A small telephone cooperative in Oklahoma began testing wireless IPTV distribution in the home this week that portends the future direction of DTV content delivery. Pioneer Telephone Cooperative (Kingfisher, OK) (www.ptci.com) announced they will use 802.11g Wi-Fi radios to send IP packets loaded with TV content (IPTV) to Wi-Fi receivers throughout the home-connecting your STB to TVs in much the same way your computers can stay connected to the internet via Wi-Fi today.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
of Projection Monthly &
Microdisplay Report

To make this happen, