UNITED STATES – According to a recently issued report by independent research company Analysys, the capacity of third generation (3G) wireless networks could be exceeded within the next two years, if as little as 40% of subscribers view just eight minutes of streaming video per day.Thus far, mobile TV service has not caught on with the mobile consumer market at large, but with the heavy marketing and promotion of TV services offered by Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Cingular, plus new offerings in the works from MTV and Warner, the market appears poised to expand rapidly.
“Streaming video consumes 10 times the bandwidth over a network that voice traffic consumes,” said Alastair Brydon, one of the authors of the Analysys report. “So watching 10 minutes worth of video per day will have a significant impact on the network. Right now, the 3G networks are empty, so it’s not a problem. But if the service proves popular, then it could be a big problem.”
Mobile carriers have invested billions in the development of 3G networks, and hope that demand for the ability to send email, download music and video and watch streamed television feeds will give a needed jump-start to the industry’s declining revenues.
“We’re very encouraged by the market,” said Dale Knoop, general manager of multimedia for Sprint. “We definitely think there’s a lot of demand to have things that entertain and inform you on the go.”
The problem, of course, is that 3G was not really developed with streaming video in mind; due to the fact that 3G networks are divided into cells, with users in a given cell sharing bandwidth, a cell with a large number of heavy users can be overloaded relatively easily.
“The carriers are going to have to move the traffic off the cell network eventually,” said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research. “It just doesn’t have the kind of capacity that video demands.”
An example of the problem played out in South Korea recently; once Korean carriers started offering video streaming services, it was only a matter of 9 months before the networks became so congested that SK Telecom had to build a separate satellite network to support its mobile TV service.
“3G is a poor solution for a big media event, like a breaking news story or a championship sporting event,” Brydon said. “Just when everyone tunes in to see what’s happening, the network fails. Not having enough capacity is clearly a bit of a weakness.”
