MOBILE BROADCAST RADIO TECHNOLOGIES:
FACTORS AFFECTING THE EMERGENCE OF DOMINANT DESIGN
Toni Paila
Helsinki University of Technology
[email protected]
Abstract
Broadcast paradigm, the simultaneous delivery of
multimedia content and associated services to masses of
consumers has recently emerged also in the context of
mobile handheld terminals, such as mobile phones.
Consequently, the broadcast radio technologies have
started to find their way into mobile devices. While
currently there are a number of technologies being
developed, piloted and deployed, none of them can be
clearly considered a dominant design. In this paper we
propose a set of five factors that we consider to affect
which mobile broadcast transmission technology will
become a dominant design. In the light of the factors we
also discuss whether a dominant design would appear
on the global or regional level. As a background we use
the theory of dominant design and the cyclical model of
technological changes.
Key Words
Mobile, Broadcast, Radio, Dominant, Design, Factor
1. Introduction
Broadcast transmission, delivering same information
simultaneously to unlimited number of recipients within
a geographical coverage area, is an interesting concept
when applied to mobile receivers. The broadcast
delivery not only enables cost-efficient transport of
content but also a variety of new mobile applications
building on broadcast programming paradigm (Berg
2003, Sonera 2003, Open Mobile Alliance 2004).
In this paper we restrict the scope of our discussion on
mobile broadcast as follows. Firstly, we consider only
handheld terminals that can receive the mobile
broadcast in similar conditions that we are used to use
mobile telephony – both indoor and outdoor, and both
stationary and in motion. Consequently, the terminal
may be a cellular phone equipped with broadcast
capability, a hybrid phone device combining mobile
phone and another radio technology, or, a receive-only
device such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) with
broadcast receiver but no cellular connectivity.
Secondly, we focus on technologies that enable TV-type
of experience. That is, the audio-visual programming
that the end-user consumes using the above-mentioned
receiver must be provided live and resemble the
experience the end-user would get using the normal TV
(although the video frame rate and image resolution
may be significantly lower). Thirdly, we discuss radio
technologies only. Although the application and service
layers are a necessary and often essential parts of the
overall broadcast technology solutions we will consider
these layers only in the light of radio technology.
The mobile broadcast – as we define it – has only
recently emerged and become a topic of many
discussions. From a technical point of view, the area of
mobile broadcast radio technologies has become very
diverse, manifested through the emergence of many
international standardization activities along with
regional and proprietary solutions. An example of
international standardization that has already been
completed is Digital Video Broadcast for Handheld
(DVB-H), which adds power-saving and error resilience
features to the terrestrial digital TV transmission
standard (DVB-T) making it suitable for reception.
Other examples of international standardization
activities are 3GPP Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast
Service (MBMS) and 3GPP2 Broadcast Multicast
Service (BCMCS). The former specifies mobile
broadcast support for the 3rd generation WCDMA
cellular systems while the latter specifies the similar
support for the 3rd generation CDMA2000 cellular
systems. Examples of regional solutions are the
Japanese Integrated Services Digital Broadcast
Terrestrial (ISDB-T) and the South-Korean Terrestrial
and Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcast (T-DMB
and S-DMB). An example of proprietary mobile
broadcast solution currently being developed is the
Forward Link Only (FLO) by Qualcomm. From a
business system point of view the current situation is
equally mixed. Two main branches of value chains
exist: the one build around the cellular mobile operator
and the other built around the broadcast network
operator (Paila, 2004). At the moment many different
solutions are currently being introduced and developed
for markets that are developing, too. Therefore no
technical solution for mobile broadcast radio can be
regarded to be a dominant solution globally.
The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of factors
that either facilitate or inhibit the emergence of a global
dominant design for mobile broadcast radio. We start by
briefly revising the theory of dominant design and the
cyclical model of technological changes, and
positioning the current state of mobile broadcast radio
technology within the model. Consequently we describe
a set of factors, a combination of which we believe a
particular radio technology need to successfully address
in order to become a dominant design: Availability of
spectrum and regulation; Existing investment and reuse;
Availability of hardware components; Availability of
terminal solutions; and; Availability of official standard.
In the light of the proposed factors we end this paper
with a discussion on whether or not there will be a
dominant design for a broadcast radio technology on
global level, or will the dominant design emerge on
regional level.
2. Theory of Dominant Design and the
Cyclical Model of Technological Changes
Our main goal in this paper is to identify the success
factors that make a specific mobile broadcast radio
technology a dominant design among the others.
Therefore it warrants a brief introduction to the theory
of dominant design and the cyclical model of
technological changes (Anderson and Tushman, 1990).
