The BMCO Forum, the industry group representing mobile broadcasting players, has lashed out at what it claims are European Commission plans to impose a 14% tax on high-end mobile TV enabled mobile phones upon entry to the EU, saying that it “poses a risk for the development of Mobile TV into a mass-market service.”

In a statement released today, the Forum says: “Of the many factors involved in the success of broadcast mobile TV services, handset availability is arguably the most critical. A wide range of attractive, feature rich handsets at a variety of price points is crucial to the rapid uptake of mobile TV services by consumers. The Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum believes that the introduction of a 14% customs duty upon entry to the EU on high-end mobile TV enabled phones as well as on components, produced outside the EU and used to manufacture mobile TV enabled phones in the EU will seriously threaten the development of mobile TV into a mass market service.”

The Forum points out that the EC had previously said it regarded mobile TV as being “at the forefront of high-value, innovative services, with indications of a potential market value between € 7 billion and € 20 billion by 2011.” The EC has also recently published a communication on the the legal framework for mobile TV networks and services by identifying best practice for authorisation.

Franklin Selgert, chairman of the BMCO Forum’s board, said his members were “surprised” by the EC’s “non-harmonised approach” regarding the development of mobile TV, “fostering it on the one hand and setting barriers to its adoption on the other.”

Selgert called on the EC and EU member states not to set any additional customs duties on mobile TV enabled components and devices.

The potential universe for broadband access via satellite in the UK could be as high as 800,000 households, according to Mike Locke, the man in charge of VSAT, Internet & Special Projects at satellite equipment distributor Eurosat.

Speaking yesterday at a UK launch event for satellite operator SES Astra’s Astra2Connect two-way broadband satellite product, Locke said that while BT estimated there were 100,000 UK homes which would never get ADSL, with Ofcom reckoning a higher figure of 200,000, private research calculated there was a much higher figure of around 800,000 homes with a poor broadband connection. “The true figure [for the potential market] is somewhere in between,” said Locke.

Mike Chandler, managing director of Astra UK, was at pains to point out that the Astra2Connect service, for which Eurosat is the UK distributor, was intended to be complementary to terrestrial broadband, not in competition with it. It was neither as cheap nor as fast, Chandler conceded: what the product sought to do was “to bridge the gap for people unable to get broadband.”

The Astra2Connect proposition is tiered by speed, with 4 service-levels available between 256KBit/s and 2MBit/s downstream, ranging from £19.99/m to £74.99/m. Upstream speeds to the satellite (Astra 1E/3A at 23.5^oE) range from 64KBit/s to 128KBit/s. The kit, including the dish, special LNB and satellite modem, is priced at £299.99, with a current install offer of £100. Given the proximity of Astra1E/3A to the UK-focussed Astra2 series at 28.2^oE, the dish is also able to receive BSkyB or Freesat satellite channels.

The service is already available in Europe, and currently has close to 50,000 customers, said Chandler, with the most popular tier being the 1MBit/s one.

The service was demonstrated live at the event, and successfully coped with embedded video streamed from Internet websites. The opportunity to test how the BBC i-Player might perform was not available, though, due to the fact that the range of IP addresses assigned to the service are currently Luxembourgeois ones, which are automatically barred from access by the BBC.

Locke maintained that the true performance speed in the packages matched the advertised one very closely, and produced a graph demonstrating an average download speed of around 800/900KBit/s for a four-day test of the 1MBit/s service. This compared very favourably with similar tests carried out on terrestrial broadband packages, he said.

The Lyngsat website shows the Astra2Connect service occupying three transponders at 23.5^oE, potentially offering a throughput of 40MBit/s each, according to Chandler. A fair use policy for the service was deployed to ensure that actual speeds matched advertised ones as closely as possible.

As for future developments, a VoIP service is in the pipeline, but there are no intentions to use the service to deliver IPTV. Both Chandler and Locke suggested it would make little commercial sense to do so given the ability of the installation to offer hundreds of satellite TV channels alongside a broadband service.

The Astra approach contrasts with rival satellite operator Eutelsat’s claims that it will be able to use its forthcoming Ka-Band capacity to offer IPTV as a possible service.

Connected TV is sceptical about such claims given a true IPTV service’s requirement to devote around 1.5MBit/s to each active customer, which would very rapidly use up available transponder capacity and would be very expensive to deliver.

However, using satellite as a fill-in broadband service for those forced otherwise to rely on dial-up Internet access seems a reasonably attractive option given the sort of prices Astra is charging. Previously, the customer premises equipment required for satellite broadband was in the £600-700 range.

The service could face problems if it becomes very popular, however, since if using the same number of transponders, Astra would gradually need to tighten its fair use policy. This could be solved by bringing additional transponders onstream, but the question then becomes to what extent do you allow service levels to deteriorate before adding the additional capacity.