British Sky Broadcasting Limited (BSkyB) and QUALCOMM completed a joint technical trial of QUALCOMM's MediaFLO System in the United Kingdom. The technical trial, conducted over two months in Cambridge, featured 11 channels from the BSkyB content menu delivered to non-commercial devices from QUALCOMM and aimed to demonstrate the performance of the MediaFLO System in both laboratory and mixed field test environments.
QUALCOMM said key conclusions of the trial included:
- MediaFLO in general either met or exceeded QUALCOMM's previous performance claims.
- Testing demonstrated that MediaFLO is capable of supporting 20 channels of QVGA video and stereo audio in a single 5MHz spectrum allocation. This performance represents a 20 percent increase in channels relative to prior performance claims of 20 video channels per 6 MHz channel.
- Testers of the 25 fps trial video services noted, "the picture quality is very good, small text is clear and movement is smooth," while operating at an average of 240 kb/sec throughput per video/audio
channel. - In tests measuring network acquisition, the MediaFLO device acquired the MediaFLO channel guide in an average of 2 seconds.
- Measurements of channel switching time yielded an average physical layer channel change time of <1.5 second and an average video to video channel change time of 2.1 seconds.
- The measured physical layer performance was better than previously published performance claims by 0.5 to 1.2 dB.
- The MediaFLO system allows the flexibility to trade off approximately half of the channel count for twice the coverage area per transmitter.