The cyclical model is initiated by a breakthrough
innovation that causes technical discontinuity. Such
innovations “command a decisive cost or quality
advantage and that strike not at the margins of the
profits and the outputs of the existing firms, but at their
foundations and their very lives” (Schumpeter, 1942
p.84). In other words, the technological innovation
introduces in some respect a significantly different and
more efficient way of providing the end product,
service, or conducting business.
The discontinuity is followed by an era of technological
fermentation: “A revolutionary innovation is crude and
experimental when introduced, but it ushers in an era of
experimentation as organizations struggle to absorb (or
destroy) the innovative technology. This era of ferment
is characterized by two distinct selection processes,
competition between technical regimes and competition
within the new technical regime.” (Anderson and
Tushman, 1990).
According to Anderson and Tushman, the era of
fermentation ends when a dominant design emerges.
We also stick to the strictest definition they give for a
dominant design – it is a design or technical solution
that accounts over 50 percent of new implementations
of breakthrough innovation. To their definition we add
the aspect that the dominant design may emerge locally
(within a nation or a group of countries) or globally.
The emergence of dominant design is followed by a
period of incremental evolution. During that period the
technical competition has either ended or significantly
faded, and the focus of industry wide activities is to
enhance the dominant design.
It is worthwhile to note that emergence of a dominant
design may take several years if not decades, and that a
dominant design may never emerge. In the latter case
several competing technologies become established and
continue to co-exists and be gradually enhanced within
their individual evolution paths. It is also worthwhile to
acknowledge that in the fast-changing area of mobile
communications technology the competition is fierce
and only few technical solutions have become
dominant. Last, we point out that the era of incremental
change – following the emergence of dominant design –
does not mean era of stability. Indeed, the dominant
design may be replaced by another design and the cycle
may turn back to the era or fermentation.
Applying this cyclical model of technological changes
to the mobile broadcast radio technologies we make the
following observations. Firstly, we consider the mobile
broadcast – reception of multimedia broadcast by small
handheld devices – a technical discontinuity that has
been enabled by two main developments. On one hand
the increasing processing power, enhanced display
technology and battery life of handheld devices have
enabled it. On the other hand, the innovations in radio
and link technologies and especially the receiver side
implementation (smaller antennas with better gain,
decreasing size and power consumption of hardware)
have enabled it. Secondly, we observe that the technical
area of mobile broadcast radios is currently in the
technical fermentation phase, as no dominant design
exists yet. Instead, several competing technologies are
being developed and introduced to the developing
markets.
3. Factors Facilitating Or Inhibiting
Emergence of a Dominant Design
3.1 Availability of spectrum and regulation
To be able to provide mobile broadcast service in the
first place, one needs to have an access to a band of
suitable radio spectrum. Governments regulate the
assignment of terrestrial radio spectrum on geographical
basis. Once a part of spectrum is allocated (or licensed)
for a certain purpose in a certain area, it is exclusively
reserved for that use and can only be used by the owner
(or licensee) of the allocation.
Different regulation usually applies to different bands of
spectrum. In many countries terrestrial television
spectrum is reserved for television broadcasting. One
particular characteristic of terrestrial broadcast
regulation is that it is highly regional. In television
broadcasting the government regulation often mandates
which solution or standard shall be deployed nationwide (Pelkmans and Beuter, 1987). However, there are
cases such as Germany, where each federal state sets
and enforces its own broadcast regulation. All in all,
when the television broadcast frequencies are used to
provide the mobile broadcast services, it is not known
whether the same regulation applies those as would
apply to television broadcasting.
Currently, the terrestrial mobile communications
spectrum is regulated in a different way than the
broadcast TV spectrum. These bands are licensed for
providing 2nd and 3rd generation mobile services.
Whether mobile broadcast can be regarded a mobile
service, for which these bands are targeted, is not
known yet. However, regarding mobile broadcast, only
3rd generation systems are of our interest since the 2nd
generation systems do not have capability to support
broadcast paradigm. Also with mobile communications
spectrum the government has a central role as the
licensor of frequency bands.
In addition to the basic types of frequencies for
broadcast and mobile communications, there are a
number of other types of bands available – and under
government regulation – that may be used to provide
mobile broadcast. One example is so called “L-band”;
in Germany the L-band has been allocated for digital
radio. Another example is satellite. As we mentioned in
the beginning, one of the radio systems under analysis
is based on satellite transmission. The regulation of
satellite frequencies differs from the regulation of
terrestrial frequencies. The reason is that the coverage
area of a given satellite signal usually transcends the
boundaries of many countries. For that reason the
regulation of satellite frequencies takes place on global
level.
