IPTV set-top box quandaries confront Tier 2, Tier 3 telcos, says Bulk
Mar 11, 2008 8:39 AM
Frank Bulk: Yes, standards are absolutely needed. They may not fit every vendor’s architectural approach, but the more that can be done to marry the different elements together, the better it is for the industry.
Mid-last year, ATIS released its “IPTV High Level Architecture Standard,” which is a good first step (http://www.atis.org/iif/). Membership includes Calix, Cisco (which purchased Scientific-Atlanta), Innovative Systems, Siemens (which purchased Myrio), Verimatrix and Widevine.
The DSL Forum introduced late last year a Technical Report, TR-135 Data Model for a TR-069 Enabled STB, that provides specifications on how STBs can be provisioned, managed and monitored. It’s exciting that vendors beyond home gateway and DSL modem manufacturers are riding the wave of interest and development of a standard that can reduce service providers’ operational costs.
There has also been some discussion and even a high-level proposal passed around among rural and small ITCs regarding whether a separate standards organization needs to be formed to develop standards that reflect the unique needs and challenges of Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators. However, there are obvious concerns about how this strategy lines up with market dynamics that favor the largest operators and their buying power.
One of the reasons that the smaller operators have fastened onto Scientific-Atlanta’s STB is that large service providers prefer to do business with larger, financially stable vendors, so Scientific-Atlanta will be able to gain the customers and associated unit volumes to keep prices low.
These large service providers are also able to demand a product that meets their specifications, hopefully ones that match the work being performed by the different standards bodies mentioned. Once standards are in the set-top boxes, shared by both small and large operators, middleware and conditional-access vendors will also need to step in line. But standards development is a long process measured in years, rather than months.
IPTV Update: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Frank Bulk: Without HD content on our IPTV platform, customers in our market are looking to satellite providers or the incumbent cable TV operator. We don’t have precise figures on the number of customers lost to the dish, but we hear enough questions, and complaints are filtering back to our office and the techs in the field that we know we’re not delivering as quickly as we need to be. We’ve been promising over a year that something will be coming “soon,” but with the delays, our words are ringing hollow. We have pulled the trigger on upgrading the coax plant in one of the towns where we provide both twisted pair and coax rather than saving those capital dollars for an IPTV product that can serve in and outside of town because of competitive pressures.
Another point worth mentioning is that our existing MPEG-2 STBs represent a huge stranded investment if we move to a middleware product that supports only the newest STBs, which naturally excludes MPEG-2 only boxes.
It’s not the MPEG-2 that the existing boxes wouldn’t be able to handle; it’s that the middleware software couldn’t load on them. I’m not aware at a time in our company’s history when we have been faced with the possibility of replacing so many CPEs at such a high cost per customer served in so short a time. There are customers who have been using the same black phone for 50 years despite three generations of telephone switches, and now we may have a situation that requires us to replace 100 percent of our STBs within three years of a deployment.
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