Fibre future for IPTV?
September 12, 2007
From Colin Mann in London
Future IPTV deployments need to be based on fibre networks, according to Ericsson's Chief Technical Officer. HÃ¥kan Eriksson told industry analysts and media representatives at the company's Strategy and Technology Summit that a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) takes the operator further, at a higher speed.
“If you've got three people in a household all watching in HD at eight Meg, and there's someone else there who needs a bit more bandwidth for browsing, operators will be needing to offer 30 Meg, and that's why you'll need fibre roll-outs.”
Karl-Henrik Sundström, Executive Vice President and CFO, also drew attention to the current lack of standardisation in the IPTV industry, which was likely to hold back its expansion. “There are economies of scale in standardisation,” he suggested. “At the moment, networks are very much 'home-grown'. Operators want to upgrade, but there's no clear development path.