ATIS MAKES IPTV INTEROP PITCH, VENDORS FORGE AHEAD ANYWAY

IPTV was upgraded yet another notch on the hot technologies scale last week when the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions announced the end of its first meeting of the IPTV Interoperability Forum.

The IIF, like other ATIS initiatives, won't be creating standards per se, but will have a significant influence on the overall network architecture for IPTV. In addition, the IIF's work will be rolled into ATIS's NGN architecture, which is being presented to the International Telecommunication Union.

Initially, the work for the IIF will come from four separate task forces created last week to address specific technology areas: architecture, digital rights management, quality of service & metrics, and testing and interoperability. The first three have adopted initial work issues and are targeting March 2006 as the deadline for initial recommendations. The testing and interoperability group will wait for the other three to develop recommendations.

Kevin Schneider, chief technology officer of Adtran, who co-chaired an early IPTV exploratory group with SureWest chief technology officer Bill DeMuth, said the initial IIF meeting in Washington attracted about 80 participants from 70 vendors and carriers.

“We had representation from all the former RBOCs, and they have embraced it from the start,” Schneider said.

That's not surprising, given the high level of support ATIS is accorded within the RBOCs. However, not every vendor is fully convinced that the effort is entirely necessary. UTStarcom, which has started to push into the U.S. IPTV market, believes the market already is expanding rapidly and that carriers need to use a standards process that is more akin to Internet development than traditional telecom.

“We believe the standards efforts are very important and fundamental to expansion of the IPTV market,” said Bill Huang, chief technology officer of UTStarcom. “Like Internet technology, we believe IPTV will be based on open standards. Whatever is going to work is going to become standard; what doesn't work will disappear.”

Schneider, however, argued that the IIF will play a role more like the DSL Forum, which contributed several key technical recommendations well after the first deployments of the high-speed access technology.

“We're just in the getting-started phases of IPTV, and what we're looking at in this group is the long term,” he said.

Other vendors claim the importance of interoperability depends largely on a company's current position in the market. Matt Cuson, director of product marketing for middleware vendor Minerva, said large carriers like SBC Communications and Belgacom have the luxury of choosing just one system integrator that will be responsible for integrating all the piece parts. For vendors that don't have all of the end-to-end elements, interoperability is a necessity.

“You could argue that you don't have to work with everybody, and you only need to work with those companies that your customers want you to,” Cuson said.

FOUR IPTV TASK FORCES

ARCHITECTURE: Will develop a reference architecture to identify where ongoing work fits in, and identify places where additional work is needed

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT: Will develop standards acceptable to both operators and content producers to ensure security and quality of video signals

QUALITY OF SERVICE AND METRICS: Will create a reference design for end-to-end QOS testing that takes into account all traffic, including IP video

TESTING AND INTEROPERABILITY: Will develop interoperability standards and testing regiment

Source: ATIS