First Study of Commercial Video Services Shows Effectiveness of Cellular Broadcast

Barcelona, Spain, March 1, 2017 – Spirent Communications and Signals Research Group (SRG) have released their latest collaboration analyzing wireless video performance. With video content exploding worldwide, operators are exploring enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) as an advanced method of delivering that content. The intent of this latest study, Video Killed the Radio Star… and then in Release 9, 3GPP created eMBMS, was to assess and quantify the expected benefits of eMBMS versus the traditional unicast methodology used today.

LTE eMBMS is a new type of multi-media broadcast technology that should allow operators to deliver more content to a greater number of users with a much higher efficiency of network resources. The study leveraged a commercial LTE network in Australia, one of only a few with live instances, and the Spirent Chromatic test platform to evaluate how the eMBMS network streamed video content and benchmarked these results against the traditional unicast transmission.

Bottom line, test results indicate eMBMS delivers a very strong and compelling case based on its technical merits. Not only was video performance improved, study results demonstrate that eMBMS will have far less impact on the network than current unicast technology with most scenarios involving shared content, and is more efficient even at low single-digit subscriber levels.

Michael Thelander, President of Signals Research Group commented, "Operators should look no further than eMBMS when identifying the best means of delivering popular video content to their subscribers. We've used the Spirent Chromatic test platform on previous occasions to analyze the performance of video over LTE, including both unicast content and various video telephony and chat services. The potential for video and/or audio degradation that we've observed in the past, wasn't evident with our LTE Broadcast testing."

Signals Research Group has partnered with Spirent over many years on various benchmark studies, with recent interest on the investigation and evaluation of VoLTE, Video telephony and VoWiFi. For a preview of the latest Signals Ahead report, please visit www.signalsresearch.com.

For additional information on video assessment with Chromatic, which evaluates video delivery performance through attributes such as video freezes, video impairments, observed frame rates, and A/V synchronization, please visit https:/www.spirent.com