Infrastructures

You are currently browsing the archive for the Infrastructures category.

Live Traffic Information on GPS Devices in Canada

December 9, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, public broadcasting by Administrator | 3 comments

In my recent reflexions about the new potential for hybrid radio based on FM I identified RDS-TMC as an incentive to maintain and even expand the FM (RDS) infrastructure in Canada. While speaking about that at a meeting last week I learned that Corus Entertainment was deploying RDS-TMC traffic for Garmin devices in major cities in Canada. I’m not sure how long it has been there but I think it is quite new. And now that I’m aware of that, I see traffic enabled Garmin devices advertised everywhere… and prices are very reasonable.

So last week I ordered a Garmin model 265WT from Tigerdirect.ca (170$). The “T” at the end of the model number indicates that the FM RDS-TMC is included in the box. With such package, traffic information seems to be included for free for the whole life of the device. I’m not quite clear about that but for some reasons, Garmin also sells lifetime traffic information for 50$ on their website. Maybe some devices have to be activated before traffic information works?

Anyways. I received the device yesterday and was eager to try it. That’s what I did on my way home last night. It was very simple to install. In fact, nothing special has to be done. The lighter power cord must be plugged into the device and the car (the FM RDS receiver is part of that cord) and that’s it. When I launched the device, it took just a few seconds before I could see a little “traffic icon” on the maps.

Pressing on that icon revealed two types of traffic information. I took a picture (shown below) of the traffic situation last night at around 7pm in Ottawa. As we can see, there was heavy traffic on the main highway in Ottawa… and that was no surprise to me… it was perfect timing for my experiment: hockey night! And every time its the same thing: the highway gets jammed at the “Scotiabank Place”. So that’s the red segment on the map here.

IMG_3197.JPG-1.0 (RGB, 1 layer) 3888x2592 – GIMP.png

The other traffic display shows a list of the various problem zones. This is shown on the second photo I took:

IMG_3199.JPG.png

So very positive experience for me. I’m impressed. It works well and is very easy to use. The next step will be to see how real-time navigation and re-routing works considering the traffic. In the meantime, I guess canadians will want a new Garmin for Christmas because they certainly understand that traffic is a major enhancement on a GPS device.

If you wonder where exactly the service is available, have a look at this page on the Navteq website. A quick scan over the list shows following regions: Hamilton-Burlington, Montreal-Laval, Oshawa-Whitby-Clarington, Ottawa-Gatineau, St. Catharines-Niagara Falls-Welland, Toronto-Mississauga and Vancouver-Surrey-Burnaby.

! UPDATE, WARNING: I was told that the service has not been officially launched yet. I guess that this means it may be unstable or could even be stopped anytime. Please consider this if you think of buying yourself a new Garmin for Christmas.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Challenges for GPRS and 3G Radio

July 24, 2009 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

There is a nice post on the Public Radio Player (PRP) blog about some challenges for Internet radio when distributed over mobile wireless networks and some strategies used in the PRP.

“A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public radio program and have it suddenly cut out….”

Some challenges can be expected:

  • loss of signal while roaming from cell to cell. Networks are optimized for voice calls but not for data yet.
  • minimal bitrate like 32 kbps is desirable but connection is still not guaranteed and sound quality is no great
  • buffers have to be implemented in receiver to mitigate signal loss.

Results of a survey made by PC World suggest that 3G coverage may not be adequate for the delivery of sustained bitrates in major cities in USA. Like this table shows, networks speeds can be impressive but their reliability vary greatly so that live radio transmissions may be hard to achieve.

There is certainly a lot of room for experimentation here in this new area but I tend to believe that it could take a while before we see 3G replace true “physical layer” broadcast networks for live transmissions.

Tags: , , , , ,

Royalty-Free Public Domain – A path towards Ubiquity

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

I read this excellent story some time ago in Vanity Fair titled “An oral history of the Internet“. I believe that one of the reasons why the Internet is what it is now comes from the fact that the Web is a royalty-free technology. And that does not happen by itself. To produce RF-tech these days, one has got to fight for it and give up potential revenue streams. That is what the CERN team did. Robert Cailliau says:

“At one point cern was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic. He said, Robert, do you want to be rich? I thought, Well, it helps, no? He apparently didn’t care about that. What he cared about was to make sure that the thing would work, that it would just be there for everybody. He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that cern put the whole thing in the public domain.”

The least we can say is that the strategy worked. The Web is now ubiquitous.

Is there a lesson here for creating the mobile broadcast system of tomorrow?

Tags: , , , , , ,

Broadcasting the Twittersphere

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, User Generated Media by Administrator | 3 comments

I think that Twitter and micro-blogging in general have properties that could be exploited along with broadcasting services. I’ll write my thoughts about this later on.

As a first step in this reflexion, I’d like to estimate the total bandwidth of Twitter, that is, how many kilobits per second are being Tweeted on average.

I made a similar exercise some time ago with regards to the blogosphere in a post titled “Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!”.

So I found some twitter services that provide relevant data. For example, TweeSpeed is an instant speed meter that shows the current number of tweets per minute. A graph showing the speed per hour during the last week is also available. A quick look at that graph now suggests that 700.000 tweets per hour would be a reasonable approximation for last week’s average, excluding the peek caused by the “Michael Jackson Effect”. Twitpocalypse currently reports 221 tweets per second which results in a similar value (221*60*60 =795.600 tweets per hour ). On another front, the recent HubSpot State of the Twittershpere report provides similar amounts on a daily basis instead of per hour. I suspect that this is a mistake. I’ll be pessimistic and take the largest number. The Hubspot report also informs on the distribution of actual tweet length. I’ll average the tweet length to 110 characters per tweet.

