Alcatel-Lucent Strategy Looks Beyond IPTV

By: Karen Liu, VP Components, Ovum
(Business News & Technology News, 26 May 2008)

Alcatel-Lucent's strategy for IPTV, now reorganized as part of Alcatel-Lucent's Fixed Access division, was recently presented Barcelona. For a wired broadband leader such as Alcatel-Lucent, IPTV has prominence as one of the few current applications that, combined, can justify a need for 100Mbps to each subscriber. But current HD-IPTV implementation barely crosses the boundary into what Alcatel-Lucent considers the bandwidth needed for "next-generation" broadband access such as FTTH. With projected advances in compression, Alcatel-Lucent and many of its customers expect HD-IPTV to be supported over current generation access. On Alcatel-Lucent's charts only 3D TV bandwidth exceeds VDSL2 capability. The applications solidly in the next-generation category are ultra-fast downloads and simultaneous usage of multiple remotely hosted applications.

The real reason IPTV is a ground-breaking application is that it is increasingly about integrating and providing service assurance for multiple applications merged into a single coherent presentation to the end user. Alcatel-Lucent's strategies address enabling the network for multimedia in general, not for IPTV alone.

Alcatel-Lucent is also prominent as a major integrator of IPTV, and has the interesting position of both supporting its own middleware and partnering with Microsoft TV. Fast channel change is one example of performance that requires more than bandwidth.

As an alternative to Microsoft's D-server implementation of fast channel change, Alcatel-Lucent will leverage distributed caching capability being added to both access (DSL, GPON) network elements and the aggregation (BSA) network elements. The overall architecture includes a full retransmission hierarchy further back through BSR and BVR. The same network elements with storage are positioned to support ad insertion, particularly as targeted advertising is expected to be pushed closer to the edge.

Though not part of the Fixed Access portfolio, Alcatel-Lucent introduced its Interactive Media Manager application toolkit based on the Tamblin acquisition. From a corporate standpoint, mobile is clearly part of the anticipated service mix. Examples of custom applications developed already on IMM include video conferencing via integration of the IPTV and IMS systems, and remote viewing of the EPG and PVR selection via integration of IPTV and a TV extension to mobile middleware called MiTV.

In the near future, I believe broadband access providers are the best positioned to fill a current gap, namely CDN-like services that extend all the way to the end user rather than terminating at the nearest point of presence. Alcatel-Lucent intimated that this is indeed the direction it will be supporting in its equipment, with more announcements to come next year. Other vendors such as Redback/Ericsson have also begun to speak about including more caching in their edge equipment. But these sorts of services represent part of the bigger evolution of the wired service provider and will require more than an expansion of the feature set of any individual product. Alcatel-Lucent is well placed with its range of products, application platforms and integration services.

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