June 7, 2007

A Different Kind of Quad Play

By Jim Barthold

A big topic of conversation at NXTComm and Cable-Tec Expo - did anyone mention the two conflict this year? - will be the poorly named quadruple play. With the way the FCC is flexing its indecency muscles, it's unlikely that the term fourplay will ever gain much credence, so for the sake of talking about the combination of voice, video, data and some other service, quad play has to do.

Most of the time, quad play means adding mobile wireless to the triple play mix. It's an easy assumption for some telcos - OK, it's easy for AT&T - and a goal for some cable operators who've banded together as SpectrumCo. It's not the way MSTI Holdings and its NuVisions Broadband service market the quad.

MSTI will start to deliver up to 300 channels of IPTV to multi-dwelling units in New York City on July 23. The IPTV service includes a combination of a satellite package delivered by CSI Digital and locally inserted content from MSTI.

"Quad play adds our Wi-Fi component," said Frank Matarazzo, CEO-founder of MSTI Holdings. "If you have voice, video and data with us, the reality is if you live in Manhattan, you get free Wi-Fi by virtue of our offering. It's not cellular, (but) if you have a Wi-Fi-enabled phone, my network will support that."

Matarazzo expects to sign up "somewhere around 10,000 subscribers" for his IPTV service by year end by feeding Gigabit Ethernet over fiber or 80 GHz licensed spectrum microwave to MDUs. Once at the buildings, MSTI will use whatever network's available to transport the signals to the residences.

Getting the connection

"That's the difference between us and a lot of our competitors. They're focused on one mode of delivery; we're in the connections business. We have to get it from A to B, and we don't care how we get it there as long as it's reliable," Matarazzo said.

Even the microwave - MSTI stands for Microwave Satellite Technologies Inc. - will deliver five-nines of availability up to a mile, he said, and the IPTV network itself is nothing revolutionary.

"We have a headend in the sky (not HITS, CSI) that's an aggregation point. It then feeds down to a terrestrial headend that we insert even more channels into, and from there we distribute out over Gigabit Ethernet to the end users."

The big difference is that this is IPTV delivered to end users who will probably have Scientific Atlanta, Amino or ADB set-tops.

"With IPTV, you tear down a lot of the barriers. You can offer a virtually unlimited number of channels to the end user; you can offer a virtually unlimited number of on-demand channels to the end user. It's a true convergence of the computer and television into one device," Matarazzo said.

And that, relative to the first item, is what the competition is saying today.

- Jim Barthold