A version of the BBC’s Planet Earth II captured in Ultra High Definition has been added to the Arqiva-Samsung 5G FWA trial in London.
The content, which is also available on some versions of the BBC iPlayer, can be seen at Arqiva’s London offices.
The 5G wireless high bandwidth connectivity used in the trial implements intelligent beam-forming technology in high-frequency mmWave spectrum. The trial achieves speeds in excess of 1Gbps per second, sufficient to deliver multiple bandwidth intensive UHD and VR streams, and demonstrates what high capacity connectivity could enable for content delivery in the future.
Commenting on the arrival of the BBC content, Nicolas Ott, managing director, Telecoms & M2M, Arqiva, said: “5G FWA is a tremendous opportunity to allow a much greater number of households to access ultra-fast broadband. Our London trial with Samsung has already gone a long way to proving the concept by establishing a stable downlink of in excess of 1Gb per second throughout a traditional British summer.”
Two pieces of content have been contributed by the BBCL Planet Earth II’ transmitted in Ultra High Definition (UHD), Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) and Attenborough-360, a 360 degree Virtual Reality (VR) experience.
Andrew Murphy, BBC R&D added: “As a technology to increase the availability of broadband to homes and businesses, 5G FWA could bring benefits to our audiences by making the BBC’s Internet-based services and new content experiences even more readily and widely available.”
In order to simultaneously deliver multiple bandwidth intensive UHD and VR streams over the same 5G link, BBC R&D’s Turing encoder], an H.265/HEVC open-source software video codec, was used to compress the content prior to its transmission. This makes it possible to reduce the amount of bandwidth required.
