Ruckus Wireless, a two-year-old startup featuring beaming WiFi with QOS, announced Tuesday a deal with IPTV providers to stream their signals to settops using Wi-Fi. Pioneer Telephone Cooperative, a rural telecommunications carrier will use Ruckus to beam IPTV around the home.
Pioneer, based in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, began offering IP-TV in its coverage area in central and western Oklahoma in July 2004. The carrier now offers TV service through 73 of its 76 exchanges in Oklahoma and has 5,000 customers. Pioneer has 140,000 customers in Oklahoma, of whom 35,000 currently can receive IPTV.
The company chose to place Ruckus because of the cost and complexity of cable installations in customer homes.
“A Category 5 cable installation takes us three to four hours,” said Scott Ulsaker, video products manager for Pioneer. “Being able to do a less-than-one-hour installation without crawling through attics is a big benefit. The quality of the service on Ruckus is equal to anything on cable or satellite.”
The Ruckus Wi-Fi system routes wireless signals throughout the home using MIMO. Ruckus’s Wi-Fi routing system tests multiple paths before sending wireless signals and includes a QOS funtion for better VoIP as well.
Ruckus isn’t the first MIMO solution, but it may be the first practical one for IPTV. Look for 802.11n (with MIMO) to be standard issue with every AT&T settop, soon.
IP-TV requires 10-20 Mbps to the home. It is usually supplied by phone companies using VDSL. WiMAX providers simply don’t have the bandwidth. WiMAX, however, CAN deliver Video On Demand. That, combined with satellite television, may provide an alternative VOD delivery system.
Microsoft says Windows Media 9 — a core component of the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform — delivers standard definition video at bit rates ranging between 1.5 and 1.8 Mbps and HD between 7 and 9 Mbps.
On the other hand, maybe six, 50 Mbps beams at 5.8 GHz or a dozen 100 Mbps beams at 60 GHz every block or two could deliver the goods via “wireless cable”. Urban WiMAX will use 5.8GHz 802.16d equipment to deliver 10Mbit/s of symmetric bandwidth to trial customers located within 1-1.5Km of its initial base stations in Westminster, UK.
Deutsche Telekom (DT) is using Microsoft’s IPTV as part of plans to roll out broadband TV (IPTV) in Germany later this year (Microsoft PR). The service is to be carried via VDSL. It is expected to go live in ten major German cities - including Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich. The IPTV services to be offered by Deutsche Telecom will include high-definition television, regular TV programming, video on demand, interactive programming and personal video recording.
“It is a very large deal for us and brings the overall number of contracts to 13,” said Microsoft TV’s marketing manager Christine Heckart. Both firms declined to give financial details, but the “T-Home” television service offering is at the heart of a 3 billion euro ($3.7 billion) network upgrade which Deutsche Telekom hopes to bring to 50 German cities by the end of next year.
Om Malik has all the rumors about Microsoft IPTV floating around TelecomNEXT, telecom’s newest trade show, in Las Vegas this week. Google News has the latest on IP-TV.
