It’s not news that the distribution of IPTV content within the home is, for many carriers, as big a challenge as getting the signal to the home in the first place. Early IPTV providers in the U.S. (folks like SureWest ) have often had to add hundreds of dollars (multiple hundreds, as much as $400 or $500) to their customer acquisition costs in order to run Category 5 cabling to remote set top box locations within the home.

Everyone – and we mean everyone – is working on this problem, with a number of alternatives percolating up to the top of the pile. Cat 5, phone line, powerline, coax-based solutions and even wireless have been suggested, tested and, in some cases, deployed.

But the fact of the matter is that there’s no magic bullet for in-home IPTV distribution yet today. Most carriers seem to be leaning, at least in the short term, towards using existing coax to distribute their IPTV. And this makes a lot of sense, given the fact that most homes have at least a few runs of coaxial cable going to the most likely IPTV set top box locations.

Two groups have made the most headway here – the MoCA alliance (built around Entropic Communication’s technology) and Coaxsys’ TVnet (Coaxsys is building its own similar coalition around this technology). Both systems offer the promise of 100Mbps (or more) over coaxial cable, providing the infrastructure for multiple simultaneous high def streams within the home – and given the rapid downward price curve of HD-capable displays, supporting at least 3 HD streams is a minimum requirement moving forward.

We’re bullish on these coax-based solutions, simply because they fit the existing video-over-coax paradigm and infrastructure found in most homes, and because they’re relatively cheap and easy to install. Most importantly, they work in most homes without retrofit or modification of existing cable infrastructure, and without the need to have expensive technician time spent troubleshooting and fine-tuning the install. Most telco TV service providers and vendors have seemed to agree too, with MoCA finding great success in the solutions being pitched in the latest PON RFP, and with Coaxsys getting the nod in a large number of smaller IPTV deployments. MoCA has even brought a second source chip supplier onboard in the past weeks, to help diversify the supply chain and ease telco’s minds about single source technologies.