Traditional broadcast stations transmit data to millions of users at the same time. For instance, a television (TV) station may have one or more broadcast antennas that transmit a signal over a large geographic area. Viewers in that area tune their receivers to the operating frequency of the station to receive the data. In terms of the number of transmissions needed to reach viewers, this system is efficient in that one broadcast transmission can reach millions of users at a time.
The opposite of a broadcast transmission is a point-to-point transmission. Examples of point-to-point transmissions are telephone calls wherein person A calls person B. The cellular telephone system represents one category of point-to-point communication systems. As cellular telephone service providers have increased their sophistication and services offered, more and more consumers have come to rely on cellular telephone systems for services beyond basic voice calls. Examples include browsing the Internet, retrieving email and downloading content that helps personalize the cellular telephone.
In recent years, traditional cellular service providers have tried various ways to send the same content to a group of wireless users. For instance, some providers offer news services, wherein a wireless user may sign up for news content to be delivered as Short Message Service (SMS) messages to his or her phone. Currently, if one thousand wireless users are all entitled to receive the same news content, the wireless provider sends individual messages to each user with the content therein. Thus, to reach one thousand users, one thousand message transmissions are needed. This is much different than the broadcast TV example above, because of the point-point nature of the cellular system.
Sending such a large number of messages, containing identical content, in a short time is an inefficient use of network capacity. It may congest the network, preventing other messages from being delivered in a timely manner. It may also require the wireless service provider to invest in more equipment in order to cope with usage spikes that occur at particular times of the day.