< ![CDATA[Much is being made about IPTV and its future. The biggest challenge facing IPTV is not scalability at the back end, it is scalability in the last hundred metres. IP is a technology that fundamentally uses a one to one paradigm, not like MPEG2 transport as part of DVB which uses a one to many paradigm. It is both its strength and its biggest weakness. At some point one sender matches to one receiver. What this means is that in the 'average' (my figures) home in the UK, there are 3 TVs which are likely to be tuned to 3 separate channels. In todays world, they should be at least one HD and two SD channels. With conservative compression and MPEG4, you are looking at 8 to 12Mbps for the HD stream and 2 to 4 Mbps for the SD streams. Looking at the best case therefore, you need 12Mbps for that average home, purely for TV. Nothing about High Speed Internet here.
ADSL in the UK can barely provide the average home with 2Mbps, and let us be nice and say that they can receive 5Mbps like my own. This is under half of what is required for those 3 TVs. Until something is done about broadband provided to UK homes, large scale adoption of pure IPTV is not going to happen. This is particularly as we move into the future with all streams becoming HD, and High Speed Internet services demanding all that ADSL can just about provide. ADSL is not going to allow IPTV to thrive.
What about Cable I hear you say. Well that depends on a massive investment in network segmentation and new generation CMTS gear. This being all very expensive and complex, tied with the fact that cable just simply does not have the homes passed in the UK. It would also require that traditional broadcast transmission is reduced on cable to a very great degree, to give the bandwidth that those DOCSIS 3.0 modems crave, to give that low contention and high throughput necessary for IPTV. Not unassailable, but also not something that will happen quickly.
Until then, or until a new technology around FTTH or FTTC comes about in the UK, IPTV will remain niche no matter what Tiscali or BT publically say.]]>