HD IPTV beams everywhere as show starts

NO SOONER HAD HOT AND RAINY Computex closed down than another big show came to the Far East.

The former CommunicAsia, NetworkAsia and BroadcastAsia line-up has a new name worthy of a large show - a four letter word: IMBX. It means InfocomM Business eXchange.

The region's largest telecom, networking and broadcasting show is, as usual, held in sunny Singapore. That's the famous island city which, many decades ago, due to wild experiences, certain colonial gentlemen from a slightly larger island off France, often called Sin-Galore...

IMBX is everything that Computex isn't: all 2,400 exhibiting companies, expecting around 70,000 visitors from 100+ countries, are neatly arranged in eight halls of the huge Singapore Expo - all under a single roof! No rain exposure, chasing those shuttles. Even the UFO-shaped metro station, designed by Sir Norman Foster, is just fifty yards away through a covered wide walkway. It takes exactly six minutes to the airport terminal from there by train... not bad for a day visitor!

Overall, the atmosphere feels more serious and professional. The booths are generally much larger than those at the Computex, with proportionally larger walkways as well - you're unlikely to bump into anyone here unless you intend to.

HSDPA was shown on many new phones and mobile computer adapters, from Samsung's newest superslim entry to Chinese ZTE Expresscards. WiMax focus this time was still on the 'provider' side with all the transceiver stuff, with few client devices shown - phone and PC Card adapter from, again, Samsung. The Korean giant also showed phones with DVB-H digital TV capability.

Interestingly, "fashion" and "style" were the in thing on the mobile phone vendors' booths - after all, how much more functionality can you really force out of a phone? So, fashion fads become the next $$$-pinching play.

On the other side, HDTV was the star of both telecom and broadcast halves of the show. 1080p HD over IPTV was shown as on over a dozen booths, with even high-quality MPEG2 streams requiring no more than 35 Mbps, and near-same quality MPEG4 ones being happy with about a third of that. The links? VDSL, WiMax, even power networking.

HDTV cameras on consumer level, are now reaching true 1920x1080 sensor resolution, so you can expect a proliferation of next-generation YouTube-like sites providing true HDTV footage fo those with enough bandwidth, of course. The huge 100-inch 1080p display from Panasonic was there, among others, to show such footage.

The other star of the show was Skype: cellphones, desk phones with or without need for a PC, accessories and even teleconference units, all based on Skype, were seen around the show. Nothing is cheaper than free, after all, and it was fun putting my name in a cellphone and getting added instantly. Singapore has free wireless with around 5,000 hotspots throughout the city, so a WiFi-enabled Skype cellphone makes perfect sense here.

In summary, the general feeling on the show floor this first day is: the market is still growing by leaps and bounds, the fight for the spectrum is getting worse with the latest spat between WiMax and satellite guys for the C-band below 5 GHz, both WiMax and HSDPA are moving ahead fast, each on its own turf and seemingly not (yet) overlapping.

HDTV is everywhere as well, especially as the whole of South East Asia standardised on DVB-T. And all these are combining in some really interesting mobile - and not so mobile - devices, able to handle all this stuff in a show of ever-better convergence. The following stories will cover some examples from the show. µ