On The Verge

Recently, both Texas Instruments (TI) and Ikanos announced new VDSL2-capable chip familes – that presumably will help jumpstart the telco carriers in their video service offerings. As I covered in “100-Mbps broadband: how, why, when, and where?,” VDSL2 can, in some cases depending on distance from a carrier facility, enable delivery of HDTV service over existing copper twisted pair. The telcos are hoping to use the VDSL2 technology as a way to roll out HDTV-capable video service while those carriers also purse PON (Passive Optical Network) technology to offer even faster broadband service and more compelling video as well. The VDSL2 alternative can serve customer while the carriers build out PON and indeed some customers – depending on the density of potential subscribers in the neighborhood – will never have the PON option but may be able to take advantage of VDSL2. But financial and deployment news breaking this still paints a fairly bleak picture for the carrier video offerings.

The TI press release describes a family of five ICs that really the follow on to the company’s successful AR7 family of ADSL chips for the customer premise. Labeled like the AR7 offerings as residential gateway chips, the new UR8 family ranges from baseline models that don’t include voice support to advanced models that support four channels of VoIP service. The family includes models that support VDSL2 and also models that only support ADSL2/2+. You can find product details and application notes in the residential gateway section of the TI web site.

Ikanos made a similar announcement back in the summer, although Ikanos offers both customer premise equipment (CPE) ICs (Fx10050S-5 CPE and Fx100100s-5 CPE) and central office ICs (Fx10050S-5 CO/RT and Fx100100s-5 CO/RT) whereas TO only sells CPE chips. The 50S-5 flavors support 50-Mbps rates, while the 100S-5 flavors support 100-MBPS rate by using a wider transmission band. Read more in the Ikanos press release. The company also has announced a VDSL2 reference platform based on these ICs.

Both the Ikanos and TI ICs are backwards compatible with earlier DSL standards. Presumably, companies making CPE and central office (CO) gear will deploy the newer ICs even in advance of rolling out VDSL2 services. The companies can actually future proof their investment by doing so.

Thus far, however, the telco carriers have struggled with the video part of their “triple play” offering. In fact AT&T is pushing a triple-play package with Dish Network fulfilling the video service although the company is also trialing IPTV services in San Antonio. But the IPTV roll out was planned on a much broader scale by now. Clearly there are issues with installing fiber for PON, or moving to VDSL2 for copper delivery. But evidently software issues with the Microsoft IPTV package continue to hinder deployment as well. In addition, the existing AT&T IPTV deployment does not supportHDTV resolution.

Verizon is having more success with the triple play with their FIOS services. But FIOS doesn’t rely on a converged network and IPTV today. As I documented in the 100-Mbos broadband article mentioned earlier, FIOS delivers digital video via an overlay network. Moreover, despite gaining subscribers, analysts were broadly disappointed with Verizon’s financial results announced this week. The Wall Street Journal noted the disappointment in “Verizon’s efforts in client growth hit some hurdles” (subscription required.)