Big Blue Marble has announced its Nakolos platform has implemented the feature set introduced with 3GPP Release 19. The update, achieved together with partners bitstem, TRedess and SYES follows two years of standardisation contributions alongside organisations such as the European Broadcasting Union and Broadcast Networks Europe. Nakolos becomes the world’s first end-to-end 5G Broadcast solution to implement the feature set.
Designed to address the needs of 5G Broadcast rollout, additional capabilities include Time Frequency Interleaving (TFI), which allows existing transmission sites to be reused while improving signal robustness; CAS-Muting functionality, which aims to reduce deployment costs by enabling DVB-T2 infrastructure to be repurposed for 5G Broadcast and support for the new early-deployment frequency bands B112, targeting the U.S. market, and B113, targeting Europe and other global markets.
Nakolos is built on a carrier-grade, 3GPP-native architecture and has evolved continuously from Release 14, said the company. In combination with Release 19-compatible transmitter solutions from TRedess and SYES, and the new bitstem 5GR receiver platform, released alongside this announcement, users can now validate and deploy interoperable 5G Broadcast chains under real-world conditions.
Johann Mika, chief innovation officer at Big Blue Marble, said, “Release 19 represents a concrete step forward for commercial 5G Broadcast, not a future promise. The features introduced in this release give network operators a credible path to cost-efficient deployments using infrastructure they already have. With Nakolos, they can begin that transition today, ahead of the first generation of commercial 5G Broadcast-enabled consumer devices.”
Commercial device availability is expected in the coming years, with Big Blue Marble aiming to Nakolos as a solution for users who need to be infrastructure-ready ahead of mass-market adoption.
