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Mobile & Wireless
Dilithium Crystallises its 3G Video Message
Vendor Outlines Multimedia Proposition
by Ken Wieland
Dilithium Networks may have taken its name from the fabled Dilithium Crystals that propel the Star Trek Enterprise to warp drive, but that was no guarantee it would move fast in its chosen specialist area -- 3G video transmission. Yet, according to feedback from its mobile operators customers (parts of which it has released this week to flesh out its 3G multimedia value proposition to the media) -- the company would appear to be at least picking up speed.
“Mobile operators are getting a 6-9 months ROI payback time using our multimedia gateway,” says Mitch Lewis, Dilithium’s vice president for marketing and product management, adding that the company now has 125 ‘major accounts’ in 50 countries. “We have a good lead over our competitors,” continues Lewis. “This year, we think that half of all video calls [over mobile networks] worldwide will go over one of our products.”
This is not bad progress for a company that was incorporated in 2001. And pushing Dilithium forward is its flagship product, the DTG2000 multimedia gateway (compliant with 324M standard ratified by 3GPP for delivering video over mobile networks). Integrated with the mobile operator’s MSC, the DTG2000 has what Lewis calls ‘unique capabilities’ that enable it to improve the end-user’s mobile video experience and to generate greater cost-efficiencies for the mobile operator itself.
These functions are ‘unicoding’, AnswerFast Plus and Video Refresh. Unicoding is designed to tackle delays and poor quality of service that can happen when ‘traditional coding’ methods are used when connecting one device with another to deliver video services over different networks and protocols. With tandem video transcoding (the traditional way), delays are introduced due to the presence of intermediary protocols to translate one codec into another. Dilithium’s patented ‘unicoding’ method is direct and so reduces the power needed and increases the capacity. In fact, Dilithium claims that its gateway can use up to 60 per cent less energy and floor space compared with gateways using transcoding.
The AnswerFast Plus function is capable of setting up a video call in less than one second compared with over five seconds, and sometimes as much as 12 seconds in conventional networks, says Lewis. With Video Refresh, Dilithium claims that it can also prevent corruption of video streaming sessions. Taking these two attributes together, Dilithium goes on to claim that mobile operators using its kit can experience up to 25 per cent less churn than those operators who don’t. Moreover, due to longer video calls (due to better quality) Dilithium says that mobile operators can increase ‘advanced service revenue’ by up to 30 per cent.
While Lewis argues that the technology barriers to mobile video are coming down, he still feels that video calling tariffs have been ‘running too high’ in Europe with charges of up to US$1.00 per minute.
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