Vodafone: No new video spec

Published reports that claim Vodafone Group, Cingular Wireless, China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo are among dozens of companies collaborating on a new mobile video standard are false, according to a Vodafone representative.

“There's not been any sort of announcement on this,” said a spokesman for the world's largest wireless company. The spokesman said that while mobile video standards have been a topic of conversation in meetings of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a consortium of wireless operators and vendors of which Vodafone is a member, nothing has moved beyond the discussion stage.

“There's not even been a 3GPP meeting in a long time, nor were there any secret meetings.”

Rumors of the new video standard appear to have originated with a story from the Associated Press' Tokyo bureau that seems to confuse details surrounding the advanced Super 3G standard proposed to the 3GPP by NTT DoCoMo. On Dec. 7, 2004, the 3GPP did agree to begin an investigation into the development of a higher-speed version of 3G following a request from a faction of 26 member companies led by the Japanese carrier; dubbed “Super 3G” and designed as a low-cost upgrade to current 3G WCDMA networks, the standard promises 100 Mb/s downlink and 50 Mb/s uplink speeds and is seen in some quarters as a defense measure against the increasing speeds of emerging wireless technologies such as WiMAX.

The mobile video standard rumors are nevertheless making waves at a time when carrier interest in delivering video to wireless devices is at a fever pitch and the market for wireless video services in the U.S. continues to grow. Earlier this month, Verizon Wireless announced a new consumer service, Vcast, that supports video and will be rolled out nationally (see story, page 18).

Verizon's announcement followed on the heels of a spate of mobile video announcements made in late 2004. Qualcomm announced plans to build an $800 million nationwide mobile video and multimedia multicasting network, called MediaFLO, scheduled to go live in late 2006; Texas Instruments introduced Hollywood, a chip it claims will equal mobile video resolution comparable to today's digital television broadcasts by the time it hits retail in 2007; and Nokia and tower operator Crown Castle unveiled a Pittsburgh-area trial of DVB-H, a mobile TV standard initially developed in Europe.

DVB-H, an open standard created by a consortium called the Digital Video Broadcast Project and finalized in 2004, appears to have the edge in the standards race, both in the U.S. and abroad. The standard is in trials in Berlin and Oxford, England, in addition to its aforementioned test in Pittsburgh, where Nokia and Crown Castle are trialing the standard in the 1.6 GHz frequency band that Crown Castle owns nationwide.

“DVB-H has a distinct advantage as a legacy technology that people have been working on for years,” said Kush Parikh, worldwide strategic marketing manager for mobile connectivity solutions at Texas Instruments.