HomePNA Blog

3Q Results for Verizon FIOS and AT&T U-verse

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Interesting TelcoTV results reported by market monitor FierceIPTV which recently reported on AT&T’s  and Verizon’s 3Q results.

"AT&T said revenue and profits were up in the third quarter, driven by wireless growth and the continued strength of its U-verse business…with 236,000 new U-verse subscribers” and the “first year-over-year growth in wireline consumer revenue in more than two years.” ARPU (Average Revenue per User) for U-verse customers was about $160 indicating the high percentage of U-verse customers selecting triple-play and quad-play services.

Verizon’s results - not so great as “third-quarter earnings dropped 25%, as wireless subscriber growth slowed and landline operations struggled to make a profit. The company said its FiOS TV service continued to add customers, with 204,000 net additions, bringing its total subscriber base to 3.3 million…its largest net quarterly increase in FiOS customers in more than a year.”

Gary Schultz, principal of market analyst firm MRG commented that they are expecting U-verse to pull ahead of FiOS in 2012 and stay number one worldwide in IPTV subscribers through 2014. Gary noted that Verizon still enjoys a lead due to its earlier introduction. If you recall, Verizon picked cable MSO technology for FIOS (delivered over FTTH) which gave them shorter time to market and broadband access speed bragging rights but saddled them with TV technology that was not IP based. Gary expects the gap between AT&T and Verizon to continue until Verizon can upgrade its network to a true IPTV network, which will be costly and take time.  He also notes reports of AT&T’s aggressive marketing efforts.

I’ve heard reports of aggressive marketing too and my guess is that this, combined with AT&T’s larger customer footprint, will continue to fuel the growth.

More Telcos, More (and faster) IPTV Deployments

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

If you have been following this blog (and I hope you do) you may recall that I’ve mentioned that the telcos' interest IPTV has been increasing dramatically. I saw it at FTTH, IP Possibilities, and especially at the HomePNA Summit which attracted more telcos than equipment manufacturers. Yesterday, HomePNA board member Motorola  announced  a win at Farmers Telephone Cooperative. Being HomePNA (aka HPNA) centric, we immediately noticed that it includes their VIP1200 IP Set-top boxes which, we are happy to say, features HomePNA for home networking over coax (and, also needless to say, is HomePNA certified).

Ignoring the hype that I get paid to write, the technology really is maturing rapidly. CED Magazine ran an article last month about Bell Aliant that stated they “can comfortably get a couple of TV installs done in a day, and we’ve created enough buffer zone that our technicians can pick up another piece of work, whether it’s a TV trouble call or another high-speed install. We’ve gone from struggling to get two pieces of work done a day to comfortably getting three pieces of work done a day.” A far call from the six or seven hour installs we heard about a couple years ago. The HomePNA technology hasn’t changed so you can bet that this is mostly a result of experience, better installation procedures, diagnostic equipment and increased testing.

HomePNA Gets (even more) Real

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

It’s been a busy week. The first half was spent staffing the HomePNA demo in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) conference. Good demo, great interest, and some interesting applications and products I’ll write about soon.

Thursday was the HomePNA Summit. We had over 100 attendees, half from service providers, and some really great sessions. I’m a marketing type so I don’t get insulted when you don’t believe every piece of earnest hyperbole that I pound into my keyboard, but nothing cuts through the hype like respected telcos and satellite TV providers such as CenturyLink, Bell Aliant, AT&T, TELUS, Telefonica, Tata Sky and yes talking about their own real life experiences with home networking technology – getting the install times down and customer satisfaction up. No really, don’t take my word for it. Read Carol Wilson’s article “HED: HomePNA driving down install times”  in Telephony Magazine. She quotes real numbers, real times and actionable advice.

And please read the HomePNA PR about the Summit. Service providers are joining HomePNA as we continue to gain momentum in triple play home networking. And not just in North America; it’s being adopted worldwide thanks to robust operation over both coax and phone wires.

