Reasons to Focus on MediaFLO: KDDI President Onodera Talks

Jul 19, 2007 21:45 Hiroki Yomogita, Nikkei Electronics

Tadashi Onodera, president and chairman of KDDI Corp., delivered a lecture and talked about the future orientation of technology development concerning mobile communications at Wireless Japan 2007, which opened July 18, 2007.

To be involved from the start

Regarding current wireless access technologies, Onodera mentioned introduction of the CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev.A and indicated his view: "It holds great significance that Rev.A boosts uplink data rates. Higher data rates could lead to a diversity of services such as use of contents created by users."

As for "BCMCS" broadcast/multicast services introduced in the second half of 2006, "Despite poor attention paid, BCMCS have broadened the range of our services to EZ News Flash and so on," Onodera said.

Commenting on "MediaFLO" multimedia distribution services for mobile phones, Onodera said, "I am often asked why KDDI focuses on MediaFLO and what's wrong with 1seg. Why do we persist in MediaFLO? It's because we consider it is important to develop a next-generation multimedia broadcast by ourselves."

He explains that the technology attracts the company because, unlike 1seg, MediaFLO allows the company to take the initiative in designing everything including service contents.

He did not specifically address the company's efforts toward 3.9G "UMB" technology based on OFDMA and "IMT-Advanced" 4G mobile communication system.

Autonomous networks expected for use in times of disaster

On the other hand, Onodera underscored KDDI's clear focus on "cognitive radio." It is a wireless communication system that actively recognizes surrounding radio environments, available frequency bands and access formats, and chooses an optimum one from several formats it supports.

"If the traffic is congested, users only want data to be transmitted sufficiently no matter in what access format," Onodera said. "They wouldn't care if it were 3G or what. Such a method is already technically achievable."

He also indicated cognitive radio is very useful when big cities are hit by a disaster.

"The technology is also useful when establishing swift, autonomous networks in disaster-stricken areas," Onodera said. "Mobile phone networks sometimes go down in times of disaster like the recent earthquake in Niigata, for example. We are exploring ways to allow some access even if they go down."

KDDI is exploring a method to make mobile phones form autonomous networks when base stations become unavailable due to a disaster, Onodera said. He, however, added further technology development is needed because such a method requires mobile phones to feature new mechanisms including that to choose a radio format and a route to transmit data via the handset.

KDDI is showcasing a cognitive radio system combining mobile WiMAX and wireless LAN technologies at the Wireless Japan 2007.

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