The prosperous cities of the future will be those that offer ubiquitous advanced fixed and mobile networks supporting a wide range of rich media such as mobile video and mobile TV which in particular will emerge as a ‘constant companion' to those that want it.

This was the key finding in Ericsson's Business Innovation forum in Stockholm in which the network giant aimed to outline the future that advanced networks would bring over the next five years.

At the event based in Kista, otherwise known as Scandinavia's equivalent to Silicon Valley or Silicon Fjord, the network equipment supplier said that mobile broadband would be a necessity to enable people's business and consumer needs and predicted that the development of Long Term Evolution (LTE) would be key to the mass availability of mobile multimedia services.

LTE networks are designed to offer true mobile broadband performance thus offering the bandwidth needed to support high quality mobile video services. They will almost certainly boast data speeds that are equivalent to those offered by fixed line broadband today. The first networks are expected next year and Ericsson confirmed that it had signed licence agreements for LTE essential patents.

The announcements are based on the industry practice FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) licensing. Commented Kasim Alfalahi, Vice President and Head of IPR Licensing and Patent Portfolio at Ericsson, "This is an important milestone for us to demonstrate our LTE leadership. We aim to strike a balance between providing value for our customers and earning a fair return on our significant R&D investments when other parties have the opportunity to benefit from them."

When such networks are up and running, their potential will contribute to making TV to grow dramatically in importance predicted Dr Jeffrey Cole director of the Centre for the Digital Future at USC Annenburg School. The market analyst said that future mobile TV networks would have the scope to allow TV to escape from people's living rooms for the first time, and with the availability of the appropriate handsets and mobile video players in cars he said that mobile TV would grow to be a constant companion filing holes and phases in people's lives.

Interestingly Cole also expected that once services broadcast in demand content of high enough quality, they would more likely y watch TV shows in 30-, 40 and even 60-minute segments rather than the two or three minute-long snippets that are mainly viewed currently. However he warned that there were limits of for just how long people would watch mobile video. "Nobody will watch Lord of The Rings for the first time on mobile devices," he chided. Cole also expressed confidence that end users would not be put off by having to watch advertising in order to receive content for free.

Ericsson saw a world where people deployed content servers at home especially in the transport of rich media content such as video to a range of compatible mobile video platforms. It also sees the rise and rise of the app store concept within mobile video.

Jan Häglund, Ericsson's deputy head of product area IP and broadband networks did however caution that there would be a need for very closely aligned service convergence and that operators have to understand fully the different character aspects of each content delivery platform. "Development needs to be adapted to the screen in front of you," Häglund said. "We've only see phase one of the digital TV evolution; constant TV everywhere is the next phase."

Another area touched upon by Hakan Djuphamar, and Ericsson vice president of systems architecture, was the need for service and/or content providers to be able to use brokerage technology to enable a reversed charge model for mobile video. That is to be able to push out mobile video to end users who would balk at being liable pay for streams of video that they did not ask for but which the provider would like to push out to be viewed.