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By Dan
Blacharski
Television has come a long way since
the time I watched “The Honeymooners”
and “I Love Lucy” on my
parents' black-and-white floor model.
We had to make sure to turn the set
on five minutes before our show started
so it could "warm up," and
every now and then it would go on the
fritz, and I would walk with my dad
to the drug store with the spent vacuum
tube in hand to find a replacement.
With IP having been designed as a "best
effort" protocol, one envisions
a return to those old days of television
when hearing talk of IPTV, but such
is not the case. As the third leg of
the much-heralded "Triple Play,”
IPTV has a lot riding on it. Customers
are willing to pay for the trio of services
in a single package, and are likely
to enjoy the convenience of a single
offering, but only if the price is right,
and only if the quality of all three
areas--telephony, Internet, and television--is
at least equal to, if not greater than,
what is already being offered.
The Market
Initial deployments of IPTV have encountered
some delays. Several major providers,
including Telstra, Swisscom, and SBC,
have put off their rollouts of IPTV,
due in part to technical problems and
the need for improved stability. These
difficulties will no doubt be overcome,
but it will take time.
IP broadband television does have several
advantages over other television services.
The interactivity of IP naturally lends
itself to services that are not possible
on traditional television. Interactive
applications such as video blogs, or
other types of television shows that
could include the viewing audience,
may become the reality show of the future.
Television shopping will be as easy
as shopping over the Internet. You will
be able to order that Pocket Fisherman
with just a few clicks of your remote,
instead of calling the 800 number.
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"The
interactivity of IP naturally lends
itself to services that are not
possible on traditional television."
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"Many of the QoS features
that have allowed us to deliver
VoIP can be leveraged to deliver
IPTV," says Dave Boland,
Senior Manager, Next Generation
Solutions at Juniper Networks.
From a router perspective, those
QoS issues include Diffserv-based
traffic classification, rate limiting
of the queues, and the ability
to prioritize traffic types per
subscriber and place traffic in
the appropriate queue.
The Need for QoS
Telcos are facing increasing pressure
to diversify their revenue streams
by offering the triple play that
includes IPTV. But doing it right,
and delivering superior quality,
requires a very large risk and
a very large CAPEX investment.
In offering an IPTV service, a
market study by BNS Ltd.shows
that consumers rank channel variety
as the greatest factor in making
a purchase decision; but the second-greatest
factor by only a slim margin is
the quality of the signal. Low
monthly cost comes in at a distant
third.
There are five areas that must
be considered when delivering
excellent network performance
through IPTV; these include scalability,
security, manageability, QoS,
and availability. All are important
in delivering the type of advanced,
high-quality viewing experience
the consumer will no doubt demand.
Scalability is essential for
planning for the future. Manageability
is also an important element,
especially since components are
often compiled from different
manufacturers. Systems integration
is vitally important for effective
day-to-day operations. The IPTV
Management System itself (the
middleware) must be able to interact
with every element of the IPTV
system.
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From VoIP to IPTV: Not Such
a Big Leap
One of the biggest reasons for the current
difficulties being seen in IPTV is simply
that the technology is still in the
early stages of development. IP, in
relation to its original use--transmission
of data--didn't need much in the way
of quality of service. If a packet arrived
out of order, it didn't much matter.
Then VoIP came along. Those first, experimental
VoIP implementations, usually implemented
on a PC-to-PC basis, were fuzzy and
choppy. Today, VoIP quality is equivalent
to POTS, and its presence continues
to revolutionize the telephony industry
thanks to improved QoS.
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Existing DSL networks were designed
to be inexpensive and simple. But, according
to Boland, "The equipment and network
architectures were not designed to offer
voice or video services, and QoS was
not considered." New services,
most notably IPTV, need not only more
bandwidth, they need security and a
guarantee of quality. "Now that
new access networks and hardware are
being rolled out to deliver IP voice
and video (Verizon, FiOS, SBC Lightspeed,
etc.), QoS and network design are critically
important, and are receiving a lot of
attention."
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