Telecommunication News

The overwhelming majority of home wiring is perfectly suitable as a conduit for IPTV in a HomePlug network. When it isn’t, however, carriers are at a loss to say why and the homeowners are annoyed that the carriers can’t correctly install a home network.

“They (carriers) don’t have tools that provide them with the diagnostic capabilities for a reliable network,” said Elsa Chan, director of business development for HomePlug technology vendor Asoka USA. “We came out with a tool that provides them an understanding of the wiring in the home and the delivery of the service … information on not only bandwidth (but) packet loss, jitter, latency and a lot of information that that lets them understand why there’s pixelization happening.”

The toolset, priced at US$600 and available late in the first quarter of 2008, includes three adapters and a CD. It helps an installer diagnose whether a problem is with an individual outlet and can be resolved by moving to another spot; whether nearby noisy appliances are creating a problem and can be filtered; or if the home wiring is bad and the homeowner needs an electrician.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time in the deployments we’re seeing today—and we have hundreds of thousands of IPTV deployments running today with our technology (with AT&T and Bell Canada, among others)—it just works; you plug it in and it works,” said Dano Ybarra, Asoka’s CEO. “This is for that one percent of the time when you plug it in and something’s wrong. Rather than just walking away, they can figure out what is wrong.”

A report by ABI Research says that although TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) faces an uphill battle outside of mainland China, inside the country it will likely be the dominant 3G technology thanks to “heavyweight” support by the government.

The current 3G delay inside China, says the report titled “3G and Beyond in China and Hong Kong,” is largely due to regulatory complications rather than technical issues. Although “China’s TD-SCDMA ecosystem is ready,” according to ABI, 3G licenses were not issued by the end of 2007. ABI predicts that the first TD-SCDMA license will be issued by the end of the first quarter of 2008, and the remaining 3G licenses issued six to nine months after that.

TD-SCDMA may have trouble catching on outside China, especially in Hong Kong, which has a very strong market infrastructure — 56 lines per 100 people, according to Hong Kong’s OFTA (Office of the Telecommunications Authority). However, with industry players in China and internationally already displaying multimode handsets, and an upgraded, HSDPA-enhanced network infrastructure already in place in 10 of China’s major cities, the lag may not be significant.

The recent 850 MHz spectrum auction for CDMA2000 services, which will ensure continuity of roaming services for visitors to China using CDMA handsets, suggests that the mainland’s influence on Hong Kong’s telecommunications industry is becoming more significant.

The results will be more clear, according to ABI, once the Chinese government has finalized its 3G outcome.

Following a logical track taking advantage of its FiOS service buildout, Verizon is offering small-medium businesses symmetrical high-speed data throughput for prices ranging from $99 to $239 per month, depending on the plan and where it’s offered.

“It’s definitely not a new business segment and we’ve always had a business FiOS data product. What we’ve done is be able to increase the speeds to the point where we’re probably touching more businesses,” said David Frendo, director of business voice and broadband services for Verizon.

The high-speed data offering is for businesses from 1 to 500 employees who to transport increasing loads of bandwidth-rich content, said Frendo.

In Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island customers can get 20 Mbps symmetrical service with a dynamic IP address for $99.99 or with a static address for $139.99 with a two year agreement. A 50/20 Mbps plan is $299 per month with dynamic IP and $239 a month for static. In California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington plans range from a 15/15 Mbps service for $99-$139 price to a 30/15 Mbps at $199-$239 a month. The plans are also available with 12- month agreements at higher prices, the company said.

Where FiOS Internet is not available—and that’s still the majority of the carrier’s footprint–Verizon offers high-speed Internet for business from 768 Kbps up to 7.1 Mbps.

“We’ve always been able to deliver a high-end fiber-related service, Ethernet-over-fiber and those services,” said Frendo. “What we’ve been able to do with FiOS is deliver extremely high speeds at much lower costs. We’re bringing high-end services and some very high-end speeds down to price points that the small customer can afford.”

Frendo said there was probably going to be some cannibalization of Verizon’s existing business service customers, many of who have been paying high prices for low- speed speed, albeit reliable, T1 private line networks.

“We’re opening this up to a whole new segment of customer who … are pushing for more bandwidth,” Frendo said, pointing to groups such as medical offices that send high resolution X- rays and cat scans between facilities or “people hosting their own Web sites. Is there some cannibalization? Sure.”

For the most part, though, the new offering takes advantage of FiOS as a high-speed network to pitch new customers and use the expertise Verizon Business has gained working with large enterprises and high-speed networks.

“We work with our enterprise group to bring things down from enterprise into the small-medium business space and work with our consumer folks to bring products up to make them business grade,” Frendo said. “We’ve always been sort of a standalone entity between those two, providing specific requirements for the space.”

Harmonic, a video infrastructure equipment provider that cut its teeth in the cable industry, will chow down on telcos this year, an executive made clear during a presentation at the 10th Annual Needham Growth Conference in New York City.

“One of the most important drivers for Harmonic over the last few years has been the emergence of telcos as players in the video business,” Robin Dickson, Harmonic’s CFO said during the presentation. “While this is still in the very early stages, telco video mostly delivered over IPTV is a significant new growth opportunity and market for us.”

