More to Building ATSC 3.0 Smartphones Than Fast-Tracking Chips, T-Mobile Tells FCC
Building ATSC 3.0 functionality into smartphones takes more than just fast-tracking development of receiver chipsets, said T-Mobile in a “technical white paper” filed Monday at the FCC in docket 16-142. It takes aim at Sinclair plans to have 3.0 chipsets ready for commercialization in smartphones in time for the 2018 holiday selling season (see 1705210001). Sinclair's response is "we're not naive enough to believe you hand somebody a chip and suddenly you’ve got ATSC 3.0 on that phone,” Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us Tuesday.
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Mobile devices require an “entirely new receiver chain to receive ATSC 3.0,” including new antennas, filters, amplifiers, oscillators and demodulator chips, said T-Mobile. Adding dedicated 3.0 “increases cost and size of mobile devices that are likely to render them uncompetitive with devices” without 3.0 reception, it said. ATSC 3.0 reception also will require a new “antenna array” in a smartphone “that will likely degrade performance” for LTE and 5G services, “including in bands currently used for competitive broadband services,” like 600 MHz, it said.
T-Mobile last month turned on the first part of its 600 MHz LTE network, using spectrum acquired for $8 billion in the TV incentive auction, and is campaigning to make good on plans to make handsets available for the holiday selling season with 600 MHz chips that can use the new band (see 1708160038). Patience has been wearing thin recently between Sinclair and T-Mobile on the regulatory front. In filings opposing Sinclair buying Tribune, the carrier accused Sinclair of maneuvering to delay T-Mobile’s access to spectrum bought in the incentive auction so Sinclair could enter the mobile broadband market as a competitor (see 1708300053). Sinclair said T-Mobile is concerned about competition from 3.0 (see 1708230061).
Sinclair's offer to supply a million 3.0 receiver chips free to each smartphone manufacturer willing to embed the chip in a mobile device is insufficient for the realities of smartphone volume, said the carrier. That's less than 0.4 percent of the “existing U.S. market for active smartphones,” and most popular devices “typically have sales volumes of more than one million devices in the first day,” it said.
ATSC 3.0 “will not enhance public safety and emergency message delivery but instead would be an inferior platform” compared with that of the “well-established wireless network,” T-Mobile said. With 3.0 functionality in smartphones, “interference to wireless reception will occur, particularly for devices operating in the 600 MHz band, unless the mobile device is modified extensively and in a way that is likely to make those devices uncompetitive commercially,” it said.
With Sinclair’s free chip offer, “we were trying to provide an incentive to work with the carriers and to work with the manufacturing community towards the goal of the inclusion of ATSC 3.0" in smartphones, Aitken told us in response. “We can serve the public in a better way through the availability of our services, including mission-critical [emergency] notification and in-depth information via the inclusion of 3.0 in mobile and portable devices.”
On the production scale of 3.0 receiver chips that Sinclair’s One Media is developing with India’s Saankhya Labs, “this is not a capacity-driven issue, this is a market-driven issue,” said Aitken. “We are looking at the manufacture of this chip on a mass scale. We are in the process of economically balancing out two foundries to do that workthrough. Both of those foundries have the capacity to do hundreds of millions of chips without batting an eye.”
The chips being developed “will support 23 global broadcast standards,” including 3.0 in the U.S. and South Korea, said Aitken. “This chip can be included in devices, and an identical device can be shipped to multiple parts of the world and provide support for multiple broadcast standards.”
Sinclair never advocated a 3.0 “mandate” in smartphones, said Aitken. “Our concern, be it demonstrated by T-Mobile and others, is that, in fact, the free market is not functioning in the way that regulators believe it can or should.” Sinclair “is in conversations with many parties” about building 3.0 functionality into mobile devices, he said. “There are, in fact, strong business incentives for the inclusion of 3.0, even if we were to discount the high value of the emergency services that we continue to offer for free. To be clear, we’ve not asked for a mandate. We believe in the free market. We hope that the free market can prevail.” The FCC's 3.0 February NPRM “tentatively” concluded that a tuner mandate won’t be needed on fixed TV receivers and was silent on the issue of tuners in mobile devices (see 1702270059).