So the math goes like this:

110ch * 1byte/ch * 700k/hour = 77 Mbytes/hour

or

TOTAL TWITTER BANDWIDTH = 170 kbps !

Again, very surprising results! The current Twitter bandwidth is barely higher than a typical Internet or DAB radio station. The whole Twittershpere would only require to sacrifice a couple of off-air DAB stations in every market. I feel that very innovative datacasting/social applications could be built based on this!

Tags: , , , , ,

FemtoDAB

June 24, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | 4 comments

According to this article, Vodafone will be next week the first mobile network operator to launch a femtocell product in Europe:

“Looking like a home router, femtocells give 3G coverage indoors, and use home broadband to connect calls across the Internet to the mobile network.”

“… will be available on different price plans… Essentially, the femto is free to anyone on a £30 contract, and £5 otherwise – including dongle customers”

Femtocells are in fact compact devices (similar to Wi-Fi routers) that act as very low power cell phone base stations that can be installed in end-users premises. Typical cell phones can connect to them instead of the remote “high-power” towers operated by mobile network operators. Femtocells carry the usual communication services through standard Internet connections in homes and offices.

Key benefits to operators (O) and users (U):

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Off-loading cellular networks (O)
  • MNOs can still charge service costs while using end-users resources (Internet) (O)
  • Use the mobile device at home at lower rates (U)
  • Does not need regular phone service at home anymore (O, U)

Could this femtocell approach be exploited in the context of digital broadcasting as well? At CRC, we have developed a compact software transmitter for DAB. This platform could be further integrated as a low-cost personal DAB transmitter or FemtoDAB cell!

Such a FemtoDAB approach could offer interesting benefits:

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Outdoor, indoor roaming with the same device (broadcast enabled handhelds) (U)
  • Transmission of additional Internet radio content in the femtoDAB cell (U)

One of the challenges will be to make FemtoDAB more attractive than the Wi-Fi options.

Do you see any use cases for FemtoDAB?

Tags: , , , , , ,

In-car Wi-Fi Internet Radio

June 24, 2009 in Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media by Administrator | 2 comments

As Internet radio appliances are becoming available, there is still the issue that they can’t be used in your car.

This could change thanks to so-called “in-car WiFi routers” which are designed to provide Internet access through 3G mobile telephony networks.

AutoNet Mobile offers such device and service combination:

we create a Wi-Fi hot spot that allows everyone in the car to connect multiple devices to the internet, in and around the car! it’s the next step in in-car entertainment and productvity. we make internet in your car easier than ever because we provide both the in-car router and the monthly service. our affordable monthly service plans start at only $29 per month.

This still represent an expensive proposition for radio though. One hour daily consumption of good quality Internet radio content could easily reach the 29$ 1Gb limit.

Tags: , , , , , ,

RDS Enabled Handhelds

April 24, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, Mobility, Services by Administrator | 1 comment

The current financial context is not optimal for deploying new broadcast networks. Some will tend to think twice on how to maximize the use of the current infrastructure.

Isn’t that the case with FM radio? Will it truly benefit from going digital?

One of the compromise I find attractive is starting to emerge: enabling mobile phone handsets to receive FM AND RDS. Such an effort led by GSS and Silicon Laboratiroes is reported here at RadioWorld.

GSS believes that cell phones that can receive FM without cumbersome headphone antennas will not only be more popular with consumers but can then put RDS capabilities into the hands of many more consumers, which in turn will better support the penetration of emergency alerting systems like its Alert FM.

Tags: , , , ,

Radio on Mobile Devices

February 15, 2009 in Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Mobility and radio go hand in hand. James Cridland reports on a current positive trend:

“RAJAR’s recent figures were upbeat about listening to the radio on mobile devices. (They only monitor ‘listening via mobile phones’, despite many MP3 players also having FM radios built-in)”

Competing business models between mobile network operators and broadcasters prevent broadcast receivers from being integrated into mobile phones. At CRC, we work on a project that would allow broadcasters to sponsor and eventually develop their own receivers. The project is called Openmokast. We published our thoughts and results about this in a paper released as part of last month’s EBU Technical Review.

We suggest that innovation in mobile digital broadcasting (including digital radio) will happen with the event of open source platforms like Android and Openmoko.

Tags: , , , ,

Google Ends Radio AdSense

February 14, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Last summer at Broadcast Asia, I discovered that Google planned to extend its AdSense Internet advertising program to Radio. I ran into a very modest Google booth that displayed their new radio automation software acquired from dMarc, a market leader I was told. When I saw that, I thought it was an obvious business for Google.

Well, it looks like this project was killed. May I suggest a strategy: Google, release your automation software to the open source community like you did with Android. This could attract new developers that support your AdSense program for free… and some competing options, of course!

Tags: , ,

iPlayer Reach

February 2, 2009 in Infrastructures, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Some important numbers about the use of iPlayer can be seen here in this TIMESONLINE story:

Before that, they appear on iPlayer, the free service which notched up 41m programme requests in December and 271m during the whole of 2008.

Tags: , , , ,

« Older entries