Harmonic partners with traditional telco equipment suppliers like Alcatel-Lucent but has traditionally split its efforts between cable and satellite video TV providers by delivering video-on-demand, high definition and other forms of time- shifted television technology.

“It’s not just about cable and satellite anymore, but it’s increasingly the role of the telcos and the over-the-top Internet providers as well,” said Dickson. “The least well understood at this point is the whole business of Internet video but it’s very clear that the service provider model is under threat from Internet providers and we expect to see significant growth opportunities in that business as well as mobile.”

Dickson called encoding Harmonic’s “key competency” and said the company would continue to drive business off a product line that handles both traditional MPEG-2 and emerging MPEG-4 compression formats.

“We do encoding for standard definition, encoding for high definition and we sell these encoders to service providers of all stripes all over the world,” he said.

More recently, the company has also expanded into gear that helps service providers condition content for on-demand playout as another part of its encoding expertise.

“As operators are managing more types and volume of video content and at the same time managing more subscribers who are using VoD, the ability to store and organize these assets and distribute them intelligently over a network is becoming absolutely mission critical,” Dickson said.

This expertise, he said, along with expanding capabilities brought onboard when Harmonic acquired Entone and Rhozet, present the company with an opportunity to continue its strong growth with traditional customers and expand to new ones, he said.

“Cable and satellite still represent the vast majority of our revenue (but) we certainly see growing opportunities in the telco space,” he said.

Even though it has no presence on show floor, CopperGate Communications is using this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to introduce the latest, fastest version of its CopperStream HomePNA chipset.

“We have a meeting room (because) we don’t want to attract (show floor) walk-ups,” said Rich Nesin, vice president of marketing at CopperGate. “It just gives us a place to meet with our customers.”

In this case the customers are other equipment manufacturers who, at the request of service providers, add the CopperGate silicon to their products. The service providers, in turn, want the higher data throughput “to carry more streams and just to buy them more margin in their networks,” said Nesin. “They want to have a very robust network, which is why they’re using existing wires and not wireless and why they’re focusing on the coax and phone wires … so they can deliver a couple HD streams anywhere in the house while still supporting a number of SD streams.”

CopperGate is committed to HPNA—in this case HPNA 3.1— because it’s biggest customer, AT&T uses it, Nesin said.

“It’s our belief that the HomePNA is being picked up by an awful lot of telephone companies. In North America it’s basically the standard for the telephone companies because AT&T picked it,” he said.

Verizon, which is using MoCA is “not IPTV,” Nesin emphasized. “AT&T brought up a true IPTV system and we’ve worked for years with them debugging all the features, the fast channel change and everything else, getting them ready for their deployment so it’s a much easier sell to the other telephone companies.”

It’s also an easier sell to the OEMs that include the chipsets in their products because the service providers back it, he said.

“It got into their (service providers) RFIs and their RFPs and then it got into their products … and they pushed it to the OEMs who were anxious to put any good home network technology in their boxes that the customers wanted,” he said.

The latest version, with headroom included, delivers up to 240 Mbps of data throughput and is fully compatible with CopperGate’s previous generations of products.

“They just connect us to an existing port on the set-top box and our chips are the entire HomePNA 3.1 modem,” he said.

Pre-empting what’s certain to be federal guidelines for wireless emergency notification, Sprint has deployed a geographically targeted mobile alert service in Contra Costa County, Calif. using technology developed by SquareLoop. The service lets public and private sector officials send geographically targeted messages to subscribers based on their actual location rather than to a swath of phone numbers.

“The handset knows where it is,” said Tom Stroup, SquareLoop’s CEO. “That information is sent out to the handset and it makes the determination if it’s in line with its geographic coordinates.”

The initial information will be a text message that can be sent over existing mobile networks. Future enhancements could include text-to-voice and rich media content.

Contra Costa was chosen for the first deployment because its community warning systems manager, Art Botterell, “is one of the thought leaders in the emergency alerting space,” said Stroup. “We’ve done a pilot with them and now we’re moving forward to the commercial rollout. We definitely expect to take it to other jurisdictions throughout the country.”

The community or whatever agency—public or private—that wants to deliver messages pays for the use of the networks and the service. Mobile phone users receive it free of charge.

Even though there is no current requirement to push this sort of information to mobile phones, it makes sense for Sprint to partner with SquareLoop because “we don’t want to leave our customers in the lurch where they don’t have a solution,” said Chris Hackett, vice president of public sector sales programs. At Sprint. “Our take is that there has been no (federal) mandate that’s been put out there so we’ve been proactive in going out and finding the right partner.”

By geographically targeting users the emergency alerts gain credence, said Stroup because they “reach people where they actually are. One of the challenges in public safety is making sure that the information that they get is relevant.”

SquareLoop based its solution on technology developed by MITRE, a non-profit engineering development firm, so the military could geographically target emergency alerts.

“There are other features included in this such as unique alert tones and vibrating capabilities so people pay attention when the information is sent,” he said.

Users can also upgrade to get information on “areas of interest” such as what’s happening near a child’s school or throughout an enterprise campus, he added.

“There are an almost unlimited number of applications for this technology,” he said. “We felt starting with public safety was one of the most important.”