The ludicrously inappropriately-named wireless cable concept – call it cellular television – has caught on in New Zealand, and Salt Lake City-based Transworld Telecommunications Inc has teamed with Decathlon Communications Inc to deploy Decathlon’s digital compression technology in its cellular video system in Auckland, New Zealand, where it leases 10 radio channels, on which with Decathlon’s digital compression it reckons it can offer up to 100 channels of video programming. It expects to order 10 compression systems and about 200,000 set-top decoders. Transworld operates a similar system in Tampa and St Petersburg, Florida.Decathlon claims to be the first to use compression – MPEG-2 – at the head-end, so it is compatible with existing analogue head-end equipment.
