Simon: Our regional head-end is adding MPEG4 in the next 3-6 months, so we're on the same bandwagon. Unfortunately, we've spent $$$ on MPEG2-only STB. It looks like we could be transport MPEG2 and MPEG4 around our local transport rings for a long time. We'll use the MPEG4 for customers who want HD, the rest will get upgraded as we can afford to. We have a few customers that have 4 or 5 TVs and want STBs for each one of them, and besides the fact that we have difficulty getting 20 Mbps on medium-range loops, we end up installing two modems because our BLC infrastructure is only configured for three streams. This will hopefully be resolves in future releases. Yes, there are quite a few MPEG4-capable STB vendors with lots of middleware vendors standing behind them, but I challenge you to document one STB/middleware combination in GA. I haven't seen it. Talk to me in six months, and it will be a different story. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Simon Lockhart [mailto:simon@slimey.org] Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2006 2:55 PM To: Frank Bulk Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant" On Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 01:26:51PM -0600, Frank Bulk wrote:
The majority of U.S.-based IP TV deployments are not using MPEG-4
Agreed. However, I'd say that any IPTV provider currently using MPEG2 would be planning a migration to MPEG4/H.264 - half the bandwidth means double the channels.
in fact, you would be hard-pressed to find an MPEG-4 capable STB working with middleware.
I disagree. There are several MPEG4 capable STB available now, and they all have support of middleware vendors.
SD MPEG-2 runs around ~4 Mbps today and HD MPEG-2 is ~19 Mbps. With ADSL2+ you can get up to 24 Mbps per home on very short loops, but if you look at the loop length/rate graphs, you'll see that even with VDSL2 only the very short loops will have sufficient capacity for multiple HD streams. FTTP/H is inevitable.
Anyone looking to do HD will be looking at H.264, and looking to bring the bandwidth requirement down to 8-10Mbps. That is certainly more practical with ADSL2+ deployments (unless you want more than one STB per DSL). Simon (Currently working on an H.264 IPTV deployment) -- Simon Lockhart | * Sun Server Colocation * ADSL * Domain Registration * Director | * Domain & Web Hosting * Internet Consultancy * Bogons Ltd | * http://www.bogons.net/ * Email: info@bogons.net *