14 DAY TRIAL // Huawei Technologies and QUALCOMM have successfully completed the first commercial MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) mobile TV interoperability testing, a mobile TV solution based on 3GPP Release 6. The test was performed on Huawei's UMTS/HSPA network with handsets based on QUALCOMM's Mobile Station Modem MSM7200 chipset solution.
During the test, MBMS technology was used to transmit TV programs at 256 Kbps, which played clearly and smoothly. Users were able to quickly switch channels by pressing navigation buttons on the handset and MBMS allowed streaming to be suspended during an incoming voice call and automatically resumed streaming when the call ended. The successful testing demonstrated that MBMS is on-track for large-scale commercial deployments in 2007.
MBMS is the most advanced mobile TV standard and allows network operators to roll out mobile TV services with relatively inexpensive deployment costs as compared to other mobile TV standards. MBMS supports both multimedia broadcast and multicast services, which allow operators to either directly broadcast multimedia content to all subscribers or only to a specific group of subscribers respectively. MBMS also supports abundant mobile multimedia applications. To provide MBMS mobile TV services, network operators need only a software upgrade to their existing UMTS/HSPA networks, and eliminates any required investment in additional radio frequency resources.
Based on the commercial CMB technology, Huawei's MBMS solution adopts special Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint technologies, allowing a single frequency to bear more than a dozen mobile TV channels and helping operators to develop applications including multimedia advertisements, free and premium TV channels and group sending of multimedia messages. Since Huawei's MBMS solution adopts advanced radio resources management algorithms, it ensures that operators realize the efficient sharing of radio resources between MBMS service and other mobile services.