|
International
Issue:
Dilithium
predicts mobile video warp drive
by Stephen McClelland
Wed, June 1. 2005
As this year’s projected 3G subscriber
numbers push through the 50 million mark worldwide, at least
one CEO will be watching with quiet satisfaction: Dilithium’ Paul Zuber. Why?
Because 3G will demand both interoperability and high quality
of service — whatever the application and whatever the
terminal.
“Where we fit is in this area of media
processing,” says Zuber. “There’s always going to be a need to
mediate between different standards”. But doesn’t convergence
deal with that issue? “No,” says Zuber, “there is divergence.
When I think of convergence, it is not between mobile and
fixed. The big bang convergence that’s happening out there is
in consumer electronics, telecom and the IT world. They all
have differing standards and that’s a very good opportunity
for us.”
Dilithium has a
set of 3G solutions including multimedia transcoding gateways,
3G-324M protocol analysis test tools, and 3G-324M protocols
stacks. What, however, might shoot the company up the success
curve is its video telephony work. “If you look at some of the
launches that were delayed, you see that some basic issues
such as terminal interoperability, session set-up times, and
over-the-air corruption of video messages took a while to
solve,” says Zuber.
Mobile video may — arguably — be the most
complex telecom proposition ever delivered to users. Service
options will range from simple video peer-to-peer
videoconferencing, through video mail, and video portal
applications. “If I think about our core expertise, we are the
world leader in voice and video transcoding, and in 3G-324M,
which is the world standard for mobile video telephony,” says
Zuber, “But whilst everyone is focussing on IP, this will be a
multi-year transition for service providers.”
The products may look disparate, but Zuber
defends a strategy where each element contributes to the
other. “As operators launch enhanced services where our
gateway will play a vital role, we have tools that help
operators solve basic but fundamental issues such as enabling
interoperability of terminals and network equipment,
monitoring quality of service, and providing key performance
indicators and quality metrics for deployed video services.
Initially, we, and the market, were focussed on industry
interoperability. Then there were some optimisation issues.
Now, as services are being launched, the focus is switching to
QoS and related user experience issues.”
Industrial investors have joined VCs in
backing a company that might have one of the few market
drivers under its belt. In squeezing performance out of its
DTG 2000 multimedia gateway, Dilithium, says Zuber, can offer superior
coding technology to improve lip synchronisation and
audio/video delays, patent-pending technology to reduce
session set-up times to less than one second (well below 8-10
seconds experienced elsewhere), and video refresh and
transrating that minimise video corruption, and modify video
bit rates to maintain video quality. The net result is a
superior customer experience and lower operational costs.
Dilithium,
unusually for a young US company, focuses mostly on overseas
markets, particularly in Asia and Europe, where it has
connections with service providers running the sort of leading
edge service not yet apparent in the US market. The company
serves customers in more than 40 countries. They include the
majority of leading terminal, network equipment, and messaging
vendors as well as the leading 3G operators in Europe and
Asia. A joint collaboration agreement with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo
— announced in March — will enable development of 3G terminal
test cases to advance video telephony interoperability test
solutions, and support new handset development. The company
also counts SK Telecom, KTF, China Mobile, Vodafone, Orange,
H3G, TIM and KPN among its customers.
It’s a work in progress, Zuber argues. He
clearly sees no end to emerging market needs — thanks to new
and differing standards, although he says Dilithium itself will remain technology and
standards-agnostic. “We don’t have the luxury [of rapid,
disposable standards cycles] in telecom as we do in the
computing world”. |
|
|
