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To: Stoctrash who wrote (44374)	9/1/1999 3:31:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Nokia redefines digital TV as a mobile device By Junko Yoshida EE Times (09/01/99, 1:34 p.m. EDT) eet.com BERLIN, Germany — Nokia is attempting to redefine terrestrial digital television in Europe by introducing a portable/mobile TV device featuring a GSM phone and designed to offer TV programs as well as data broadcast, Internet access and e-mail services. With its partners ZDF; a German public broadcaster, and Deutsche Telekom, Nokia demonstrated a prototype of its battery-operated, color LCD-screen digital TV, code-named MediaScreen, at Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) 1999 here this week. Nokia's MediaScreen, with an embedded computer running the Linux operating system and a GSM phone used as a return channel, was shown in action as both a portable device within a booth and as a mobile unit installed in a car that could be seen cruising the IFA exhibition halls. The live demonstrations proved the robustness of Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM)-based digital video broadcast (DVB)-Terrestrial reception. Both the portable and mobile device demos displayed perfectly clear pictures, plus interactive access to the Internet and to select Internet sites offered by the broadcaster through the digital TV data stream. The mobile DTV integrated in a car used a small window antenna attached to the vehicle. Working with ZDF and Deutsche Telekom on a project called "DVB@air," Nokia hopes to build momentum for the idea that DVB-Terrestrial is about more than pretty pictures; rather, it is about the use of broadcast channels for multimedia. The Finnish company, a clear leader in the mobile phone market, used IFA '99 to position DVB-T as a fundamental prerequisite of mobile computing. The company hopes to see broadband broadcast channels supplement telecommunications channels for the transmission of data, Internet pages and other information. Helmut Stein, senior vice president and chief technical officer of Nokia Multimedia Terminals, said that countries outside of Europe have signed onto DVB-T, because of the mobile and portable TV reception feature inherent in the DVB-T's modulation scheme. Singapore, for example, has embraced the standard as it plans to roll out a public transportation system equipped to offer DVB-T mobile services to passengers in real-time, Stein said. At IFA, ZDF demoed a multimedia data service called digitext, in which IP-based content is transformed into HTML. The broadcast of these signals was done via terrestrial networks made available by the Deutsche Telekom's DVB-T pilot project in Berlin. The mobile phone channel was supplied by the D1 network. Mobile reception is the most challenging environment for television broadcast due to constant and rapid changes of reception conditions that render single carrier systems such as analog TV unsuitable. Advocates of DVB-T contend that the COFDM multi-carrier modulation systems used in DVB-T alone has proved capable of solving this problem. DVB-T's transmission scheme allows for either a 2k or 8k mode. The 2k mode is suitable for single-transmitter operation and for relatively small single frequency networks with limited transmitter power. The 8k mode can be used both for single-transmitter operation and for large-area single-frequency networks. Janne Aaltonen, group manager of new technology at Nokia Multimedia Terminals, said that 2k mode is known to have better characteristics for a mobile environment, and allows a digital TV in a car moving at about 180 miles per hour to receive DVB-T signals. When 8k mode is used for DVB-T mobile applications, the over-the-air reception is limited to the maximum speed of 50 mph, he said. Through simulations and a number of ongoing trials in Europe, much of the DVB-T mobile standard has already been defined. Issues still to be decided include is the automatic hand-over of protocols when a car equipped with a DVB-T device moves from one cell site to an adjacent site, Aaltonen said. For the '2k' system, The radius of a cell wherein DTV signals broadcast from a transmitter can reach is about 10 to 12 miles for a 2k system, or about 37 miles for an 8k system. Details of hand-over issues are currently under discussion. The intent is to achieve seamless DTV signal reception by a mobile device on the go. The DVB-T trial is currently being carried out in Lower Saxony, Germany, in conjunction with the Institute of Communications at the University of Braunschweig. And in Scandinavia, there are discussions of building 2k transmitters along highway E18, which connects Nordic countries from Sweden to Russia, according to Aaltonen. The DVB-T mobile launch, however, still remains "a concept," warned David Harby, commercial manager of Nokia Multimedia Terminals. "We need to have operators get interested" in rolling out multimedia data broadcasting services such as ZDF's digitext, he said.