Will MBMS arrive too late for mass-market mobile TV?

摘要

The mobile phone industry has set a self-imposed deadline for bringing mobile TV to customers: June 9, 2006 - the beginning of the FIFA World Cup in Germany. By that time, operators will need an efficient technology for delivering mass-market mobile TV services if they are to avoid the risk of network congestion when hundreds of soccer fans in the same cell simultaneously order the same World Cup highlight. Not be confused with currently available 3G video-streaming services, mobile TV uses point-to-point transmission technology, which requires a separate IP stream for each customer. This is known as "unicast," and it is a greedy consumer of network resources, typically enabling only a handful of simultaneous data streams per cell.