(AFX) Alcatel, the leading French maker of telecommunications equipment, said Monday that it had signed an agreement with Samsung Electronics to jointly develop a range of mobile phones capable of receiving satellite television broadcasts using the standard called digital video broadcasting handheld, or DVB-H.
Alcatel is promoting a system that supplements DVB-H broadcasts using land-based antennas with satellite transmissions in the S-Band, a part of the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum that ranges from 2 Gigahertz to 4 Gigahertz. The agreement will initially cover Europe, where the S-Band is now available for DVB-H, Alcatel said.
"The solution in the S-Band allows complete territory coverage for mobile TV at the scale of a country or even a continent, including inside buildings," Alcatel said.
Telecom Italia Mobile has started offering DVB-H to its customers, and trials are under way in cities including Paris, Sydney, Helsinki, Berlin, Hong Kong and Pittsburgh, according to DVB Project Office, an industry group supporting the standard, reports Trend.
Separately, SES Global and Eutelsat Communications, two major satellite operators, said they would create a 50- 50 joint venture to share the costs for a new service to broadcast television and radio programs to mobile phones. The companies said the would jointly invest about в'¬130 million.
Eutelsat's new W2A satellite, which is being designed and built by Alcatel Alenia Space, will carry S-Band transponders as part of its payload, Alcatel said.
Eutelsat said the SES-Eutelsat joint venture would commercialize the S- Band portion of the W2A satellite.