Quote: : » Phil Quote: : » Quote: : » Quote: : » The mistake would be for them to do another BBC Three, switching off a channel and then providing intermittent iplayer content.
People are still watching TV but via boxes. There needs to be a freeview app that can deliver an OTT video streaming service similar to Molotov in France where users can Chromecast from their mobile phone to their TV.
Yes we need a Freeview app. We also need to think about capacity – could this app handle 30 million simultaneous HD streams of a future England World Cup final, for example?
It will probably be a tree-like distribution network, with a cache at each local exchange getting a feed, with the subscribers to that exchange viewing that. I’m sure that techies on this forum will tell us what the technical terminology for that system is… It has already been in use for several decades as regards web traffic in general.
An excitement with networking will be mesh networks. 5G, launching commercially in 2019, and advances in Bluetooth will mean that devices will no longer have be able to see the internet themselves, such as “have I got a signal ?”. As long as they are on the network, the information will be piped through to them from another device at an unknown point that does have a signal. ( This is vastly more advanced than just connecting to a router that itself has to have a signal ). It will lead to a more stable network. That’s the theory – time will tell how well it works…
My employer owns one of the four MNOs and will at some point launch a 5G network, though I don’t work directly on their mobile networks.
I’m still not seeing how the 5G hype is going to turn into reality, definitely not without a massive investment in a wireline network that will totally eclipse its capabilities (1Gbit to handsets under the most ideal of conditions? Yawn – the underlying FTTP network, that the necessary 5G small cells will use as backhaul, will do multi-gigabits to homes without breaking a sweat).
Mesh networks are a concept that never seems to work well in practice, and simple laws of physics seem to ruin the whole idea anyway. No, my phone isn’t going to be a mesh radio. It’ll ruin its already naff battery life, for one thing…
Before these telcos start talking about 5G, and various bodies talk about TV distribution over 5G, they need to concentrate on getting viable (and strong) 3G signals into many areas first, notwithstanding the requirement for a strong signal indoors. Where I am (a medium-sized town of 84,000 close to Birmingham and served by an excellent DTT signal from Sutton Coldfield) i struggle to get a 3G signal indoors, and just up the road from me there is no 3G signal outside at all. Looking at the coverage maps, 4G seems to be the same.

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