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Telecom service providers have an exciting new opportunity with a triple play delivery of voice, video and data to the home. Of the three services, video is the last to become economically viable. But combining IP with DSL is making cost-effective delivery of video to the home a real possibility. Triple play is a win for everyone involved. Consumers will get simplicity: all three services from one provider, with one bill and possibly even a nice bundled-service price break. They’ll also get access to new services and new capabilities. Service providers will get a simplified network and a healthy new revenue stream. And, most important, they’ll be able to compete more effectively with their cable rivals, who are offering their own version of the triple play.
Service providers have already been successful with data delivery to the home. DSL services are welcomed and familiar to most consumers. In the meantime, cable operators and satellite TV providers have captured the video to the home market. With the advent of cable modems, cable operators have made inroads into data delivery to the home and are now beginning to edge into the delivery of voice service—a market that’s been owned by telecom providers since the beginning of telecom. It’s time for service providers to push back. Until now, video delivery by telecom service providers has been closely linked with fiber, either Fiber to the Home (FTTH) or Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). But the expense of replacing the existing copper plant with fiber has locked service providers out of the video market. Today, new technologies that build on the use of copper pairs have made it possible and cost effective to deliver video without installing fiber all the way to a consumer’s home. It’s no longer a question of when service providers will have cost-effective video delivery. Instead, they find themselves in the enviable position of considering how. Service providers now have a choice of technologies, and, as always, the decisions they make will dramatically affect their bottom line. Two Choices of Delivery Two competing methods of video delivery are through an IP over ATM-based infrastructure or via an IP/Ethernet-based infrastructure. Many service providers have a large investment in ATM infrastructure with SONET transport and may be inclined to stick with ATM for this reason. But IP and Ethernet are the natural delivery mechanisms for video services, in part because it is the IP/Ethernet ports, not ATM ports, that are ubiquitous on end-user equipment, such as personal computers and DSL CPE devices. Furthermore, the explosive growth of the Internet, which is based on IP, ensured that the existing ATM infrastructure grew to become simply a transport mechanism for IP networks. Many service providers are learning that in the case of video services, ATM is simply unnecessary. page 1 of 3 |
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