Taking questions

I seldom get through a week without being asked the same two recurring questions: “How much bandwidth will be enough for residential triple-play subscribers?” and “What in the world has happened to our marriage?” I try to avoid conversations that I know will end in tears, so I usually steer clear of the bandwidth question.

It came up yesterday, though, at the VON show in San Jose, Calif. AT&T reported it delivers 25 Mb/s to the home over its longest fiber-to-the-node loops (and more over shorter loops), pledging to deliver multiple simultaneous streams of high-definition television this year. Later the same day, as part of Telephony’s all-day IPTV Workshop, Surewest Communications described the new 50-Mb/s Internet service it recently launched. With its fiber-to-the-home network, Surewest delivers a total of 100 Mb/s to the home and has been offering HDTV over MPEG-2 set top boxes for more than a year. (With MPEG-2 encoding, HD streams take up about 20 Mb/s, the company said.) Surewest now claims an 11% penetration rate for HDTV, with HDTV customers averaging 1.6 HD sets per home.

There are other key questions surrounding triple-play deployment besides the bandwidth matter, such as, “How much are carriers spending on these deployments?” (There’s an excellent Webcast on that subject here.) You can often tell a lot about a carrier’s deployment by noting which questions they try to avoid and which ones they’ll answer without being asked.