AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

Sat Apr 1 21:54:33 UTC 2006

Simon:

Our regional head-end is adding MPEG4 in the next 3-6 months, so we're on
the same bandwagon.  Unfortunately, we've spent $$$ on MPEG2-only STB.  It
looks like we could be transport MPEG2 and MPEG4 around our local transport
rings for a long time.  We'll use the MPEG4 for customers who want HD, the
rest will get upgraded as we can afford to.

We have a few customers that have 4 or 5 TVs and want STBs for each one of
them, and besides the fact that we have difficulty getting 20 Mbps on
medium-range loops, we end up installing two modems because our BLC
infrastructure is only configured for three streams.  This will hopefully be
resolves in future releases.

Yes, there are quite a few MPEG4-capable STB vendors with lots of middleware
vendors standing behind them, but I challenge you to document one
STB/middleware combination in GA.  I haven't seen it.  Talk to me in six
months, and it will be a different story.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Lockhart [mailto:simon at slimey.org] 
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2006 2:55 PM
To: Frank Bulk
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

On Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 01:26:51PM -0600, Frank Bulk wrote:
> The majority of U.S.-based IP TV deployments are not using MPEG-4

Agreed. However, I'd say that any IPTV provider currently using MPEG2 would
be planning a migration to MPEG4/H.264 - half the bandwidth means double the
channels.

> in fact,
> you would be hard-pressed to find an MPEG-4 capable STB working with 
> middleware.

I disagree. There are several MPEG4 capable STB available now, and they all
have support of middleware vendors.

> SD MPEG-2 runs around ~4 Mbps today and HD MPEG-2 is ~19 Mbps. With 
> ADSL2+ you can get up to 24 Mbps per home on very short loops, but if 
> you look at the loop length/rate graphs, you'll see that even with 
> VDSL2 only the very short loops will have sufficient capacity for 
> multiple HD streams.  FTTP/H is inevitable.

Anyone looking to do HD will be looking at H.264, and looking to bring the
bandwidth requirement down to 8-10Mbps. That is certainly more practical
with
ADSL2+ deployments (unless you want more than one STB per DSL).

Simon
(Currently working on an H.264 IPTV deployment)
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