Celeno tallies wireless IPTV deals

Celeno Communications, an Israel-based company making chips for Wi-Fi home networking applications, has announced that nine rural U.S. telcos are conducting deployments of whole-home HD IPTV wireless distribution configurations using video bridges incorporating its technology.

Celeno said in a statement that “dozens” of rural service providers have adopted its technology and identifies nine of them: BTC Broadband in Oklahoma; DTC Communications in Tennessee; Duo County Telephone in Kentucky; Etex Telephone Cooperative in Texas; Farmers Telephone Cooperative in South Carolina; Horizon Chillicothe Telephone in Ohio; Liberty Communications in Iowa; and Surry Telephone Membership Corporation and Star Telephone Membership Corporation, both in North Carolina.

These deals suggest a major step forward for a technology scheme that has been used widely in Europe but only recently has begun to penetrate the U.S. market. Ruckus Wireless, arguably the most well-known vendor of dedicated systems for distributing IPTV and other apps over Wi-Fi in the home, announced a deal with Consolidated Communications last year that made the Illinois-bases rural telco one of the U.S. market pioneers for the technology. Meanwhile, AT&T and other telcos reportedly have had the technology in their labs.

Unlike Ruckus, Celeno gets its chips to market not through its own systems but in the modems, set-top boxes, residential gateways and other gear of vendor partners, which include Zyxel, Comtrend, Alpha Networks, SerComm, Ayecom and others, said Lior Weiss, vice president of marketing for Celeno. Also, Airsonics, another company using Celeno’s technology, has teamed up with Flextronics to target Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers, Weiss said, though he declined to identifies the vendors involved in the deployments Celeno discussed in its press release.

“In the IPTV telco space we see two deployment models for IPTV [over] Wi-Fi,” Weiss said. “One is on stand-alone Ethernet bridges, and the second is Wi-Fi modules embedded in xDSL and fiber gateways.”

He added that the stand-alone Ethernet bridges are still the more common route, but that Celeno is “starting to see momentum building toward integrated designs by some key manufacturers” and language in some requests for proposal asking for the technology to be embedded in gateways. The latter is something that hasn’t been seen in previous years, he said.

Home wiring challenges are nothing new to telcos, and the increasing market activity could be a sign that service providers are both broadening their options and putting more faith in wireless to support video quality.

“From our initial experience in the IPTV world, we have found that there are many home networking challenges,” said Mike Lawson, plant manager for Surry Telephone Membership Corporation in Dobson, N.C., in the Celeno press release. “We required a solution that would enable us to reduce wiring time and to enable delivery of IPTV services in homes that can’t be rewired. Celeno's Wireless Bridge is a very cost-effective and easy-to-use product, which has allowed us to reduce man hours of wiring in several of our installations.”