There is more in spectrum regulation than just
technology selection. The local regulation often
associates a set of rules to an allocated band. These
rules may require the operators to acquire operation
licenses or program licenses, to follow various content
considerations, or even impose a quota for the amount
of data transmitted (relative to TV-programming). We
regard this element an important factor as the contentlevel regulation directly affects what kind of mobile
broadcast services can to be provided.
Since the government regulation enforces the
technologies to be used for given bands, we consider the
regulation to be an important factor affecting which
radio technology becomes the dominant design on a
national level. However, as the scope of regulation is
limited to the regions under government control, the
local regulation has weaker impact on the global level
selection of dominant design.
3.2 Existing investment and reuse
Let us first define the terms of existing investment and
reuse in the context of this paper. Firstly, by existing
investment we mean that a stakeholder in mobile
broadcast value chain has already invested building up
radio coverage using a certain technology. The existing
investment may or may not be directly usable for
providing mobile broadcast service. Secondly, by reuse
we mean a situation in which providing mobile
broadcast coverage would mean an incremental upgrade
cost building on and/or extending the existing
investment.
In the light of these definitions, the crucial question
becomes: What does building of mobile broadcast
coverage mean when the one willing to provide mobile
coverage already has existing investment? Does it allow
leveraging the investment and extending it further? Or
alternatively: Does it mean discarding the existing
investment and making a new investment from scratch?
This problem setting is strongly related to who is the
driver – i.e. which business is driving the first
deployments of mobile broadcast. We envision that the
value chain of mobile broadcast will, at least in the
beginning, be built around the business model of the
driving business. In this context, we can identify two
alternative main drivers. The first is broadcast network
operator, which already has a traditional broadcast
network. In this case there may be an opportunity to
reuse the existing broadcast investment. The second is
the cellular operator, which already has a cellular
network without broadcast capability. Also in this case
there may be an opportunity to reuse the existing
network investment. In both of these cases the type of
existing system will determine whether it can be reused
at all, and how big an additional investment would be
required to enhance the system to provide mobile
broadcast coverage.
Consider that one has made an investment in a network
system and now has an opportunity to either directly
reuse or upgrade it with a marginal cost to provide a
new service (mobile broadcast) and consequently to
enter new market. In such a case we believe that the one
having this kind of existing investment and facing such
an opportunity will take the opportunity. Hence, we
consider that the level of existing investment and the
possibility of reuse are factors that will, at their part,
affect which technology becomes a dominant design.
3.3 Availability of hardware components
Technologies exist as specifications or even as
standards. However, considering the actual deployment
of a particular technology, what matters is the
availability of actual hardware components for
products. That is, in order to produce actual working
equipment utilizing the technology there needs to be
supply of components. In the mobile broadcast radio
these components mean both the components for
transmission side (transmitter, modulator, baseband
processing) as well as the components for the reception
side (receiver front-ends, chipsets, decoders). The
mobile broadcast terminal is handheld, which means
that the receiver side components have an extra
constraint regarding the small form factor and limited
power consumption, as they are to be integrated into the
terminal.
Another important aspect related to the availability of
hardware components is the number of vendors that
provide the technology: the greater the number of
component providers the greater competition among the
vendors. It is a widely accepted economical fact that
greater competition under unbiased circumstances
usually leads to lower prices with same quality or better
quality with same price. To allow unbiased and healthy
competition the intellectual property for the technology
must be available for reasonable and non-discriminatory
terms. That is, no single company should have a
dominant ownership of the intellectual property, or the
company having the dominant ownership of intellectual
property should not be in the business of providing
implementations or components of the technology.
The aspect of timing may be crucial and is to be
considered in the context of availability of the hardware
components. Imagine that there is a high market
demand for mobile broadcast services. From the system
and terminal providers’ point of view this demand
translates consequently to the need of providing the
mobile broadcast radio feature in the systems and in the
terminals, respectively. If hardware components for a
particular technology (and not for any others) are
available to answer the demand, we consider it likely
that the terminal and system vendors will select those.
This will enforce the chances of that particular
technology becoming a dominant design. On the other
hand, if components for several competing technologies
are available at the time the market demand for
technical solution emerges we consider that the timing
will have significantly less impact on which technology
will become dominant.
technology the higher probability the technology has to
become a dominant design.
3.4 Availability of terminal solutions
We would like to point that the official standard is not
the only way to get a particular broadcast radio solution
on air. Namely, there are some few cases, such as U.S.
FCC auctions where bands of spectrum have been
auctioned without any requirement or binding to any
particular technology.