And while you’re at it, don't miss Jim Barthold article in CED magazine “Beyond the Triple Play” that ran yesterday. Jim describes Bell Aliant’s experience establishing leading triple play services and their plans for the future. Good reading.

Major Indian Cable TV Provider DigiCable joins AT&T, Telefonica and others at HomePNA Summit

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

The HomePNA Summit has just added another major speaker to its’ service provider line-up. DigiCable, one of India largest cable TV suppliers, joins leading international, national and regional telcos AT&T , Telefonica, TELUS, and Bell Aliant , and Satellite service providers Tata Sky  and YES as speakers at the event.

The Summit, which also features major equipment suppliers and system integrators such as Cisco and Motorola, showcases the momentum and appeal of HomePNA technology to service providers of all sizes and types all over the world.

The HomePNA Summit, which is especially drawing service providers to it’s audience in addition to equipment manufacturers and system integrators interested in learning about these companies’ experience with HomePNA, will be held September 30 to October 1, 2008 in Houston, TX co-located with the FTTH conference and expo .

Verizon FIOS, AT&T Uverse, and the Recession

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

So much to write about, so little time. I was in the middle of a blog on the positive 4Q results from Netflix and Verizon FIOS last week when I saw the “Recession’s Silver Lining Ringing True?” article from Telecompetitor newsletter -- which said most of what I was going to say and said it pretty well: “But for the telecom sector, there may lay a silver lining. This beacon of light premise suggests that carriers who offer entertainment options may benefit from today’s economic climate. The thinking being that consumers will choose home based entertainment options over going out to save money.”

I would have included AT&T new 264,000 new Uverse TV customers bringing their total to over 1M  (although they did push the goal to pass 30M homes a year to 2011).

One difference between AT&T and Verizon is the penetration. Verizon claims 21% while AT&T’s 1M customers out of 17M homes passed works out to about 6% penetration. So what? AT&T uses VDSL to deliver Uverse over phone wires. When they say they “pass” 17M homes, they mean that they have installed the necessary VDSL equipment near 17M homes. Add a new VDSL line card to one of those equipment cabinets and you connect about a dozen or so new Uverse TV customers. Lot’s of upside there. Verizon’s approach requires them to run a new fiber cable to every new FIOS customer’s house. Either way, TV service is helping these telcos compensate for declining landline businesses while helping to add and retain broadband customers.

AT&T to Surpass One Million U-Verse Subscribers

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director, HomePNA Marketing

We recently announced that AT&T had reached 650,000 subscribers last quarter. Not satisfied with so many new subscribers, AT&T has targeted a goal of one million subscribers by the end of the 2008. You might think that is a lofty goal but guess what? AT&T has bigger plans. AT&T has now announced plans to plans to go straight through the big retails chains, Wal-mart and Circuit City, which is an interesting and bold move since most IPTV operators do not sell services through retail chains. It also seems a natural move for a company that sells a good number of cell phones and mobile service plans through those same retailers. In our opinion, this marks an aggressive marketing position that will help increase awareness of IPTV with the general consumer. Right now, most U-verse subscribers are blissfully unaware that they are on the cutting edge using IPTV. Now that about 600 stores (located in areas where U-verse is available) will market IPTV, expect the public's interest to be piqued, which we here at HomePNA couldn't be more pleased about. AT&T's U-verse uses the HomePNA standard. As AT&T becomes more aggressive all we can do is sit back, watch the fun, and enjoy the results.

So what’s a cableco to do?

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Last week I wrote a couple of blogs about DOCSIS technology and the traction HomePNA member CopperGate is getting promoting alternative HomePNA-based access technology to cablecos in China for IPTV delivery and Internet access in MDUs.

In the ten years since DOCSIS was invented there have been many technology advances. Fiber, for example, has gone from a core network transport technology to one that is becoming widely deployed worldwide to provide access to the premises and home. So … there you are in a huge consumer market served by a lot of mostly smaller cablecos that provide basic, often analog, cable service to their customers. These cablecos want to provide new triple-play services to their customers. Often there is no existing DOCSIS infrastructure -- in effect, it’s a green-field (an industry term for new construction) opportunity -- and the cablecos are free to select the optimum solution. But they don’t want to pay a lot for it. Hello HomePNA.

