The Japanese Communications Ministry has put off making up its mind over who in Japan gets a license for a new mobile broadcast network in the country. It has asked the Radio Regulatory Council for advice.
The two main cellular operators NTT DoCoMo and KDDI are each leading groups supporting different technology standards, one with an evolution of the existing ISDB-T DTV standard and KDDI pushing Qualcomm’s MediaFLO.
Which way would you go? Let’s see. An extension of ISDB-T will lead to the opportunity to all Japanese suppliers to export to Latin America and develop a continuing roadmap for a technology used in 70 million phones and almost every Japanese home. Or they could opt for one which will make Qualcomm rich, result in a royalty burden to Japanese industry and lead to completely re-building the technology base for mobile broadcasting. Hmmm?
That’s pretty much why MediaFLO has never caught on anywhere. It’s nothing to do with the technology choices.
KDDI’s support for MediaFLO is partially because the technology is mature and partially because it has been working with it for a while and has a head start. The video images are likely to be better per MHz used on any given channel compared to existing ISDB-T signals, but an adjustment to signaling using many of the techniques built into MediaFLO (simply because it was designed later) would do just as well. In either case brand new handsets will be needed to use the new network.
And anyway this network is not going to catch on, because to reach all of Japan it will require that it has an expensive network build, perhaps $200 million or more, and that will lead to having to charge the customer for paid Mobile TV, instead of the existing free service which is already used by 70 million consumers.
Which is all perhaps why there has been a suggestion the two companies either work together ‘ maybe use the Qualcomm advances in the ISDB-T format ‘ or each build a network and compete. That’s a great idea, and then instead of one company wasting money on a slightly better, paid mobile TV format, there would be two.
The network was supposed to be deployed by 2012 and ready to operate and that timescale still must be feasible, but it is less and less likely.
DoCoMo is pushing something called ISDB-Tmm which is a variable band version of ISDB-T using the same segment size across 14.5MHz of VHF, using some of the spectrum to be re-harvested by closing analog broadcasting in Japan. ISDB-Tmm (the mm is for multimedia) will also have both a streamed and downloaded delivery method.