Verizon CTO on in-home LTE, IPTV migration and more

Mark Wegleitner

On FiOS and the transition to digital TV: We’re taking care of our embedded base, sending at least one converter to get the same or better package -- more than just the analog channels. Going forward, we use that device as part of the offer for second, third and fourth devices. It’s a low-end set-top but performs virtually the same functions as a converter. As we recover QAM channels -- 8 or 9 standard definition (SD) or a couple high-def channels – we’re applying that to get to the larger SD and HD packages we offer now.

On IPTV migration: There’s 3 ways to get video from one point to another: There’s analog, which we’re leaving; digital QAM, which is 6 MHz worth of QAM modulation with multiple channels on each; and then there’s IPTV. We’re moving toward IPTV in the interactive VOD world and digital QAM in the broadcast world. We’ll see some overlap happen here as we move some broadcast channels into IPTV -- probably long-tail content initially not the most frequently viewed channels but the ones we still want in broadcast as opposed to interactive because interactive is a transaction – I’m buying something or getting something free off a menu. And long term, broadcast IPTV is more a surfing experience as it is in the current digital QAM world. There’s some migration toward IPTV already for broadcast. In the digital QAM world, we’ll use that capacity for a combination of SD and HD, which is what we have today.

On femtocells and dual-mode phones: We’re planning for trial of femtocells. Both had obstacles. In one case, the femtocell cost was a problem. In other case, the availability of dual-mode phones was a problem. Both of those will be overcome. We look at femtocells right now as a desirable solution but mostly for coverage purposes, not for additional feature capability. If a customer wants to cover a spot in their home, for example, femtocells are a solution. It isn’t necessarily dirt cheap to do that, but on the whole, there are circumstances where that would makes some sense. In the dual-mode phone case, you can get a little more into the feature world, and you get coverage as well, but you’ve got to have the phone, and that’s an obstacle in some cases.

On femtocells and LTE: [Femtocells] might be [a way to add features] some day, but it’s not the part we’re focusing on. On the whole, it isn’t altogether different than if you step out the front door and hook up to the base station. It’s just a small base station. You might be able to get into a little more in the home networking world, and that’s why I don’t want to shut off the possibility of getting more features out of a femtocell. I could in theory make EVDO today, RevA today or LTE tomorrow a part of a home networking environment. We’ve always had a vision of home networking that involved more than just MoCA or even WiFi. It had multiple ways of reaching off the broadband LAN, which in our world today is MoCA. I don’t know that we couldn’t ultimately make LTE one of those if we needed to.