What makes HomePNA technology attractive for this market? First, HomePNA can share the coax cable with the cablecos’ TV channels allowing them to reuse the existing wires in the MDU. Second, it is low cost. Where DOCSIS requires a DOCSIS modem in each apartment, HomePNA-based implementations only need a low-cost Ethernet bridge in each apartment. Where DOCSIS requires a port on an expensive CMTS for each apartment, the HomePNA-based approach uses a low cost HomePNA master – essentially a HomePNA Ethernet bridge with different software – to provide connectivity to up to 32 or more apartments in the MDU. Where DOCSIS may require the cableco’s network cabling and equipment to be upgraded to support high speed bi-directional digital communication, the HomePNA approach uses a standard fiber connection instead.

The key to HomePNA technology’s appeal is its synchronous MAC architecture, discussed back in a June blog, which enables HomePNA’s best-in –class QoS (sorry MOCA PQoS) and master-client architecture. 

In a home network every device cocommunicates with every other connected device.  Not so in an MDU. In an MDU, communication is only between the service provider and each individual apartment -- every apartment communicates with the HomePNA master and the HomePNA master communicates to the service provider over the  FTTP connection.  To provide privacy, apartment to apartment communication is prevented by the HomePNA master even though all of the apartments are connected to the same coax cable. 

When a service provider provides triple play VoIP voice, IPTV, and Internet access services over a home network, guaranteed QoS enables interference-free voice and video in the presence of heavy Internet access action (I imagine that kids are downloading videos and songs at all hours of the day all over the world - legally of course).  Guaranteed QoS serves the same purpose in an MDU however it has another important function. HomePNA's guaranteed QoS mechanism also controls how much of the HomePNA capacity is allocated to each apartment -- guaranteeing the amount of bandwidth supplied to each apartment similar to the way a cableco might advertise a given megabits per second Internet access over DOCSIS.

These features and others make the combination of FTTP and HomePNA-based technologies a compelling solution for MDU apartment access.

Why DOCSIS isn't the first choice worldwide

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

The big HomePNA news this week (and I hope you read Monday’s blog so you know what I am talking about) was CopperGate’s announcement about the Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Broadband Technologies & Application (B-STAR) selecting HomePNA-based technology as its primary solution for its Multi Dwelling Unit (MDU) interactive Digital TV test program in Shanghai. Why didn’t they select DOCSIS like so many other cablecos? In a word, cost. HomePNA technology combined with fiber to the premises (FTTP) gave them the right mix of performance and features without the large price tag.

First, a little background on DOCSIS. The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification or DOCSIS is an international standard developed by CableLabs, the cablecos’ R&D consortium. DOCSIS, like HomePNA, is an ITU standard although the work is done in Study Group 9 (SG 9) and is completely independent of the G.hn and HomePNA home networking standardization work being done in SG15.

DOCSIS defines the protocol for high-speed data transfer over an existing Cable TV system. The killer application, needless to say, is Internet access and there are a large number of DOCSIS cable modems sold worldwide (especially in North America). The first DOCSIS specification was released over 10 years ago. The most recent version, DOCSIS 3, adds support for IP – that is to say Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) - to the standard. Multiple versions of DOCSIS exist around the globe such as EuroDOCSIS to comply with differences in regional standards. CableLabs and other organizations perform DOCSIS equipment certification testing on a regular basis.

DOCSIS equipment consists of the cable modem installed in your home and a cable modem termination system (CMTS) located at the cableco’s “headend”. It’s not cheap for an MDU. A DOCSIS cable modem has to be installed in each apartment and connected to it’s corresponding port on the CMTS over the cableco’s coax/fiber (called HFC for hybrid fiber-coax) cabling. The CMTS connects the customer’s DOCSIS modem to the Internet.

