Thursday, June 29, 2006

DVB-H Reception Poor in Germany, Good in Italy

In two articles published by EETimes, the quality of DVB-H broadcasts from the world cup were evaluated. The first article discusses the personal experience of the reporter using an HTC PDA with a DVB-H SD receiver card powered by Philips Semiconductor. The reporter describes a disappointing user experience which includes jerky pictures, dropped frames and frozen images when trying to watch the T-Systems DVB-H trial broadcast in the Berlin world cup stadium. Only towards the end of the article we discover what is probably the real reason for this poor performance: "Admittedly, the handset and DVB-H receiver/demodulation chip I used weren't among the official devices currently being used in the German DVB-H trials". The importance of interoperability testing...

The second article provides a second-hand report of DVB-H reception in Europe's first commercial DVB-H service launched by 3 in Italy. The tests, performed by French DVB-H receiver vendor DibCom using the LG U900 and Samsung P910 handsets, found excellent signal reception around Rome and Milan, even while driving at 160 Kilometers per hour. However, the service suffers from a 15-second initialization time, and a 6-second channel switch time, which DibCom executives refer to as "acceptable"...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, the chip manufacturers should be committed to make the compatible chips in line with the official standard.

Dror Gill said...

They want to make their chips compatible, of course, but the standards are not mature yet.