As mentioned in the introduction: terminal may be a
cellular phone equipped with broadcast capability, a
hybrid phone device combining mobile phone and
another radio technology, or, a receive-only device such
as a personal digital assistant (PDA) with broadcast
receiver but no cellular connectivity. In any case, there
will be terminal vendors of different kinds who provide
these terminals. Consequently, their technology
selections will be an important factor in determining the
dominant design for mobile broadcast radio. Indeed, we
envision that the technology the majority of vendors
will endorse will become the dominant design.
We base our reasoning as follows. The greater the
availability of particular technological solution is (i.e.
the more end devices implementing a given mobile
broadcast radio) on the market, the more interesting it
becomes to provide the service based on the given
technology. Then again, the more end user services
exist and are developed based on the given technology,
the more demand the technology receives from the
market. And the more end user demand there is, the
more terminal solutions are needed and besides the
existing vendors on the market, new ones are drawn in.
This is a good example on the network effects and on
the positive feedback that is characteristic to technical
innovation (Arthur 1996).
If a particular technological solution for mobile
broadcast radio becomes widely available through
support by several terminal vendors, we envision that
such a situation will affect other factors, as well. Firstly,
a growing base of terminals deploying the solution
creates an increasing demand for technology
components, and consequently new component
providers. Secondly, this factor (availability of
terminals) has an important impact in countries where
the regulation enables many options and the technical
selection is market driven, for example in China and
USA.
Due to the aspects mentioned in this section we
consider that greater the availability of terminal
solutions implementing a particular mobile broadcast
3.5 Availability of official standard
By availability of official standard we mean that a
particular mobile broadcast radio technology
specification has been published as a standard by some
recognized standardization organization. There are
different levels of global standardization organizations
as well as regional standards bodies. Generally
speaking, as we noted in our discussion on regulation,
governments tend to allocate frequencies to be use by
established standards. For these purposes, the broadcast
radio technology must be standardized.
All in all, in most of the cases the standardization and
getting the official standard status for a specification
seems to be a mandatory milestone for a technical
solution if it is to satisfy the basic regulator
requirement. In the market areas where the local
regulation allows several alternative and parallel
solutions, such as China and USA, the availability of
official standard is significantly a weaker factor
determining the dominant design.
4. Conclusion
In this paper we have described a set of factors, which
we believe a particular radio technology need to
successfully address in order to become a dominant
design: Availability of spectrum and regulation;
Existing investment and reuse; Availability of hardware
components; Availability of terminal solutions; and;
Availability of official standard. While we consider
each of the factors important on their own right, we still
emphasize that it will be a right combination of the
factors that will have the crucial role. Indeed, we
believe that a design – the mobile radio broadcast radio
technology – that succeeds addressing the right
combination of factors sufficiently will have the
greatest probability becoming a dominant design.
Further, it is not yet known whether all the factors will
have an equal weight or whether a success in one factor
can substitute a failure in another.
Considering purely the factors we have introduced, we
can identify at least one strong trend that we envision
likely to happen. Due to strong role of regulation the
mobile broadcast radio layer is likely to remain
geographically fragmented. I.e. the dominant design
will emerge country by country and the main
determinant will be the local regulation. Actually, in
many cases it may be unclear whether there will be a
dominant design on local level. This is because within a
single country several mobile broadcast radio
technologies may co-exist on different bands. However,
regional fragmentation not necessarily prevents the
emergence of global dominant design. Namely, if a
particular radio becomes widely adopted in many
European countries, in USA, and in China one could
call it dominant (the strict rule being that globally 50%
of all implementations of mobile broadcast radio would
be based on the dominant solution).
Technology. Research Seminar for Telecommunications
Business. Spring 2004.
We acknowledge the following shortcomings
concerning our paper. Firstly, the list of proposed
factors may not be exhaustive. In addition, the validity
of the presented factors would need to be validated with
empirical cases. For those purposes we encourage
further research. Secondly, for the sake of simplicity we
have limited our discussion to the level of radio bearer.
In practice there will be an application layer that
supports the services provided on the mobile broadcast
radio. The role of the application layer and its effect on
the emergence of dominant design for mobile broadcast
radio would warrant additional research. In that context
the interesting questions are whether the success of
service layer will be bound to the success of radio layer,
whether within the service layer a dominant design will
appear, and, which role global service layer
harmonization for mobile broadcast services – for
example through the Open Mobile Alliance – will have.
Schumpeter, J. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and
Democracy. New York. Harper & Brothers.
Finally we propose two further research topics building
on our paper. As we noted in the introduction, several
mobile broadcast radio technologies already exist or are
currently under development. Thus, we encourage an
evaluation of the known radio technologies in the light
of the presented factors. Another topic that would
warrant a closer research is the relation between
regional technology selections and their aggregate effect
on a particular mobile broadcast radio becoming the
globally dominant design.
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