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Qualcomm-led Group Gets Down to Business
By ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist
Six months after its creation, FLO Forum, which was founded by Qualcomm to evangelize its proprietary MediaFLO platform for multicasting broadcast-quality video, has submitted its first body of work to the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) for possible inclusion as a global standard.
In a press release issued Thursday, FLO Forum said it has officially submitted the FLO (Forward Link-Only) Air Interface Specification (AIS) as a contribution to the TIA's Subcommittee TR-47.1. The TR-47 engineering committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of Terrestrial Mobile Multimedia Multicast (TM3) standards. FLO-AIS was first ratified by FLO Forum back in November.
FLO Forum was formed last July by Qualcomm and its wholly owned MediaFLO USA subsidiary as well as notably companies like Harris, Huawei, Korea Telecom, Kyocera, LG Electronics, LG Telecom, Pantech & Curitel, Roundbox, Sanyo Electric, Sharp and ZTE. The trade association is positioned against Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) group of Europe, which has endorsed a competing open standard called DVB-H (DVB for Handhelds). DVB has received support from Nokia, Motorola and Samsung.
The Air Interface Specification defines the radio protocols used over the air between the FLO network and a FLO device for the delivery of multicast services. The AIS enables the delivery of multiple multimedia streams over the standard TV channel allocation bandwidths (UHF Channel 55) while ensuring fast service acquisition, robust performance in mobile fading links, and low receiver power consumption. FLO Forum’s primary argument over DVB-H is that its lower spectrum allocation (700 MHz v. 1.67 GHz) operates more effectively.
“The submission of the Air Interface Specification to the TR-47.1 engineering subcommittee marks a significant milestone in the progress of global FLO technology standardization,” said Dr. Kamil A. Grajski, president of the FLO Forum. “The FLO Forum is preparing additional specifications, including Minimum Performance Specifications for FLO devices and FLO transmitters. These are expected to be ready for submission to Standards Development Organizations (SDO) in early 2006.”
“The technical submission to the TR-47.1 subcommittee marks a first step towards embracing this technology as a TIA standard,” said Dan Bart, senior vice president, Standards and Special Projects, at TIA. “We look forward to working with the FLO Forum as the specification and the TIA Standard progresses. TIA is eager to standardize the technologies used for Terrestrial Mobile Multimedia Multicast.”
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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.
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