PEAK3 Forms As New ATSC 3.0-Enabled Edge Pathway Solution To Leverage Broadcast Spectrum And Demonstrate New Wireless Data-Delivery Capabilities

Two veteran IoT executives have formed PEAK3, a new ATSC 3.0-enabled edge pathway solution focused on building businesses using the ATSC 3.0 broadcast spectrum for IoT and edge use cases.

Led by Alp Sezen and Chris McGhay, the IP-based ATSC 3.0 standard ushers in a large-scale advance for broadcasting technology that brings together over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting, the internet, and limitless additional use cases that “provide the opportunity for PEAK3 to leverage broadcast spectrum and demonstrate the new wireless data-delivery capabilities that will soon be available for all commercial interests,” PEAK3 said.

PEAK3 entered into a spectrum-usage agreement with some national broadcasters with the aim of being able to offer national coverage by the fourth quarter of 2023.  This initial long-term license agreement, it said, “provides PEAK3 the bandwidth capacity necessary to affect the multiple large-scale business models where broadcasting can play a critical role in efficiency, effectiveness, and security with edge communications.”

Sezen, PEAK3’s CEO, brings more than 30 years of technical hardware and software design experience from edge to the cloud, including RF solution deployments. He said: “We are going through our sixth evolution of computing and each stage has created opportunities and challenges. The ’70s ‘Mainframe’, and ’80s ‘Client Server’, the 2000s brought three-tier architecture, 2010 was the era of multi-tenancy or cloud and now we are going into Distributed-Edge architectures. Computing is shifting towards edge computing to meet new workloads that customers demand. “The evolution of distributed computing brings new values through applications residing at the edge but also brings new challenges. The ability to extract data and deliver data from disparate devices at the edge has created a bottleneck that needs to be solved in the coming decade. ATSC 3.0 data delivery over the air will be a critical asset in accomplishing that, especially with the exponential growth of edge devices we have seen. ATSC 3.0 can scale with this growth providing one-to-many connectivity.”

ATSC 3.0 is optimized to support highly flexible Distributed Transmission System (DTS) network architectures, which will dramatically improve signal reception in indoor and outdoor environments, including small portable devices and mobile receivers. The protocols implemented in the new broadcast standard are very similar to those used in 5G cellular networks, but optimized for broadcasting over a much larger area, due to the relatively higher transmission power levels, thus requiring far fewer transmission sites compared to traditional cellular network base stations.

“We look at this technology differently,” said McGhay, CRO of Peak3. “We come from a place where adding clear value to a solution stack carries a lot of weight when organizations look to scale a current edge strategy or are looking to apply novel efficiency or security measures to their current architecture.”

The PEAK3 team is field testing several use cases with technical partners to draft supportive white papers for the technical community to demonstrate multiple ways that the ATSC 3.0 spectrum will provide value to its customers.

It is estimated that six billion edge or IoT devices will be deployed and connected by 2030 within North America, encompassing both the commercial and consumer markets and wireless services provided by broadcasters. These will be both complementary and supplementary to incumbent telecom data providers, PEAK3 said.

“With PEAK3 holding long-term licensing agreement on the broadcast spectrum with the national broadcasters, we will be able to support the delivery of data and services to customers that alleviates the data download congestion the incumbents are starting to see,” Sezen said.