Benefits, Demand for Broadcast LTE Still Unclear, Say Wireless Industry Experts
While mobile service operators are exploring broadcast LTE as an option for enhancing and expanding services to customers, consumer demand for such technology has yet to explode, some wireless and mobile services industry executives said in interviews. It’s unclear how or whether the use case for deploying broadcast LTE will move beyond events at live venues, they said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Mobile operators worldwide are considering LTE broadcast as part of their technology road map, said Chris Pearson, 4G Americas president. About 18 operators are testing the technology, he said, and it has recently gained some momentum. An operator’s current spectrum can be used to do it, he said. But “there are some enhancements to their current LTE infrastructure elements that need to take place,” and devices need to be broadcast LTE-capable to be able to receive LTE broadcast content, Pearson added.
The technology could be used to offload identical content to a massive amount of subscribers in the same area, at a sporting event or concert venue, he said. It also could be used for software updates, file delivery and other content delivery for smartphones and tablets, he said. An operator is using spectrum efficiently “by using a single frequency network to broadcast the same content to a large number of subscribers,” he said.
The demand for broadcast LTE is unclear, said Scott Wallsten, research vice president at the Technology Policy Institute. People don’t want to watch shows when a programmer says they need to be on, he said. “They want to watch a program when they want to watch it.” As a one-to-many service, broadcast LTE can have benefits during events that lots of people want to watch at the same time, he said. “It has to be live.” Sports is the “remaining thing where there’s demand from lots of people at the same time,” he added.
Consumers are moving to on-demand services and away from the linear broadcast model, said Mark McDiarmid, vice president-engineering at T-Mobile. While it may make economic sense to implement broadcast LTE in certain targeted locations, like venues or events, “the revenue opportunity and economics of deploying broadcast LTE more broadly remain challenging and unattractive,” he emailed. If the model becomes relevant longer term, “operators would have to incorporate the technology into devices and allocate network resources to support the configuration and operation of broadcast LTE,” he said.
There are some benefits regarding spectrum use and cost, some said. Broadcast LTE uses less spectrum compared with the spectrum required for each consumer trying to stream video, Wallsten said. But using spectrum for one service means that it can’t be used for other services, he said: Any service offered using spectrum “has an opportunity cost.” There is efficiency in delivering the same content to multiple users over an operator’s network, said Pearson.
McDiarmid said the benefits are limited and “niche” at best and pointed to a suspended effort by Qualcomm to transmit audio and video to cellphones. It failed “because consumers didn’t want to subscribe to a linear broadcast format,” he said, referring to the MediaFlo platform. “There is nothing inherent in broadcast LTE technology that might change that dynamic, so it’s a question of consumer needs and behaviors.”
New business models for broadcast LTE will evolve, Global Mobile Suppliers Association said in a report this month. Besides live event streaming, use cases include real-time TV streaming, newsfeeds and advertising, it said. Operators can use off-peak capacity to deliver new service offerings, “which could include rich media caching, or managed software updates,” it said.
The technology shows that there is lots of innovation in LTE, Wallsten said. “Maybe it’s a business model that will work.” Changes in the video market makes room for this kind of experimentation, he added.