IPTV Home Network Solutions

26/03/2010 by David Slade.

The future of Home Entertainment Networks is here today.

It’s called IPTV. It is one of the most promising new opportunities for carriers. A recent In-Stat report projects that telco TV subscribers will grow to 71.6 million worldwide by 2012.

Imagine a home entertainment system that offers viewers the freedom to pause a television show in one room and resume watching it in another. That’s possible with IPTV distribution. Viewers can fast forward, rewind, and record while accessing global channels, personal media channels, electronic program guides, and more. It delivers television-on-demand with multiple picture-in-picture features as well as cutting-edge functions enabling viewers to record their favorite shows from wherever they are in the world.

This is great news for telcos. IPTV deployments are proven to stop landline subscriber erosion, increase ARPU, reduce churn and improve broadband purchases. IPTV is also protecting telcos from competitive threats of Triple Play Services coming from the cable industry.

Understanding the Home Entertainment Network

The secret to successful IPTV deployments is to best understand the network inside the home. While access technology is important, the bigger challenge is to have enough bandwidth inside the home entertainment network to deliver the performance and robustness required for pay-TV services.

The Home Entertainment Network is different from the traditional home network in several ways. First, it is essentially a real-time network. There is very little tolerance for network latency. Unlike data networks where the customers can tolerate jitter and other network delay problems, the customer’s expectations for pay-TV services require a much higher robustness.

Second, Home Entertainment Networks are bandwidth intensive. Delivering multiple HDTV streams, Whole Home DVR, and other services all add up in terms of bandwidth. Typically, the throughput requirements for Home Entertainment Networks are 5-10x bigger than those of traditional home data networks.

WiFi and CAT-5 Are Not the Solution

While a widely deployed networking technology such as Ethernet or 802.11 WiFi might seem the obvious choice, they don’t meet the requirements of carriers. They lack the home coverage, cost and/or performance requirements needed to deliver Home Entertainment Networks. WiFi isn’t a viable alternative because it doesn’t have the bandwidth or robustness to deliver the performance required for HDTV streams. Plus, coverage inside the home can be spotty and unreliable.

CAT-5 is also considered a possible technology. However, CAT-5 is not widely available throughout most homes and is very time consuming and expensive to install.

The best approach is to find existing wires in the house that can meet the bandwidth requirements of Home Entertainment Networks. The most reliable approach uses coax, powerline or twisted pair.

HomePNA - the most popular Home Entertainment Network Solution for Carriers

When telcos want to get into IPTV and triple play, the technology they turn to most is HomePNA, the ITU-T based standard G.9954. Four out of the top five largest carriers in North America deploying IPTV have selected HomePNA. In a recent report, HomePNA 3.1 was ranked the most widely deployed IPTV solution amongst service providers worldwide.

What makes HomePNA so relevant to carriers?
It provides all the performance and business attributes telcos want: great performance, compatibility with existing infrastructure and an attractive business model.Telcos that have deployed HomePNA have received higher fixed line retention, higher ARPU, and greater customer satisfaction. To date, the addition of CopperGate-enabled IPTV has generated more than $1 billion in new revenues for service providers.

HomePNA 3.1 delivers high bandwidth IP traffic over existing coax and phone wires. The latest HomePNA solutions deliver more than 200 Mbit/s of continuous throughput - enough to meet all the needs of service providers for the foreseeable future. HomePNA solutions provide enhanced features such as guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and remote management and diagnostics capabilities that were developed specifically to allow telcos to provide reliable cutting-edge television service while minimizing operation expenditures.

HomePNA also works well with telco infrastructure. It coexists with ADSL, VDSL and related technologies. This makes it easy for service providers to quickly and economically deploy IPTV inside the home.
HomePlug AV - The Powerline Solution for Triple-Play Home Entertainment Networking

For service providers and consumers, HomePlug AV 1.1 based solutions provide a cost effective, high performance solution for the most demanding whole-home entertainment networking for triple-play home services - video, audio, data, and voice applications - over existing AC power lines.

For homes without existing coax wiring infrastructure, the powerline provides a cost effective, high performance solution for whole home distribution of video, phone and broadband services. With PHY performance of up to 200 Mbps, HomePlug AV is an excellent choice for consumer home entertainment products where power lines are the distribution media.

G.hn - The Next Generation in IPTV Home Networking

CopperGate welcomes the recent adoption of G.hn, the next generation home networking standard, ratified by members of the International Telecommunications Union in December 2008. This new standard will make IPTV even more popular and cost-effective, thus paving the way for increasingly innovative features and applications throughout the broadband home.

Posted in quality of service (QoS), G.hn, Home Entertainment Network, powerline, IPTV, HomNet | No Comments »