Sequans gung-ho for LTE Broadcast

Sequans gung-ho for LTE Broadcast

NEW YORK – Mobile TV broadcast is rearing its ugly head again.

The world may have determined that mobile TV broadcast -- via DVB-H or Qualcomm’s now defunct FLO TV -- is going nowhere especially in the United States and Europe. But LTE Broadcast -- which can effectively turn cell towers into the equivalent of mini-digital TV towers -- is looking to make a splash this week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

Sequans Communications S.A., a 4G chip company based in Paris, France, announced Monday (Feb. 25) that it has successfully completed interoperability testing of Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE infrastructure equipment with Sequans’ eMBMS-capable LTE chipsets. eMBMS (evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service), also referred to as LTE Broadcast, is an advanced mobile video delivery technology, allowing mobile operators to multicast popular content over LTE cellular networks.

Enabling LTE Broadcast is an underlying technology of “carrier aggregation,” developed for LTE Advanced, a new specification designed for overall 4G enhancements.

At a time when network bandwidth is limited and operators’ spectrum is fragmented, LTE Advanced’s carrier aggregation is critical to “help group operators’ spectrum in a meaningful way,” said Georges Karam, Sequans CEO. For example, an operator can bundle two separate 5-MHz carriers and use this as one 10-MHz bandwidth. Or, the technology can be used “to combine two 20-MHz carriers to increase throughput to 40 MHz,” he added, allowing an operator to push big data.

Sequans is sampling next quarter its first LTE-Advanced chip, capable of carrier aggregation of 40 MHz total bandwidth. It is part of Sequans’ Cassiopeia platform, supporting 3GPP Release 10 specifications. With Cassiopeia, the company’s third generation LTE platform, Karam claimed, “we have leveraged nearly a decade of 4G experience to develop an exceptionally powerful LTE-Advanced solution.”


Carrier aggregation
Intra-band and inter-band aggregation alternatives
TAG:Sequans LTE Broadcast LTE Advanced eMBMS