Cloudy Thinking

Phone companies are thinking too small as they plan to roll out IPTV services. Verizon’s FIOS fiber to the home service uses passive optical networking. The specific PON flavor being deployed at Verizon taps out at an average of about 30 Megabits per sec (Mbps) per household. That’s not enough, as you’ll soon see.

A few access equipment vendors have introduced so-called “point to point” optical access system. These use a star topology so each house or business uses a dedicated fiber, instead of being multiplexed over a single fibber that is split among 8, 16 or 32 customers. These fiber to the (whatever) FTTX solutions, use 100 Mbps optical Ethernet.

Those solutions — shared PON or active star at 100 mbps per customer — are the wrong choicee because the bandwidth needed per customer will soon outstrip their capacity. My answer: deliver a physical gigabit optical Ethernet to each customer. Then as a service provider, offer cleverly priced options to deliver various increments of bandwidth, downstream (to customer) and upstream (can you spell “home servers?”).

My bandwidth math is not complicated. Assume state of the art compression, either MPEG-4 Part 10 or Microsoft Windows Media 9. While there are subtle differences (and Microsoft may win the video CODEC battle…) here are realistic bandwidth planning numbers assuming advanced video compression:

Assume: MPEG-4 or Windows Media 9 video CODEC.

Assume: 2 Mbps per standard TV stream + 10 Mbps per high definition TV stream + N Mbps for high speed Internet access. (By the way, for sports programming, the jury is out regarding bandwidth requirements to deliver the best NFL, NBA or NASCAR experience. Don’t be shocked if sports programming needs a bit more than 10 Mbps.

Assume: High Definition tipping point in 2007. HD TV prices are already crashing. The 2005 holiday season will start a tsunami of HighDef adoption.

Direct broadcast satellite guys such as DISH Networks and Direct TV routinely sell (or give away to new customers) four set top boxes per house. But that doesn’t translate into four TV streams per customer, because of…

TiVo effect: On any given set, you may want to record one stream while you watch a second live stream

Picture in Picture: Most mid-range TVs support a second smaller picture so you can watch a sports event while keeping an eye on the misery in New Orleans or Iraq.

Here’s the Ron K. Jeffries IPTV bandwidth math:

10 x 4 TV sets, all High Def
10 x 4 Picture in picture
10 x 4 TiVo or other personal video recorder
100 x 1 high speed access for Internet TV, music, movie sharing

Total: 220 Mbps bandwidth PER LIVING ROOM.

You may be shaking your head about my 100 Mbps high-speed Internet access. Here’s why you are wrong and I am right. The cable industry has been using speed of Internet access as a strategic weapon against telcos over the past year. They are steadily increasing the cable modem downstream bandwidth when they get serious competition from telcos. So if I am a telephone company who is deploying fiber to the home, I will select technology that allows me to completely blow the cable guys away. With an offer of 100 Mbps high-speed Internet access, they are hopelessly lost.

It gets better. Cable technology really struggles with providing decent speed upstream bandwidth. A telephone company that roll out Gigabit to the Living Room fiber service can offer some very interesting EXTRA COST options where the customer buys a premium upstream bandwidth plan. Maybe my vanilla Internet access plan is 100 Mbps down, and 2 Mbps up. For Small Office, Home Office (SOHO) users, I sell upstream at 10 mbps for an extra (pick a number) dollars per month, and I throw in static IP address. That’s yummy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 7:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.