Get Faster, Simpler & More Affordable IPTV Deployments

Bring the IP to Any TV

Bring the Best New Technology To Your Customers

The future of Home Entertainment is here today. It's called IPTV. It is one of the most promising new opportunities for Service Providers. A recent In-Stat report projects that IPTV subscribers will grow to 71.6 million worldwide by 2012.

Imagine a home entertainment system that offers viewers the freedom to pause a television show in one room and resume watching it in another. That's possible with IPTV distribution. Viewers can fast forward, rewind, and record while accessing global channels, personal media channels, electronic program guides, and more. It delivers television-on-demand with multiple picture-in-picture features as well as cutting-edge functions enabling viewers to record their favorite shows from wherever they are in the world.

This is great news for service providers. IPTV deployments are proven to stop subscriber erosion, increase ARPU, reduce churn and improve broadband purchases. IPTV is also protecting service providers from competitive threats of Triple Play.

Understanding the Home Entertainment Network

The secret to successful IPTV deployments is to best understand the network inside the apartment. While access technology is important, the bigger challenge is to have enough bandwidth inside the home entertainment network to deliver the performance and robustness required for pay-TV services.

The Home Entertainment Network is different from the traditional home data network in several ways. First, it is essentially a real-time network. There is very little tolerance for network latency. Unlike data networks where the customers can tolerate jitter and other network delay problems, the customer's expectations for pay-TV services require much higher robustness.

Second, Home Entertainment Networks are bandwidth intensive. Delivering multiple HDTV streams, whole home DVR, interactive TV and other services all add up in terms of bandwidth and overall network traffic. Typically, the throughput requirements for Home Entertainment Networks are 5-10x bigger than those of traditional home data networks.

WiFi and CAT-5 Are Not the Solution

While a widely deployed networking technology such as Ethernet or 802.11 WiFi might seem the obvious choice, they don't meet the requirements of carriers. They lack the home coverage, cost and/or performance requirements needed to deliver Home Entertainment Networks. WiFi isn't a viable alternative because it doesn't have the bandwidth or robustness to deliver the performance required for HDTV streams. Plus, coverage inside the home can be spotty and unreliable.

CAT-5 is also considered a possible technology. However, CAT-5 is not widely available throughout most apartments and is very time consuming and expensive to install. It requires drilling in walls or stringing new ugly wiring - lowing customer satisfaction.

The best approach is to find existing wires in the building or apartment that can meet the bandwidth requirements of Home Entertainment Networks. The most reliable approach uses coax and twisted pair.

HomePNA - the most popular MDU Solution for Service Providers

When telcos, MSOs and satellite providers want to get into IPTV and triple play, the technology they turn to most is HomePNA, the ITU-T based standard G.9954. Four out of the top five largest carriers in North America deploying IPTV have selected HomePNA. In a recent report, HomePNA 3.1 was ranked the most widely deployed IPTV solution amongst service providers worldwide.

What makes HomePNA so relevant to carriers? It provides all the performance and business attributes service providers want: great performance, compatibility with existing infrastructure and an attractive business model.Companies that have deployed HomePNA have received higher fixed line retention, higher ARPU, and greater customer satisfaction. To date, the addition of CopperGate-enabled IPTV has generated more than $1 billion in new revenues for service providers.

HomePNA 3.1 delivers high bandwidth IP traffic over existing coax and phone wires. The latest HomePNA solutions deliver up to 190 Mbit/s of continuous throughput - enough to meet all the needs of service providers for the foreseeable future. HomePNA solutions provide enhanced features such as guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and remote management and diagnostics capabilities that were developed specifically to allow telcos to provide reliable cutting-edge television service while minimizing operation expenditures.

HomePNA also works well with infrastructure. It coexists with ADSL, VDSL, RF TV and related technologies. This makes it easy for service providers to quickly and economically deploy IPTV inside apartment buildings and other MDU environments.

CopperGate's latest chipset, the CG3210M is optimized for this MDU environment. It can deliver up to 61 nodes, provide a high level of security to protect service provider content and still operate at the same time as existing broadcast CATV.

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