Electro/Telecom Industry Trends
Feb 2006
A New TIA Engineering Committee to Meet a New Need
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Last September, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) formed a new engineering committee, Terrestrial Mobile Multimedia Multicast (TM3), also known as TR-47. The first new engineering committee to be formed by TIA in 12 years, TR-47 will address the standardization of critical aspects of the technologies driving the convergence of terrestrial broadcast and advanced mobile wireless multimedia services. Dan Bart, TIA senior vice president of standards and special projects, discusses the new committee and its objectives.
Q: What is TR-47 going to focus on?
We’re using the generic term “TM3,” which refers to terrestrial as opposed to satellite and mobile versus fixed. The technologies to be standardized will support mobile communications, which means the user is moving, as well as multi-media, which is more than just voice or data. And it’s multi-cast, so it’s more like broadcast and point-to-multi-point than two-way communications, so TM3 will be able to support applications that involve pushing movies or other video applications to handheld devices. There are technologies that are already doing that—in Europe you have DVB-H [digital voice broadcasting – handheld] and in this country, Qualcomm has a technology called FLO, or forward link only. There’s also a group called the FLO Forum, which is comprised of companies like Qualcomm that are developing technologies for these applications. In Korea there’s DMB, or digital multimedia broadcasting. These are examples of the particular types of technologies that might find their way into TR-47, if proponents of these technologies choose to bring them to TIA to standardize them. TIA is technology neutral, meaning we can standardize on more than one type of technology. We’re not an advocate for any one type of technology as long as there’s a constituency of companies that want it standardized. We’re technology and company neutral.
Q: Will the standards that the committee works on be focused on video delivery?
More on broadband communications; it doesn’t necessarily have to mean video in the sense of a movie. It could be a conference call with a video image, for example. But to send voice you need a certain amount of bandwidth, and to send wideband data you need more bandwidth, and to send broadband information like video, you need a lot more bandwidth. This technology is more of a broadband technology area, and it is optimized for pushing broadband communications like video from one point to a number of points, similar to broadcast TV.
Contrast that with something like what Verizon is using for its V CAST service, which is the name for their current video clip service. If you go to their website, it looks like they’re sending trailers for movies and video clips and things like that. Isn’t that video? Yes. Is that a full two-hour motion picture? No. But it’s a little bit of video, a five-minute video clip. Are they using TM3 to do that? No. They’re using the current TIA CDMA2000 standard. You can send a little bit of video that way, but you’re tying up a two-way communications pipe, something that was designed for point-to-point communications, like a phone call. That’s not an optimal use of the spectrum if you wanted have the same information distributed to many, many people. If you’re trying to send video to a lot of people, you’d be much better off from an efficiency standpoint if you used something like TM3 technologies, which are optimized for sending a message from an originating point to many points.
Q: What are some of the reasons for standardizing this type of technology?
What we’re finding is that people want the kind of communications that include video. In marketing speak at tradeshows they talk about the “triple play”: data, voice, video. We’re finding that there’s an insatiable desire for bandwidth and that people are finding new ways to use it.
Q: How quickly can you standardize the TM3 technology and how soon will standardized products be on the market?
Most of our TIA standards are produced in less than a year now. That’s the pace at which technology is changing. If you want to standardize a solution you need to move at that pace. I try to hone my standards-development process so we can turn the standards around quickly. That way we can have standardized solutions as opposed to proprietary solutions to serve this demanding marketplace.
If there’s market demand for it, whoever gets there first will get a bigger share of the pie. I think we’re going to see the standards moving very quickly, just like they are right now, and therefore we’re going to see the technology come to market very quickly.
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