T-Mobile and Orange launch mobile TV trial

Orange and T-Mobile have announced joint plans to pilot a mobile TV and multimedia broadcast service in London this year.

The trial will use the Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service based on the TDtv platform from NextWave Wireless and will be available to residents in west London.

The pilot aims to demonstrate how the cost of providing high-quality, mass-market mobile TV and multimedia broadcast services can be reduced significantly when operators share unpaired 3G spectrum and a standards-based TDtv broadcast network.

Orange and T-Mobile customers will use TDtv-enabled handsets to receive up to 24 high-resolution TV channels and 10 digital radio stations at a far lower delivery cost per channel than previously possible.

The service is expected to decide the case for mobile broadcast TV and radio services by providing more channels with higher picture quality fully integrated with existing multimedia services.

The channel line-up is expected to include many of the most popular broadcast and premium television channels in the UK.

Paul Jevons, director of product and innovation at Orange, said: "The results from the trial of TDtv in Bristol last year were extremely encouraging.

"This joint pilot of the service in London is an excellent opportunity for us properly to explore the great potential available to our customers from this technology."

The pilot will be powered by an end-to-end mobile broadcast system developed by NextWave Wireless that will include TDtv network infrastructure, as well as a complete chipset and software package that enables handset vendors to add TDtv to any multimedia handset.

NextWave's Packet Video subsidiary will provide a complete electronic programming guide that will integrate the TDtv service with the operators' existing 3G services.

"On a technical level, our involvement with this TDtv pilot is intended to raise awareness of the potential of broadcast mobile TV," said Emin Gurdenli, technical director at T-Mobile UK.

"TDtv uses part of the licensed 3G spectrum which is unused at the moment and is a technology that can scale to support high simultaneous usage levels without any degradation in quality."

Mobile network operators in Europe and the Asia Pacific which also own unpaired UMTS spectrum will be invited to participate in the pilot as observers, as will handset manufacturers which can make TDtv a standard feature in their devices.