Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Wed Jan 10 23:34:59 UTC 2007

On 1/10/07, Simon Leinen <simon at limmat.switch.ch> wrote:
>
> Alexander Harrowell writes:
> > For example: France Telecom's consumer ISP in France (Wanadoo) is
> > pushing out lots and lots of WLAN boxes to its subs, which it brands
> > Liveboxes. As well as the router, they also carry their carrier-VoIP
> > and IPTV STB functions. [...]
>
> Right, and the French ADSL ecosystem mostly seems to be based on these
> "boxes" - Proxad/free.fr has its Freebox, Alice ADSL (Telecom Italia)
> the AliceBox, etc.  All these have SCART ("peritelevision") TV plugs
> in their current incarnations, in addition to the WLAN access points
> and phone jacks that previous versions already had.
>
> Personally I don't like this kind of bundling, and I think being able
> to choose telephony and video providers indepenently of ISP is better.
> But the business model seems to work in that market.  Note that I
> don't have any insight or numbers, just noticing that non-technical
> people (friends and family in France) do seem to be capable of
> receiving TV over IP (although not "over the Internet") - confirming
> what Simon Lockhart claimed.

This is one of those "competition vs. deployment" conundrums. Yes,
independent is better, but awareness is required, so someone's got to make
the initial investment.

Of course there are still technical issues such as how to connect two
> TV sets in different parts of an appartment to a single *box.  (Some
> boxes do support two simultaneous video channels depending on
> available bandwidth, which is based on the level of unbundling
> ("degroupage") in the area.)
>
> As far as I know, the French ISPs use IP multicast for video
> distribution, although I'm pretty sure that these IP multicast
> networks are not connected to each other or to the rest of the
> multicast Internet.
> --
> Simon.
>

ADSL2+ deployment has been quicker in France (well, metro areas) than the
UK, which means this is a question of which devices get an IP address, or
rather an RFC1918 behind the box. For the time being, this has to be a
question of assigning IPs to SCART sockets in the box.

The last time I called on my relatives there, I didn't have the opportunity
to investigate the network architecture - they got unaccountably excited...
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