Cricket goes 4G with Ericsson and Telstra at the Melbourne Cricket Ground
Australia's major telco provider, Telstra, today successfully completed a live demonstration of Ericsson's LTE Broadcast solution in a stadium environment.
Three dedicated streams of content – live coverage, highlights and statistics – of the Australia versus England T20 cricket match were broadcast to participants. By using a specially designed application and an LTE Broadcast-enabled device, participants were able to select the content of the most interest to them.
By broadcasting a single stream, LTE Broadcast allows an unlimited number of enabled users in the broadcast areas to receive popular content, ensuring a high quality user experience while making the most efficient use of spectrum. In environments such as stadiums and public venues, where subscriber densities can reach extremely high levels, broadcasting content is the best way to deliver a consistent and reliable user experience.
Mike Wright, Telstra executive director for networks said: 'This trial proved that the LTE Broadcast solution worked effectively in a stadium environment. Instead of requiring around 2GB of data per user to stream one content channel of the game, we were able to serve all LTE Broadcast users, with three concurrent streams requiring a total of around 6GB for the entire broadcast, which clearly demonstrates an efficient use of spectrum. This outcome has great potential to provide new services to attendees at sporting or other entertainment events and to lift the user experience to a new level.'
Without LTE Broadcast, each user would receive an individual data stream for the content and the quality would be dependent on the number of users in the cell area, a problem considering that Ericsson's latest Mobility Report predicts that video traffic in mobile networks will grow by around 55% annually until 2019.
Håkan Eriksson, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, said: 'LTE Broadcast provides a great opportunity for mobile operators to drive new revenue streams for premium entertainment video services over LTE and meet increasing consumer demand for exceptional quality video experience. Together with leading industry partners in standardization and ecosystem development, we will ready commercial deployment for the mass market, optimizing the use of existing spectrum and networks.'
This trial demonstrates all parts of Ericsson's end to end solution, consisting of software updates for existing radio and core network elements, new media service layer and Consulting & System Integration services.
Ericsson's LTE Broadcast solution is designed to scale with increasing video consumption, efficiently delivering best quality of experience, and new revenue opportunities through differentiated video services.
