Steaming Video Shaping Future of Wireless

May 20, 2014

By J. Sharpe Smith

It may not be clear how AT&T’s proposed acquisition of DirecTV would affect the tower industry in the short term, but Vish Nandlall, head of strategy, marketing and chief technical officer, Ericsson North America, made it quite clear that video over wireless will have a big effect on the wireless industry.

“Delivering video over wireless will be the defining set of technologies over the next 10 years,” Nandlall said during his keynote address at the Wireless Infrastructure Show, Tuesday, in Orlando, Florida. “Video is the single largest growing area from an applications standpoint.” From 2013 to 2019, globally, video will grow to 55 percent of total wireless traffic. In the United States it is already at 60 percent of consumed content over the wireless network.

Teens’ behavior has been conditioned to watch video over Wi-Fi, and it is spilling over into the macrocell environment.

“The battle for the future TV customer is moving outside the home, away from the couch and into the streets,” he said.

How to Meet Capacity Needs? Physics Inhibit Video Downloads

The experience of video is driven by the initial waiting time, also known as “time to first byte.” If it takes too long, the user will probably stop watching. According to the impatience index, a cognitive study of how long people will wait for something, if it takes more than a second, you are out of the game. The carrier may lose the subscriber.

“If you are not taking care of your network, you are not going to be prepared for the biggest consumer of bandwidth — video,” he said.

What it takes to obtain good streaming quality is also important, which Nandlall said demands speeds of a megabit per second consistently across the cell. There are few cities globally that can match these speeds. But increasing network speeds can easily be monetized.

“When they have users that are streaming more and more video, carriers can use it to move them to higher-tier rates,” he said. Increasing subscriber satisfaction also lowers churn.

What is holding us back from this new frontier? Macrocell coverage within buildings is pretty patchy. There can be an erosion of the signal of 70 percent.

It takes a toolkit approach to providing coverage and capacity within buildings. In large buildings, DAS is the state of the art. In mid-size buildings, it is a battlefield between DAS and small cells. Picocells and Wi-Fi may be the answer in smaller buildings.

“It is driven by the square footage of the building and the cost of the technology,” Nandlall said. “The target cost is 50 cents to a dollar a square foot.”

No matter what the wireless technology – macrocells, microcells or in-building systems – more video demands more capacity, which is good for tower companies.