FAST NET FUTURES QUESTIONS CURRENT TELCO VIDEO MODELS

If competition from voice-over-IP and cable TV players is the main motivator for carriers offering video as a counter-punch, last week's Fast Net Futures show provided yet another wake-up call as executives from several vendors questioned those first moves. Numerous speakers who believe that carriers must rethink those strategies, in fact, called current telco video models into question. Held in conjunction with the Voice on the Net show, Fast Net Futures focuses more on the technology of triple-play services but with a heavy emphasis on long-range issues.

Metalink and Ikanos, for instance, offered dueling demonstrations of early VDSL chipsets that allow carriers to provide symmetric 100 Mb/s service over copper loop lengths of just less than 700 feet. While the technology will be deployed initially in Japan and Korea only, the demonstration has applicability to the U.S. market, where VDSL2 is expected to gain a foothold with larger carriers. That technology, which will allow 100 Mb/s downstream and at least 30 Mb/s upstream, is still early in the development cycle, with many believing that the standard will be approved soon. Large carriers' urgency in getting into video is pushing the process, said Rajesh Vashist, president and CEO of Ikanos.

Peter Chow, DSL chief technical officer of DSP Systems for Texas Instruments, said the company is pushing forward with VDSL2 chip development using its universal DSL program.

“I believe VDSL2 will become the next dominant technology in the same way that ADSL became a dominant technology,” he said.

What carriers do with that technology, though, is up for debate. While most at the Fast Net event believe video and video-related applications will be significant, the business model for delivering them is still very much in flux.

“It's all about the consumer spending that $90 to $170 per month,” Vashist said, adding that he believes the emergence of digital photography will push U.S. consumers to demand faster upstream speeds.

One of the few issues speakers almost universally agreed on was carriers' need to deliver applications above and beyond traditional cable offerings. “FTTx is a really expensive way of replicating broadcast TV,” said Brian Hinman, president and CEO of 2Wire.

For many vendor and carrier executives, the answer lies in programming being delivered on-demand in a unicast environment. However, one of the areas of sharpest disagreement was over where carriers should store content and how it should be moved around the home. On the former, some believe carriers initially should deploy premises-based storage devices such as personal video recorder-enabled set-top boxes and evolve that to network-based service. Hank Kafka, chief architect at BellSouth, said the company is looking at the full range of options, but there may be legal issues with the network-based implementation.

Getting video from the side of the home to the set-top and beyond, however, sparked even greater debate. Phil Winterbottom, chief technology officer of Entrisphere, said using the existing in-home coax network was the most feasible near-term solution. A number of others, though, believe 802.11n wireless home solution will be a feasible replacement sooner than expected.