Advanced Television

Comtrend: “interoperability is key”

December 31, 2007

Comtrend Corporation, supplier of powerline equipment for IPTV home distribution, has revealed that it shipped more than 800,000 powerline adapters for IPTV applications during 2007, confirming recent independent analysis that shows strong demand for the technology, as a result of an explosion in subscriber growth. According to the DSL Forum, year-on-year European IPTV subscriber growth reached 231 per cent, adding almost 3.5 million subscribers.

“The market for powerline-based IPTV distribution will keep growing as current deployments add subscribers and more operators launch IPTV services. Comtrend feels that the strong growth rates powerline-based solutions are experiencing could increase even further if powerline technology is standardised”, said Harold Fitch, Comtrend´s General Manager for Europe and South America.

The industry understands the need for a standard and organisations like the IEEE and the ITU have launched initial work that may lead to an industry standard. Recently, some IEEE P1901 members began the long process of considering a specification for a draft baseline proposal. However, this specification is not based on interoperability, a key requirement for IPTV operators.

“If a standard does not guarantee interoperability it will fail to gain market traction and risk becoming irrelevant. Our current powerline solution works very well, so a standard that does not guarantee interoperability will not provide any added value”, Harold Fitch added.

Categories: Articles, IPTV, OTT