INTERVIEW. The emergence of Over the Top Television (OTT) technologies is not widely viewed as a threat to the existence of telcos in their quest to transform IPTV services, an official has said.
Victor Dominguez, vice president of DS2, a leading provider of semiconductors for high-speed communications over existing wires, said fears doing the rounds in the information communication technology sector had no substance at the moment.
“It is early to say. OTT has a huge potential and there is growing acceptance in some regions like the USA. The message I am hearing from telcos is that OTT is ok and will have market adoption, but cannot deliver quality.”
“When it comes to good TV experience, the telcos are saying that they still have an advantage. Also, they are currently in discussions on whether OTT will be able to pay for premium content (without counting on a monthly subscription fee of the end user),” said Dominguez.
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| Victor Dominguez |
Dominguez was reacting to questions by Biz-News.com on whether the emergence of OTT would pose any threats to the existing IPTV.
He said small format to medium quality OTT was fine, but quickly noted that large format to HD/high quality IPTV was better.
“On the other hand OTT has its own challenges with more and more quality content being provided over free DTT,” said Dominguez.
Although he admitted that the OTT and IPTV would compete and fill in different market demands, Dominguez hinted that the regular internet connection offerings from telcos were rather expensive nowadays.
He dismissed any partnerships between OTT and telcos.
Dominguez’s DS2 was founded in 1998 and has more than 130 employees based in Santa Clara, Tokyo (Japan), Taipei and Valencia (Spain).
Dominguez said because DS2 chips could operate over power lines, phone lines and coaxial cable, users didn’t have to install new Ethernet wires to set up a robust wired network.
“DS2 technology is widely used in many markets, including consumer home networks, IPTV distribution applications, Smart Grid or Ethernet over Coax services."
“Telco IPTV (ie, a broadcast-quality TV service provided by a Telecommunication Service Provider, as opposed to "Internet TV" or "Over-the-Top TV" services such as Hulu.com or Apple iTunes) is one of the main drivers for wired home networking (and powerline networking in particular)."
“There are multiple reasons why Telco Service Providers choose powerline-based solutions for IPTV distribution instead of Wireless solutions like 802.11n,” said Dominguez.
He said wireless LANs, which usually have signal propagation problems where there are multiple walls between a transmitter and a receiver, especially with metal and concrete walls Wireless LAN signals, were not easily contained inside a single home.
He said as a result there was potential for interference to neighbour Wireless LANs, especially in densely populated areas.
He said most Wireless LAN products did not have the reliability and Quality of Service (QoS) required to support applications like HDTV.
“Delivering broadcast-quality HDTV channels in a Telco IPTV environment is specially challenging because the content is delivered over multicast UDP streams. UDP does not have automatic retransmission capabilities, so any lost UDP packet may create visual artifacts (macroblocking) on the TV screen."
“Also, most Set-Top Boxes (STB) used in Telco IPTV applications have limited reception buffers, which means that they are very sensitive to packet latency and jitter. DS2 provides high-speed powerline communication chipsets specially designed for Telco IPTV applications, that provide the performance, latency and QoS required for HD video streaming."
“For applications where maximum performance is required, DS2 offers the DSS9101+DSS7800 chipset (Aitana), with a maximum PHY data rate of 200 Mbps. DS2 also offers a lower speed solution, the DSS8101+DSS7800 chipset (Montgo), with a maximum PHY data rate of 100 Mbps,” Dominguez said.
He said both solutions were fully interoperable and pinned compatible, allowing system designers to create multiple products with a common PCB design.
Dominguez said both Aitana and Montgo chips were powered by DS2’s SPIRIT firmware, which provides advanced capabilities such as TR-069 compliant remote management, programmable QoS, automatic repeating capabilities, secure firmware upgrade, automatic multicast support via IGMP-snooping and many other features.
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