IPTV is catching up to cable one step at a time

When SaskTel announced last month that it was launching 27 high-definition channels on its Internet Protocol television service, it signalled a narrowing of the gap between IPTV offerings and cable (CCR, Oct.24/06). However, a closer look shows that the telcos still have a long way to go before they close the gap entirely. While it may come as a surprise that a carrier with the relatively small serving area of Saskatchewan is leading the way with telco TV services, SaskTel’s subscriber base actually makes network upgrades more manageable. By the end of 2006 SaskTel, which has a subscriber base of less than 500,000 phone customers, should count around 60,000 digital TV customers. By way of comparison, to reach a comparative ratio Bell Canada would have to enable its network to deliver IPTV to over a million of its more than seven million landline subscribers, so the investment required for it to narrow the television gap between the cablecos is far more significant.In order to ready their IP network to handle bandwidth-hungry HDTV, SaskTel had to shorten the length of its fibre-optic loops from the node to the home to under 900 metres, and replace its 6.9 Mbps DSL build with an ADSL2+ infrastructure. Moving the fibre closer to homes was extremely labour intensive and, according to SaskTel spokesperson Michelle Englot, the largest single capital project the corporation has ever undertaken. The overhaul allows SaskTel to deliver bandwidth speeds of 14 Mbps to its customers, more than enough to handle an HD signal compressed to 10 Mbps. But the service has its restrictions.John Arnold, an Internet Protocol communications analyst and principal of J Arnold & Associates, told Canadian Communications Reports that although IPTV providers are now capable of delivering high-definition programming, they can’t do it on the same scale as the cablecos. "If you’re a high-end consumer and you’re watching different channels, that is a lot of bandwidth requirement that a DSL solution is not going to be able to support," he said. "So there are some inherent limitations on the HD side." Indeed, SaskTel’s director of technology Larry Wagman explains that under the constraints of the current infrastructure household’s subscribing to SaskTel’s Max IPTV service can have three set-top boxes for standard definition (SD) digital television, and only one set-top box for high-definition."We had believed that our VDSL2 technology would be available in this timeframe," says Wagman. "However, it is lagging, not so much from a network perspective, but from a gateway or from a home device perspective. So mid-next year we will be upgrading our technology to VDSL2." This upgrade will increase the bandwidth capability to 20 Mbps, and Wagman says bonded VDSL could double that to 40 Mbps, so any SaskTel subscriber who wants to have two HD sets simultaneously playing different HD channels should be able to do so by the middle of next year.Even though SaskTel is still behind the cablecos on the HDTV front, the telco still deserves a lot of credit; it was the first provider in North America to deploy high-definition over IPTV. Englot says as SaskTel was planning its HDTV launch for October it was hoping to be the first HD over IPTV provider in the world, but France Telecom reached that milestone first and SaskTel had to settle for being the North American leader."We’ve always been very proud to lead the way in terms of delivering next generation types of services to our customers," says Englot. "We’ve invested close to $2.7 billion since 1987 in the network. It’s a matter of us continuing to keep the network current with the latest technologies."

IPTV is catching up to cable one step at a time

News | 11/22/2006 5:00 am EST

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