SureWest switches to Mediaroom for IPTV over copper

SureWest Communications (NASDAQ: SURW) is preparing to deliver IPTV over bonded ADSL2+ lines to some 25,000 homes in its Sacramento, Calif., market.

SureWest had said it was contemplating such services when the company began offering broadband via bonded ADSL2+ in its incumbent territory last fall, including 10-megabit-per-second services. The company already offers IPTV through its fiber-to-the-premises network, but its bonded ADSL2+ customers have so far only had access to SureWest’s voice and data services. (The company has offered IPTV over copper on a very limited basis even before it began line bonding. It offers IPTV over copper to about 2500 customers today, mostly to those with short loops and modest standard-definition video needs.)

The new copper-based IPTV services, which will be available to 15,000 homes in December and another 10,000 by next June, are enabled in part by the company’s recent switch from Minerva middleware to Microsoft’s Mediaroom and by its use of MPEG-4 encoding for video compression.

“The initial deployment of bonded ADSL2+ last year was really focused on increasing data speeds,” Bill DeMuth, SureWest’s chief technology officer, said in an email. “Since that time, we have also launched MPEG-4-based video, which helps with bandwidth utilization of our video delivery. We have also deployed error-correction technologies that help with network performance. We feel that, along with these improvements, Mediaroom will allow us to provide a better experience over the copper network because it handles bandwidth resource and conflict management very well while providing a very intuitive and expected customer viewing experience.”

SureWest is evaluating the prospect of applying Mediaroom to its other market, the Kansas City area, which it obtained through its acquisition of Everest Broadband more than a year ago.