Supercomm - IPTV - 11 June 2005

IPTV: one of the major hot topic.

A lot of demos on ADSL2+ or FTTP infrastructure. That means the application needs sufficient access bandwidth in place to support it, and therefore networks optimized for IP video services are still to be deployed. It will take some time before the market is mature and become a mass market (remember Verizon or Swisscom problems). Increasing bandwidth per household will strongly impact the aggregation and IP service edge network. There is not a single solution, and how you distribute intelligence throughout the IPTV network will lead to different solutions. Some vendors (Alcatel) are putting intelligence in the aggregator (DSLAM), while others (Cisco, Juniper, ) are keeping more intelligence in the edge routers, according to their core business. The market has a huge potential, but, for a while, trials (even commercial deployment) will be needed to test scalability.