Telefónica, Siminn television roaming trial
April 18, 2023
By Colin Mann
Spanish telco Telefónica and Siminn, Iceland’s largest telecommunications operator, have successfully carried out what they say is the first proof of concept for TV roaming. Both companies have been able to demonstrate the feasibility of distributing video services with local delivery when the user is on a visited network by interconnecting their Content Delivery Networks (CDN) using the Open Caching standard defined by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). The integration based on this standard has been carried out between the Broadpeak, provider of the CDN technology used by Siminn, and Telefónica CDN (TCDN), which is the proprietary technology used by Telefónica to distribute video content in its footprint.
The tests have focused on the scenario where a Siminn user accesses his TV service from Spain via Telefónica’s network, and delegates to Telefónica’s CDN (TCDN) for local delivery rather than remote delivery from Siminn’s CDN in Iceland. For now, testing has been done using lab environments, but the aim is to be able to take the same proof of concept to production in the coming months.
The Open Caching initiative promoted by SVTA provides standard interfaces so that any content provider can improve the quality of its video service by delivering it closer to the end user by relying on operators’ CDNs. In addition, this scenario also allows operators to optimise video traffic on their networks, which is particularly relevant when video traffic already accounts for 80 per cent of total traffic and is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
This use case will allow a better TV service to be offered to users when they access it from outside their own networks, offering better quality thanks to closer delivery and higher availability thanks to the use of the local operator’s CDN. In addition, both operators will significantly reduce the volume of traffic associated with these scenarios, resulting in greater service efficiency for both.
“We are excited by this partnership with Telefónica as it has the potential to give our customers a great experience driven by open standards when using our services while traveling abroad while keeping our operational costs down,” declared Bjarki Jónsson, team leader of TV services at Siminn.
“We are pleased that as a result of our collaboration with our partner Siminn, we have been the first to successfully achieve this proof of concept for the optimised distribution of video roaming services and we look forward to bringing it into production as soon as possible,” added Ruben Mellado director of Digital Home services at Telefónica. “We are also confident that this TV Roaming initiative will also be of interest to other operators and we can quickly add new participants.”
Telefónica and Siminn have been collaborating on innovation since 2017, when the Icelandic operator became part of Telefónica’s Partners Programme. Since their alliance began, both operators have been working on a number of business areas, including innovation, procurement, roaming, digital products and multinational services.