The “Triple Play” chorus has become deafening. Everyone and their brother has a triple play strategy – big telcos, little telcos, PTTs, IOCs, just about any size, shape or form of telco wants to head off the cable guys at the pass with a TV strategy.
And lots of money is being spent on triple play infrastructure, both in terms of vendor investment in R&D and product development, and in terms of actual on-the-ground investment by carriers in fiber extension, DSL upgrades, core router/BRAS upgrades, video servers and the like.
All of this investment means that telcos have finally, and for a variety of reasons, warmed up to the video business case. But that doesn’t mean that telco TV is a no-brainer, in terms of dollars and cents. Telcos are moving forward because they are looking at a longer-term business case that involves losing everything to the cable multiple system operators (MSO) if they don’t act soon.
What would make the short-term business case for telco TV sweeter? Well unfortunately, the upgraded access network part of the “costs” half of the ledger is not negotiable – low bandwidth codecs are coming, but they’re not going to be soon enough (or low bandwidth-enough) to let today’s DSL networks support triple play without upgrades. But one big cost item, according to just about every telco, integrator and system vendor we speak with, comes in terms of the in-home wiring/install/truck roll required to get a customer up and running with a multi-room TV solution.
This may seem like relatively small potatoes, compared to some of the other capital and operational expenses involved in rolling out triple play, but in fact it can be significant. First, consider the fact that it’s a must to go multi-room with any truly competitive TV offering, and trying to support full-featured set tops at each TV is cost prohibitive in and of itself.
So some sort of less capital-intensive distribution system is required. There have been many different answers thrown at this problem. Some telcos are installing new Category 5, which costs the telcos hundreds of dollars on top of other install/provisioning costs, and moves payback periods out multiple years. This is tough to recoup with the relatively low margin TV service – and also can leave stranded assets if a customer moves to a competitive provider.
Other telcos have at least looked at wireless solutions, using Wi-Fi or UWB, to distribute signals between the primary and satellite set top boxes. But although we’re about as bullish on Wi-Fi and UWB as anyone you’ll meet, this just isn’t ready for prime time (despite some awesome CES demos we’ve seen just about every year we’ve been there).
One promising angle is to do what the cable MSOs do – utilize the coaxial cables, which are found in the vast majority of American homes. Indeed some triple play systems – like the 2Wire set tops that SBC is using for their DirecTV-fed u-Verse service – are simply modulating the signals for remote locations into unused TV channel slots and sending them out over the existing coax. If the main set top is powerful enough to handle this approach, this can work well.
Another related, but distinct, angle is to use the coax to carry a two-way IP signal around the house. This has the benefit of keeping an IPTV signal as IP all the way to the endpoints, and also providing a backbone for any IP traffic in the home (like high speed Internet and VoIP). The MoCA folks have been pushing this vision for a while, promising a high speed (270M bit/sec) IP connection over existing coax, but products aren’t shipping yet.
One vendor that is shipping, and with whom we spoke recently, isCoaxsys. The company just this month announced their 20th live customer with the TVnet IPTV 7000 adapter system. Working over any RG-6 or RG-59 coax network, and any topology, Coaxsys claims 70M bit/sec or higher bidirectionally by simply plugging a pair of adapters into existing coax cables – enough speed to handle two or maybe even three HDTV signals.
Today’s system will only work with the entire coax free of other signals (in other words, it’s not compatible with simultaneous cable or satellite services over the same cables), but the folks at Coaxsys will say they’ll soon have products which overcome this obstacle. Either way, they’ve got a working solution that’s being put into live customer premises today – which is something worth knowing while we all wait for MoCA and 802.11e and UWB to come out of the oven, fully cooked and ready to deploy.
