When 4G LTE made its appearance on the mobile landscape it created a huge buzz. Since then mobile data has become faster and more reliable and there’s now movement leading us into the 5G LTE era. Ericsson is making its own moves working on what they call LTE-B (LTE Broadcast). LTE-B is a new kind of data transfer that uses LTE to push media content to multiple devices using a single data stream. Ericsson is working with Telstra and 21st Century Fox’s Innovation Lab in Australia on a pilot program to test the technology with an unknown number of users.
As part of the trial, consumer participants will be given immediate access to newly released movies in high quality, with the promise that it will have no impact on device performance or their mobile phone’s data plan. The content delivery pilot will use Ericsson MediaFirst for content processing and origin, and its Unified Delivery Network for content delivery.
The idea of LTE-B isn’t new as Ericsson and Telstra have been working on this for at least the past year. The short video below sort of gives you the idea of what they want to accomplish with this broadcast technology.
https://youtu.be/cdInxqwCVKw
“It’s all thanks to LTE Broadcast technology (also known as LTE-B or multicast), which lets carriers and telecommunications providers push content to a large number of users at once using existing LTE spectrum,” Reilly reports. “Best of all, the carrier only needs to use a single stream of data to push the content (hence the idea of broadcasting) rather than requiring each user to download their own stream and put massive strain on the network.”
With 5G LTE coming soon and more mobile data hungry users than ever, if this Ericsson and Telstra experiment works out, it could help relieve the inevitable congestion fast mobile networks sometimes experience. We will try and keep an eye on any reports coming out of Australia about this pilot program and keep updating you should anything of interest arise.
What do you think of Ericsson and Telstra’s LTE Broadcast pilot program? Are you a reader in Australia who’s signed up for this? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
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[button link=”http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/ericsson-tests-lte-b-tech-in-content-delivery-pilot/5115558.article” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: BroadcastNow[/button][button link=”http://macdailynews.com/2017/02/27/fox-pushes-movies-straight-to-your-phone-with-no-data-usage-or-download-delays/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Mac Daily News[/button]
