All IPTV solutions are not alike

A recent EETimes article reports that a panel of cable executives have concluded that they have little to fear from telcos' forays into video services. The crux of the argument goes like this:

1. Most telcos (SBC's Project Lightspeed, for example) are deploying systems wherein they don't actually run fiber to the home, but rather just to your neighborhood distribution node. The final hop still has to traverse the existing copper telephone line running to your house.
2. That final hop won't be able to support the bandwidth necessary to run high definition video services.
   
3. The cable plant does, obviously, support HDTV, so they'll continue to have a significant competitive advantage.

The article points to one notable exception, however: Verizon's FiOS video service.

"HD channels are the ultimate weapon against IPTV, because most of the PON architectures being talked about right now can't handle multiple HD streams," [Richard Green, president and chief executive of cable consortium CableLabs,] said. "Verizon is the toughest competitor because it duplicates the cable plant."

That part about Verizon duplicating the cable plant reminded me of something else I came across a while back. While Verizon's FiOS architecture may support high-speed Internet access, and they may be using VoIP to provide telephony service, they have thus far shied away from IPTV. According to this article, Verizon uses two wavelengths on the fiber connection: one for VoIP and Internet data; and the other for video. They use traditional RF broadcast technology over that video wavelength and not, as one might otherwise assume, IPTV.

Categories: IPTV, Verizon, FiOS, Uverse, SBC, AT&T, FTTP, FTTN