September 14, 2007

Mountain from a Molehill

By Jim Barthold

Lest anyone think that IPTV is the playground of the rich and famous telcos, it should be noted that Mountain Telephone, a cooperative owned by its 17,000 or so users in West Liberty, KY, is building out an IPTV system along with an expanded suite of voice, data and video services.

The co-op, obviously with the full blessing and even encouragement of its owners/subscribers, is replacing all legacy switching, transport and access equipment to provide IP-based services, using a Fujitsu multiservice provisioning platform to manage it all.

The incumbent cable operator, in case you were wondering, is Time Warner, and the telephone company, while excited about the mission on which it's embarking, is not going in blindly with expectations of putting TWC out of business.

"We don't expect it would be something that would be less than a challenge with IPTV," said Alan Gillum, general manager of Mountain Telephone, a moment of fresh honesty in an increasingly stale hype-filled space.

IPTV, while the most glamorous part of the upgrade, of course, isn't even the main reason that it's happening, Gillum said.

"We had needs of upgrading some equipment that was getting a lot of age to it, and with ... the need to migrate to a softswitch and anticipate being able to offer voice-over-IP along with IPTV, we felt like the time had come to begin this journey," he said.

The journey includes a 10 Gb fiber ring feeding 18 kilofoot ADSL2+ links to deliver residential and commercial voice, video and data services. It's hardly FiOS, but it's rural Kentucky, for goodness sakes, and it's a steppingstone for what will probably happen in the next half-decade or so.

"Within two to five years, once we get our deployment in place, up and running and serving the customers that we can with ADSL2+ on an 18-kilofoot fiber design ... we probably would be ready to seriously look at fiber-to-the-home as the next step and take us into the next generation beyond what IPTV over copper can do for us," he said.

If that five years sounds like a long way off, think of how long it took until you got a cable modem; or DVR; or voice service from your cable provider - or, conversely, TV from your telco. That will put things into perspective.

- Jim Barthold