Integrated Mobile Broadcast (iMB) is a mobile wireless technology that enables broadcast of content (such as live television) at the cellular transmitter level, using the 3G or 4G licensed radio spectrum, and received on mobile terminals. iMB was accepted as part of the Release 8 3GPP standards in December 2008. It was endorsed as the preferred broadcast standard by the

GSM Association The GSM Association (commonly referred to as 'the GSMA' or ''Global System for Mobile Communications'', originally ''Groupe Spécial Mobile'') is an industry organisation that represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide. More ...

(GSMA) in September 2009. On 22 June 2010 O2,

Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...

and

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public limited company, plc () is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Telephone company, telecommunications company. Its registered office and Headquarters, global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It ...

announced a multi-operator iMB pilot in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. iMB delivers mobile data broadcast services in the 3G TDD bands in a way that is integrated with existing 3G FDD

unicast Unicast is data transmission from a single sender (red) to a single receiver (green). Other devices on the network (yellow) do not participate in the communication. In computer networking, unicast is a one-to-one transmission from one point in ...

technology. In June 2010, O2, Orange and Vodafone announced a UK trial of the technology, to offload bandwidth intensive mobile data from their unicast networks and place on the broadcast portion of their spectrum (TDD). iMB supports both linear (live broadcast TV services) and non-linear (

video clip Video clips refer to mostly short videos, most of the time called memes, which are short videos of silly jokes and funny clips, most of the time coming from movies or any entertainment videos such as YouTube. The term is also used more loosely to ...

software update A patch is a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, with such patches usually being called bugfixes or bug fixes. Patches ...

s, data broadcast, music, etc.) broadcast services and can be implemented in TDD spectrum, currently owned, but unused by many operators as a part of their 3G licenses.

Example

Using a typical 5 MHz -wide TDD band, an operator may obtain 4800 kbit/s of IP multicast throughput over

MBMS Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) is a point-to-multipoint interface specification for existing 3GPP cellular networks, which is designed to provide efficient delivery of broadcast and multicast services, both within a cell as well ...

, allowing the delivery of 15 linear TV channels, each TV stream compressed at the bitrate of 320 kbit/s. The typical cell radius around the transmitter to receive the service will be around {{convert, 350, m. Using a

single-frequency network A single-frequency network or SFN is a broadcast network where several transmitters simultaneously send the same signal over the same frequency channel. Analog AM and FM radio broadcast networks as well as digital broadcast networks can operate ...

(SFN) of transmitters, the received signal may be reinforced and the service coverage gets better.

References

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20100715011506/http://gsmworld.com/technology/4334.htm GSM standard