play with Windows XP and Vista.
So a customer in Germany might watch free to air DVB-T, and if they actually preferred something on the competing DVB-H service from Mobile 3.0, could subscribe to that as well. DiBcom, which has the largest installed base of any DVB-H chip, came out of the DVB-T world, especially bundled on PC motherboards, and on in-car systems. It is also the supplier of chips to handsets that are being targeted at adding DVB-T to cellular customers in Germany, and earlier this month became the chip provider to LG for a DVB-T chip for the German market.
Our own view is that even DiBcom DVB-T chips will use a lot of power, and produce an inferior image to DVB-H (because the signal is weaker), but most German cellular operators seem convinced they should offer them in order to undermine the DVB-H service launch there.
However while battery life is not so much an issue on a laptop, the DVB-T signal is usually considerably weaker than DVB-H service since the former needs to reach a large rooftop antenna, which never moves or changes its orientation, and which is 10 meters above ground, while the DVB-H signal has to be engineered to reach in-building, 1 meter from the floor on a device with no external antenna, which moves all the time.
French TV chip maker DiBcom, says it has delivered 10 million components to different segments of the TV market. DiBcom is perhaps now best known for its DVB-H chip which came to the market around a year ahead of anyone else’s, but it was also well established before that in the DVB-T chip market. It claims to have a 75% market share in four major markets: automotive, notebook PCs, mobile phones and other handhelds such as PMPs and LCD TVs, and says that now its chips are in 13 handset models.