The Mobile Internet and Event Reporting in Italy

I’ve been in Rome recently and over the weekend attended one of the V-Day manifestations with a friend for more direct democracy in Italy initiated by Beppe Grillo. I mention this on my technical blog as I was very happy to see a couple of organizations reporting from the event which used a 3.5G network to broadcast their stories in real time via the Internet and radio.

Tv_roma
The first picture on the left shows two guys of TheBlogTV interviewing people at the event. The guy on the left operates the camera while the guy on the right with the Mac (!) controls the software which sends the live video stream with the USB data card that hangs down from the notebook on the left to the Internet (recognize the Huawei logo?). I know there are already integrated mobile phone solutions available that do the same thing but this way the quality is probably better (at least for now).

Radio_roma
The second picture shows the transmission equipment of Radiololgiata which transmits both on FM (96.6) and on the Internet. I didn’t talk to them personally as they were quite busy but I am sure the N70 connected to the equipment via the USB cable was NOT used for sending SMS messages 🙂

Great examples of how the mobile Internet revolutionizes event reporting and allows anyone to broadcast to a large audience in real time, in good quality (think HSUPA with 500+ kbit/s bandwidth) and with little cost for equipment. I modestly contributed to the reporting and uploaded some pictures to flickr in real time.