Verizon Uses Super Bowl Week To Showcase LTE Multicast

Verizon Wireless has set up shop in New York City to demonstrate LTE Multicast, a technique that’s designed to beam live TV feeds wirelessly to smartphones and tablets without gobbling up all of the wireless network’s bandwidth.

Instead of delivering a bunch of bandwidth-eating unicast video streams, the multicast approach carves out a dedicated slice of the LTE spectrum to fit in a nailed-up stream of the live event that, in turn, can be captured by multiple devices that are connected to the cell site. Verizon Wireless is showing off a test LTE Multicast network at the Verizon Power House facility at Bryant Park that is feeding live video to Samsung Galaxy Note 3 tablets that are outfitted with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and Sequans chips matched with middleware from Expway that enables the multicast capability. According to Verizon Wireless, the demo is also being powered by encoders from Thomson and an app developed by MobiTV. Alcatel Lucent is supplying the underlying 4G LTE network equipment.