February 26, 2008

You Gonna Eat That?

IPTV Eyes Cable's Lunch

By Jim Barthold

If you listen to its advocates, IPTV is eating cable's lunch. There is about as much reality to that as to Comcast's ongoing claims that it has an "advanced fiber optic network." Yeah, IPTV is making inroads, and yeah, Comcast has fiber out there. But cable TV is still the dominant way to get television, and Verizon FiOS is still the most advanced fiber-optic network because it goes all the way to the consumer's home, not to a node.

It's all in how you look at things.

The IPTV providers know they're not on top of the world yet, so they're taking steps to gain traction and climb the mountain. Canadian regional telecommunications provider Bell Aliant is working overtime (not literally, of course) to make sure IPTV home networking isn't a problem by embedding CopperGate's HomePNA chips into its CPE home networking equipment. Another example of the IPTV community's desire to make things right is a forgivably self-serving survey conducted by Multimedia Research Group at the behest of Symmetricom (doesn't mean it's not accurate, just means Symmetric can benefit from the results) showing that IPTV video quality is of "vital importance."

Duh!

Multi-sets a given

First Bell Aliant, which serves 3.3 million total customers in six Eastern Canada provinces, three of which are now getting IPTV from the cleverly named Aliant TV. Those getting IPTV are not content with one set - having been taught better by the cable guys who already laid coax around the house. The time and money saver for Bell Aliant is to use that coax for IPTV; the answer was HPNA.

"Thank god CopperGate came along with some of this technology because if you look inside the home environment, as we start to install multiple TV set-top boxes and devices, you can just imagine the installation time or the customer experience," said Gary Lund, Bell Aliant's CTO.

Instead, putting CopperGate's HPNA silicon into Motorola set-tops and Corinex powerline adapters, Aliant installers can whisk through the multi-room setups and move to the next customer.

"Eighty percent, 90 percent of installations are homes that have coax. We absolutely have to have the (HPNA) technology; it's been a godsend for us (because) anywhere we're launching our IPTV service there's a good take rate ... ahead of our forecasts. They're taking multiple TVs, multiple devices all bundled together and packaged together," Lund said.

Not exactly video phones

And they're taking them from the regional telephone company, not the regional MSO. Of course, this means high definition because even in the Great White North, HD rules.

"We wouldn't put HPNA in if it wasn't going to handle high def PVR applications," said Lund. "It's both a bandwidth throughput getting it over ADSL, VDSL modems and so on and into the set-top box, but once you get it there, it has to be crystal clean, transitioning across to all the other devices."

That backs up the primarily obvious conclusion of the Symmetricom study that "video quality is critical to the growth and success of IPTV."

"There are three conclusions," said Gary Croke, director of marketing in Symmetricom's QoE Assurance Division. "One of them is that good video quality is essential, and that might be a 'duh.'"

Wait for it, folks.

"Of course it is," he added.

The other two conclusions are that it's important to have a quality monitoring capability that adequately determines what the end user experience is and that operators are struggling to find the monitoring tools that they need. That's where Symmetricom gets to step in and play the savior.

Video is tough

Video, to continue stating the obvious for any cable engineer, is not voice, nor is it data.

"Video just stresses a lot of these IP networks more than a lot of other services. For that reason, monitoring, which was critical for VoIP services ... just becomes so much more important with video because IP networks weren't built to handle such large volumes of real-time QoS-sensitive traffic," Croke continued.

To give Symmetricom its due, the results proved out what the company has been trying to say all along: IPTV needs a good end-to-end video quality monitoring system. Of course, it goes without saying (so why are we saying it?) that Symmetricom has such as system.

"We at Symmetricom have entered this video monitoring market and targeted IPTV service providers just because we think the expectations for quality are higher in that space, and the service provider can do something about it," he concluded.

- Jim Barthold