NCTA 2005 focus

NCTA: The National Cable & Telecommunications Association show took place in San Francisco last week. The cable industry has been shaped in few recent years by technology, and is no more just a TV programming industry. For years, MSOs have heavily invested in their networks (two ways, data-aware, higher bandwidth, voice and VOIP, VOD, PVRs and more recently HDTV). Up to recent time, their main competitors were satellite companies. VOD and service bundles had been successfully promoted as key differentiators as satellite providers cannot do them. MSOs are now full telecom companies.

Now telcos are identified as main competitors, attacking their core business (TV programming) through broadband access (ADSL2+, FTTx). The identified strategy to react will be "quadruple play" offer made of mobile, TV, broadband and fixed voice. Attacking is always the best strategy, so they will offer wideband connection for surpassing data rates of competing media and offering more channels (forcing telcos to move to fiber-based networks), they will enter the mobile business, the VOIP market, as well as the VoWLAN market. How to say they are not full-range telecom service providers? So competition with telcos will be head-to-head and sharp.

NCTA’s focus was on all those technologies involved, all applications and services that can be offered to the end-user (home and business). Among the hottest topics were "seamless handoff" (the ability for a connection to switch among cable, cellular, and wireless LAN at will), wideband (channel bonding up to 1Gbit/s), and customer care (customers on control) and customization.