VTT Hosts First Live Multicast Demo in Finland, Using Expway’s LTE Broadcast Solution

Helsinki, April 9^th, 2018 – Expway, the LTE-Broadcast expert, announced today that the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, one of the leading research and technology organizations in Europe and having national mandate in Finland, will showcase the first LTE Broadcast solution designed to handle large mobile video streaming traffic peaks. Expway is providing the LTE Broadcast server components, integrated with Nokia’s eNodeBs and EPC, and the eMBMS middleware in the mobile handsets. Expway’s technology, as announced during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is already used by several operators, and is 5G ready.

People are increasingly watching live TV on their mobile phones. Events, like sport matches, are usually watched by millions of people at the same time – causing network congestion, and consumer frustration. Finland recently experienced such a misadventure, during the Winter Olympics when the national Finnish players were on the verge of winning a medal. The remarkably high viewership put such a burden on the Finnish mobile networks, that vital applications like Finland’s critical patient information system, came to a crawl. Several municipalities decided to block the Yle Arena application used to watch the games, multiple times during the span of a week, creating more consumer irritation.

Network traffic spikes will not only continue to occur during major sporting events, but will get bigger, more frequent, and more unpredictable, as more and more people watch live TV on-line. Mobile networks are not designed to handle these high traffic crests. Unicasting videos through an LTE network using today’s technology, which creates as many video streams as the number of users watching the event, is not sustainable.

The solution showcased by VTT is designed to handle today’s large and tomorrow’s even larger traffic peaks. It involves using Expway’s leading LTE Broadcast technology – which Multicasts, instead of Unicasting live events and popular TV shows over LTE. Multicasting allows content providers and network operators to broadcast video streams to millions of users, using the equivalent bandwidth as one stream to one user.

“Reducing large traffic surges with LTE Broadcast enables content providers and network operators to keep their end-users happy and therefore loyal”, said Claude Seyrat, CMO and Co-Founder Expway. “As important, it also insures that critical communications still have enough bandwidth to properly operate during dramatic events”.

Yle (Yleisradio, Finnish Broadcasting Company), Finland’s national public service broadcasting company and the largest content provider in Finland, will provide the content to broadcast during the demonstration, Nokia the LTE network components and Bittium and Samsung the devices running the Yle application. VTT will invite Finnish network operators to witness first-hand how the technology works. This partnership is the first to demo LTE Broadcast in Finland.