Adding yet more confusion to an already fragmented mobile TV market, 3UK, Telefonica and Vodafone on Wednesday joined Orange in a technical trial of TDtv, the 3G TD-CDMA-based Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS)

The trial of TDtv technology developed by US vendor IPWireless, is scheduled to run to the end of the year and will allow the operators to test key performance and deployment aspects of the platform.

TDtv base stations have been deployed on 12 cell sites covering parts of Bristol in the UK to provide broadcast services to TDtv enabled smart phones. Content provider MobiTV, which already delivers streaming mobile TV content to 3 and Orange, will provide the client application as well the content.

The TDtv technology itself operates in the universal unpaired 3G spectrum bands, known as TD-CDMA or TDD, that are available across Europe and Asia at 1900MHz and 2010MHz.

Michael Walker, director of research and development at Vodafone said: “Trials are an extremely important part of our strategic product development. In the case of mobile TV, there are a number of technologies emerging that must be fully explored so that we have a comprehensive understanding of how the technologies work and the experience they will offer. Currently the most interesting technologies are the variants of MBMS and DVB-H and this trial forms part of the MBMS assessments we are undertaking.”