For those of you who (like me) had early DOCSIS 1.0 modems that required a phone line connection in addition to the coax connection to operate, you've probably guessed this isn’t the entire story. When I first got broadband the only option was this DOCSIS kluge (kluge is an engineering term for a less than elegant system). I had to get a second dedicated phone line (remember phone lines? They are what DSL modems use today for Internet access, VoIP and IPTV) from the phone company in order for my cable modem to work. Cablecos had to upgrade their HFC network to provide a return path for upstream traffic – data sent from your PC to the Internet – over the coax. This also costs money. While many cableco’s HFC networks have been upgraded, there are parts of the world where the technology lags.

What's it all mean?  Stay tuned for the next post.

HomePNA Shown the Standard for TelcoTV

There is exciting news coming out of HomePNA member company CopperGate Communications, a leading provider of home networking chipsets for triple play IPTV over existing wiring. TELUS, a $9 billion Canadian national telecommunications provider, selected CopperGate’s HomePNA 3.1 technology integrated into set-top boxes and residential gateways manufactured by other HomePNA members for its TELUS TV service offering. TELUS TV is a 100 percent digital entertainment service that allows subscribers to customize their entertainment experience. With TELUS TV, customers get automatic access to TELUS Video On-Demand and can build a TV package from a list of more than 200 channels.

Now couple this news with recent findings that HomePNA was installed in more North American homes in the last quarter than any other coax home networking solution and we have even more to celebrate. “The addition of TELUS means that of the largest telcos in North America, 4 out of the top 5 that offer TelcoTV now support HomePNA 3.1 home networking technology,” noted Michael Wolf, Director of Digital Home research at ABI Research. “This win validates HomePNA as a home networking technology that is optimized for service provider rollouts to enable whole-home entertainment services such as TelcoTV.”

We believe that HomePNA has become the defacto standard for TelcoTV home networking. With industry deployments that go well beyond AT&T’s recently announced 650,000 paying U-verse subscribers, we see great growth ahead for HomePNA. What does this mean for the service providers? It means that if you’re not using HomePNA to distribute home entertainment over coax and phone you are missing out on a great market opportunity. So we encourage you to consider joining today and share in this amazing opportunity to grow right along with us! For information on membership, visit the HomePNA website.

G.hn – Why So Fast?

By Richard Nesin, president, HomePNA

Five years ago, a long time in the world of high tech, we introduced HomePNA 3.0 (a.k.a., HPNA) to equipment vendors. Most thought it was great stuff but couldn’t conceive of applications that needed so much speed and guaranteed QoS. They told us to market it to the service providers, which we did. Then along came IPTV triple play, HDTV and GPON and suddenly nobody was wondering what to do with all that speed.

Fast forward to today and even HomePNA 3.1’s 320 Mbit/sec data rate, providing up to 230 Mbit/sec of user throughput (the real capacity after the overhead is subtracted), doesn’t seem so fast. All right, it does seem really fast. But some, like Verizon’s CTO Mark Wegleitner who is calling for at least 100 Mbps of actual user throughput today and 400 Mbps in less than two years, want more. Why so?

Why has several answers. First is that sales of HDTVs are going up – but it’s not that simple. Digital video is compressed and the type of compression used (MPEG 2, MPEG 4, VC-1, etc.) has a big impact on the amount of network bandwidth – another word for the network capacity - used. Add to that display of multiple IPTV streams on each TV and it becomes more about the number and type of streams family members view than about the number of TVs.

Don’t forget the video streams that originate within the home. With the coming proliferation of IP-enabled whole-home DVRs, every IPTV will have a DVR further increasing the number of streams being recorded and viewed. But there’s another gotcha coming. Fast-forward on the DVR often uses “trick mode”, a technique that can increase the amount of bandwidth used by that stream by three or four times.

And don’t forget Internet access. The home network shouldn’t slow down Internet access. With fiber to the home (FTTH) providing 100 Mb/sec and more, the data part of triple-play service can consume a significant chunk of the home network capacity all by itself. It’s no wonder so much effort is going into speeding G.hn to market.