France Telecom to trial FTTH

France Telecom announce plans to trial FTTH. Wonder if this is to scare off the Mayor of Paris after his announcement last week?

BT to use pester power

More announcements on BT’s content for its IPTV service. Are they hoping for an element of pester power once the kids get used to having Bob & Pingu on tap? Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the service will be rolled out nationwide rather than restricted to metropolitan areas. Given that there are still some exchanges (35 here in Wales) which are still not even enabled for broadband I’d like to see how they’ll do that.

There won’t be any subscriptions involved either and it will be available to all BT broadband customers, no mention of how much the set-top-box and PVR will cost (if anything). It sounds as though this service will do a lot to entice customers from resellers and LLU operators.

Pipex and Wimax

Pipex are running consumer trials using Wimax. It’ll be interesting to watch this one as they’re one of only 2 companies to hold licenses that Wimax will be certified on. I thought that they might hold on to the licence ready to sell it off to another wimax provider but it looks as though they’re going for it themselves. The technical trials with Airspan in August 2005 must have gone well. They’ll be able to offer a better QoS than those using Wimax in the unrestricted spectrum. PCCW, the other company holding the licence have rolled out a service using UMTS TDD but are more cautious on Wimax, although they did trial it in 2004.

Ofcom to sort out IPTV rights

Ofcom looks to settle disputes between programme makers and broadcasters. Good news for Channel 4 who are looking for a 30-day window of exclusivity. Bad news for BT and other non-traditional broadcasters who might have to wait a month or two before being able to show the programmes. Until BT are in a position to buy original content then they’ll have to be content with films and old programmes. It would put Sky in a strong position with their Sky By Broadband service and the possibility of offering IPTV through their recently purchased Easynet.

Fibre to Paris & Amsterdam

Amsterdam and Paris have both announces plans to build a municipally owned Fibre to the Home network. The Amsterdam network will be run by the municipal authority but open to telecoms operators to use. Details on the Paris initiative are a little more sketchy but sounds as though its on the same lines. If these succeed then I’m sure UK municipalities will think hard about it as the first ones to introduce it will attract inward investment into the area as well as generating a new revenue stream.
The encourging status of Verizon’s FiOS FTTP product should encourage UK network providers going straight to FTTH without slowly graduating through slightly better technologies.BT would be in a very strong position if it could offer its IPTV service combined with 100Mbps fibre line.

Net Neutrality RIP?

Recent noises from US telcos look to be putting Net Neutrality in danger. Net Neutrality is where all network traffic is treated equally but telcos are now sounding out the idea of getting ISPs to pay extra to have their traffic prioritised. No doubt BT are keeping a close eye on any precedent set here as it would provide them with a very healthy extra revenue stream.

If the telcos manage to charge the ISPs then who are the ISPs going to charge? If they simply up their price across the board then users all users will be paying the same price for a service of different quality, depending on what network their on. If they decide to only pass on the charges to users then the ISPs will have a billing nightmare. Users might also be tempted to move networks which would lose the telcos revenue too.

This move might also reduce progress on the advancement on the network. Instead of finding the extra network bandwidth needed to meet the demand, Telcos would simply be able shift the prioritisation of traffic around so that non-paying data is reduced to the slow lane.

And what happens when the data crosses multiple networks? As a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a network is only as fast as its slowest point.

IPTV on any broadband connection?

An impressive sounding IPTV and VoD set top box has been announced by MatrixStream at CES2006. It claims to deliver HD and DVD quality TV over any ‘best effort’ broadband connection. Wonder what ‘best effort’ broadband actually means. There was a time not long ago that 128kbps was argued to be broadband. The title refers to powerline broadband but makes no mention of it in the article. It claims it can deliver over any connection by using MPEG-4 (H.264) codec.

As fancy as this gadget sounds though it ain’t diddly without decent content behind it.

Cable users interested in quad play

A US report says that 46% of cable customers would be interested in quadplay. Don’t know if the profile of the average US cable user is any different to the UK but it backs up NTLs bid for Virgin Mobile.

VoIP Silos

Om Malik at the CES 2006 has valid points on the lack of interoperability of VoIP handsets between different VoIP services. Standardisation enables a unit to be mass produced more easily as it can be used in more situations. Mass production means lower production costs which means cheaper units. Having these VoIP silos will inevitably mean that handsets will be more expensive for a service who’s chief selling point (at the moment) is the cheap cost of calls. How long would it take for the cheaper calls to pay for the handset?

This story mirrors the current WiMAX certification process where vendors have standardised the fixed and mobile WiMAX standards in effort to reduce CPE costs.

WiFi in the street

Interesting idea to distibute wifi in Scotland. While the pilot might work technically can the council use public money to provide broadband access in areas where it’s already being provided by the market place? Cardiff Council & BT had a similar venture in 2004 so I guess there must be a way of doing it. Although I live in Cardiff I’ve never taken my laptop into town to try it.
The Cloud and BT have a similar idea but using BT payphones instead. Don’t see many of those around outside of town centres these days but maybe the business traveller (who doesn’t want to go to Starbucks) in the town centre is who their aiming it at. This concept might work for WiFi enabled phones although I suspect hotspots will be too patchy for it to be that useful.
Internet lampposts to be trialled
BT & The Cloud