In the Spotlight: Scott Ulsaker, Pioneer Telephone Cooperative

Pioneer Telephone Cooperative in Kingfisher, Okla., is the nation’s third largest telephone cooperative, and like many other independent service providers, Pioneer is making a name for itself by being aggressive deploying IPTV services serving 72 communities in central and western Oklahoma. But, Pioneer is a pioneer even among the IPTV set, by testing wireless as an in-home distribution technology for IPTV (using an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi-based system developed by vendor Ruckus Wireless. Scott Ulsaker, director of operations at Pioneer, is an old hand at wireless, having worked on AT&T’s Project Angel fixed wireless endeavor. He spoke with Telephony editor in chief Dan O’Shea recently about using Wi-Fi for in-home wiring.

On how he discovered the IPTV-over-Wi-Fi concept: I had looked at it about a year ago at the TelcoTV show, and after talking to Ruckus about it, I had a couple units shipped out to us for testing. Now, technicians pride themselves on being able to break things, and our guys ran it through every test and situation you can think of, and it has done well for us.

On Pioneer’s initial trial of IPTV over Wi-Fi: We had concerns about interference. We weren’t sure how it would perform, so we wanted to stay close to home with the trial. We used my house and a lot of my neighbor’s houses, about 25 in all, and it did well and we later extended that. We now have it in about 80 homes.

How Wi-Fi may fit into future plans: For in-home wiring, we had wanted to do mostly Cat 5 Ethernet—that has been our core. We did some IPTV with coax, and we have been working with HomePNA stuff, but I feel strongly that wireless could be the mode of installation that will eventually become our standard. An IPTV installation can typically run at least three and a half hours, and with Ruckus it’s more like one hour. Also, our customers really like the ability to move the TV around if they want. Right now, the number of people volunteering for our trial is more than we can handle.

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