Ericsson Working On Wireless Video-mail Technology
Ericsson has announced it is working on a parallel e-mail technology for third generation (3G) wireless networks that supports video transmissions alongside regular e-mail.
Known, appropriately enough, as video-mail, Ericsson says that it has been testing the technology at its UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications service) test center in Guildford, England.
Hakan Enquist, the first's managing director of UMTS, said that the demonstrations took place over a WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) network, a technology that is set to be deployed in the US and other regions in the next few years.
Enquist said that, after e-mail, fax-mail and voice-mail, video-mail is the next logical step.
"We live in an era when communicating by messages is becoming an everyday activity," he said, adding that the phenomenal growth of short message services (SMS) text messaging has shown that the wireless market is ready for new types of mobile messaging.
"Video-mail will add new dimensions - literally - to electronic messages," he said.
Ericsson says that, unlike video communications, which require a real-time and relatively wide bandwidth to exist between the two mobiles and their respective wireless network access point, video- mail files can be transferred incrementally to and from the mobile device.
Thanks to this, a video-mail transmission which is relatively high quality, can be gradually transferred to and from the mobiles concerned at varying speeds, depending on network usage.
Using this approach means, for example, that a user may already be having a voice conversation using their mobile, but not using anywhere near the available bandwidth. In such situations, a video- mail message can quickly and easily be transferred to or from the mobile in the background.
Ericsson predicts that video-mail is unsuited to mobile networks with their current data transmission limits of between 9,600 and 19,200 bits per second (bps). However, the company says, when GPRS (general packet radio service) network facilities start arriving later this year, then video-mail will become a reality.
As reported previously, GPRS uses existing second generation (2G) cellular networks and, using channel aggregation and data compression technologies, supports maximum data speeds of around 120,000 bps, subject to network channel availabilities.
Ericsson's Web site is at http://www.ericsson.se.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.
