América Móvil does LatAm's first LTE Broadcast trial in Rio

Mexican telecoms group América Móvil has carried out the first field test of LTE Broadcast in Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, though its local subsidiaries Claro and NET.

The LTE Broadcast technology allows the simultaneous transmission of high-quality video for multiple mobile users at a selected location through the 4G LTE network. It is a multicast transmission suited mainly to mobile TV and specific cases, such as events with a large concentration of people.

Unlike traditional transmissions, which send content to each device individually, LTE Broadcast distributes content to multiple users through a single and continuous signal, which reportedly improves efficiency and stability. However, the technology requires compatible phones.

The demo of the technology was conducted by América Móvil during the Rio Open tennis competition, South America's largest tennis tournament, in partnership with Swedish telecoms equipment supplier Ericsson, which provided the infrastructure.

Other partners included Qualcomm (chipsets), Samsung (smartphones), Globosat (the transmission content) and Movile (app development).

THE TEST

Samsung provided S6 phones embedded with Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Samsung's Exynus processors and adapted to the test with Qualcomm middleware. The two processors are said to be the only ones in the market compatible with LTE Broadcast.

This is the first time that such technology has been tested in Latin America. Other recent tests were carried out with operators in the US, Poland and Australia.

The technology is new, but not yet commercial as it lacks LTE Broadcast-enabled phones. South Korea's KT is the only operator to transmit specific events to users in LTE Broadcast, due to the higher penetration of technology-ready handsets in that country.

Moreover, as the deployment is complex and expensive, the business model needs to pay off in order to take off.

In the future, the technology could be used for live transmissions to mobile devices by pay-TV operators, NET's CMO Márcio Carvalho said during the demo.

Roberto Medeiros, Qualcomm's products development manager, told Brazilian journalists he expected other local operators to also carry out field tests.

According to the executive, all the latest generation of Snapdragon chipsets are compatible with the LTE Broadcast, but they require a remote middleware update to run the technology.

Ericsson's media and TV solutions director Jefferson Nobile told BNamericas there are no more tests immediately scheduled for other Latin American markets.

When asked by BNamericas, Samsung Brasil product engineer Matheus Regiani said that, technically, the company is ready to activate this compatibility in its smartphones, in Latin America or elsewhere. "It's in the operator's hands. The key point is market demand and how they market it."

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