The GSMA, an industry body representing the worldwide mobile communications industry, announced that it has endorsed a new 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard, Integrated Mobile (News - Alert) Broadcast (IMB), that will accelerate the adoption of mobile data and broadcast services worldwide.

IMB, the GSMA said in a release, enables “spectrally-efficient delivery of broadcast services, based on techniques that are greatly aligned with existing Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) Wireless Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) but also allowing deployment in Time Division Duplexing (TDD) spectrum.”

This new standard has been created through collaborative mobile industry effort and offers mobile operators the opportunity to launch new services to their customers, said Alex Sinclair, chief technology officer at the GSMA (News - Alert).

The IMB can be used within segments of spectrum already allocated with many 3G licenses, but which have remained unused due to a lack of appropriate technology.  It meets the necessary regulatory and spectral requirements to be deployed in this spectrum, so operators can use this without concerns.

The new standard also reuses many aspects of existing, deployed technologies such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) and Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS). This feature results in a short development cycle for inclusion on products resulting in a faster time to market for mobile broadcast services such as mobile TV.

IMB, being a 3GPP standard, gives the biggest scale advantage for mobile broadcast, says Erik Ekudden, vice president and head of Technology and Industry. “As such, IMB is complementing existing HSPA and MBMS delivery of rich content.”

In a release, Bill Jones, CEO, IPWireless, said IMB gives tremendous opportunity for operators to leverage their 3G network investments to deliver innovative mobile broadcast services and efficiently handle the significant growth of video on mobile networks.

Ted Matsumoto, senior executive vice president, Softbank (News - Alert), adds that the company can leverage the new standard to offer innovative services based on the delivery of a range of short video clips, but which were not practical to implement on the present unicast system.

“We believe IMB can offer operators a flexible and efficient way of managing broadcast and high demand video services,” added Hugh Bradlow, CTO, Telstra (News - Alert) Australia. “The nature of the technology allows deployment either as a coverage layer or more incrementally to relieve capacity as demand grows.”

The GSMA has also announced a white paper titled “GSMA IMB Service Scenarios and System Requirements” that covers the IMB technology in greater detail, including spectral requirements for deployment of the service, capabilities that are required to be supported in the operator's network and upon devices, and a range of examples of services that could be implemented using IMB as the underlying delivery technology.

The purpose of the white paper is to help infrastructure and handset manufacturers develop common implementations of IMB, which in turn will promote mass adoption through the generation of economies of scale and an IMB ecosystem.