ing this with ‘resilient bandwidth,’ and products shipping in 2007 that will provide “telco-robust home networking solutions including an outdoor IPTV gateway with an environmentally hardened box. “We are looking to rewire the house–to get IP from one side of the house to the other.”

Ofir Michael, Director of Product Management at RADCOM ( www.radcom.com) sees that much of IPTV’s first service issues have been solved by sheer attention to detail and the tiny size of most developments. “When telecom providers launch IPTV, they need some sort of management, and generally they first take care of content (signaling) management and then content distribution. At first this is not a big deal to manage, as there are not many subscribers.” As time goes on, and subscribers (hopefully) go up, today’s IPTV networks will need fairly comprehensive management solutions, “much more so than the VoIP service environment, for the demand on bandwidth is higher–64k for voice versus a hundred times that for IPTV. The network is much more stressed.” Moreover, says Michael, “TV is a much more complex signal. More bandwidth is required on an IPTV signal, and while you can build a current amount of packet loss in voice services, and codecs to deal with it, video codecs were not designed for any packet loss…. The human brain doesn’t deal with video error as well. This is problematic, especially when you are dealing with an already loaded network.”

In this environment, “studios are going to force the carriers into some sort of SLA.” RADCOM has developed a probe that sits at the head end and monitors network quality as well as content format and its ability to conform to broadcast quality specifications, as part of its Omni-Q monitoring network. But the clients of this service, despite content providers’ growing concerns, will still be the carriers’ problem because it’s their network. Could film studios and TV networks be taking a more active role? “Quite frankly no; these elements content providers take for granted. With single-path CATV networks, you don’t have to worry about it. While switched networks are different, the mindset is still CATV.” This mindset will persist, Michael believes, until “IPTV becomes predominant and (the film studios) are sending out so many signals over IP platforms that the content providers will have to take care of it.”

Ironically, however, the fundamental nature of video codecs run across the grain of what IP is built for because, according to Michael, “they are digitized, not packetized. MPEG- 2 is still designed for DVDs. We may see someone invent a new, more fault-tolerant codec, and there is evidence–Apple, Flash, You Tube–that this is happening.” However, he sees the standard by which many in the industry are looking to sort out some of IPTV’s delivery issues as magnifying the problem. “MPEG- 4 heightens the loss problems by a factor of ten” because of its high rate of compression, “and more compression equals more packet loss…. One dropped byte uncompressed is a second and a half of lost video transmission; 100 dropped bytes is a disaster,” says Michael.

Andrew Sachs, Director of Marketing for IPTV service assurance solutions at JDSU, concurs. “IP was never meant to

carry video, and video was never meant to be delivered over IP,” he says. But given that’s what the industry has to work with, Sachs sees four major challenges to be overcome by carriers using IP platforms to deliver video content: “First you have to ensure the content is as good as it gets when it’s delivered into the network–checking transcoding, pixilation, and metadata at the head end. You have to make sure the content is golden before it gets to the customer. Then you have to make sure it’s error free to the edge of the optical network.” Sachs say that getting video signal to the DSLAM sounds simple, but the very essence of an IP network is its ability to reroute dynamically, so there is bound to be packet loss regardless.

“Then a carrier has to ensure link capacity at the point of access. These architectures are built around high-speed delivery, but they are connected to consumers through thin little straws!” And finally, carriers have to boldly go where they rarely have gone before. “There must be error compensation in the noisy loop and home environment.”

More significantly, however, Sachs sees effective error maintenance as, in and of itself, a market differentiator for a converged service carrier. “In competitive converged services markets,” he says, where every carrier offers everything, “you don’t get two shots to win a customer.” V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacific Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst, consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly appears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquartered in Hong Kong. You can reach him at robrien@vonmag.com.