Qualcomm promoting data-casting for network relief

SAN DIEGO — Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) FLO TV may not be capturing the imaginations of the U.S. consumers, but Qualcomm has found other uses for FLO’s underlying technology. MediaFLO, the multicast technology powering FLO TV, can be tweaked not just to broadcast live video feeds across a market. It can be used to transmit any form of IP data to multiple devices simultaneously, which could then be consumed at a customer’s leisure.

Qualcomm has talked up data-casting on MediaFLO for some time, using its as a means of sending live information feeds to phones. For instance, one data feed would transmit up-to-the-minute quotes for the entire stock market over a broadcast channel. A ticker widget or client in each individual user’s phone would then pull from that stream the quotes pertinent to each user, based on his or her preferences. FLO TV has also discussed using data-casting as a subscription video service, transmitting whole TV episodes or movies in the middle of the night. Customers would then wake up to find their content pre-loaded into their devices.

But at its Uplinq developers conference, Qualcomm stated more ambitious goals for MediaFLO technology. Rather than just use it as a supplementary service for FLO TV and other MediaFLO operators, data-casting services could be wholesaled to operators and third-party content providers, which could use the technology to send large batches of subscription content while conserving their valuable 3G and 4G data capacity.

At his keynote address on Wednesday, Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs gave the example of Wired magazine, which is preparing a digital version of its publication for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) that would run nearly 500 MB over the network due to embedded multimedia. Such a huge file would kill any operator's 3G network if it had to send the magazine to individual subscribers. Rather than rely on Wi-Fi or other local networks, operators could ship that magazine en masse to subscribers across an entire market using MediaFLO data-casting. Because the data is broadcast, adding new subscribers doesn’t create any additional demands to the network. Every subscriber in a market, or just a mere handful, could receive the magazine, but no additional network capacity would be consumed.

“We can get that information onto a device in a much more efficient manner,” Jacobs said.

A single MediaFLO channel supports 6 Mb/s, meaning that a 500 MB magazine like Wired would still take 10 minutes to download over the FLO network, but Jacobs pointed out that few digital publishers are as ambitious as Wired. The average digital magazine comes in under 50 MB. By putting magazines and other subscription content into timeslots, dozens of individual data casts could be performed in a single hour over a single channel. During off hours, some MediaFLO TV channels could go offline, which could then be devoted to data-casting. The 3G or 4G operator would benefit from being able to offer high-bandwidth content to customers, but wouldn’t have to charge exorbitant fees for it, nor worry about those voluminous files clogging their network pipes, Jacobs said.

The major issue with using MediaFLO for data-casting is that any device using it would have to have a MediaFLO chip embedded. Operators that support the service have limited MediaFLO to a few specialty TV devices. Adding MediaFLO silicon to smartphones and tablets solely for data-casting could add considerable cost to the already expensive devices.

Data-casting could be supported over 3G and 4G networks themselves, though not as efficiently, Jacobs said. Qualcomm has already developed multicast versions of its CDMA 1X EV-DO technology, which could use existing cell sites to send data feeds across an entire network. But Jacobs said that operators' spectrum and network capacity are so valuable they’ll likely want to avoid taking any of it offline for data-casting.

Conserving network capacity was an underlying theme at Uplinq. Though Qualcomm is one of the key innovators in mobile broadband technology, Jacobs warned that consumers' hunger for data and developer innovation of data-intensive apps are far outpacing networks’ ability to deliver. Jacobs said in 2014 the amount of mobile data consumed in a single month will far exceed the total data consumed in 2008. “There is the fact that we have the danger of digital brown outs,” he said. But Jacobs also placed the onus on developers at Uplinq to help conserve capacity. “You have an obligation to build applications that are as network efficient as possible,” he said.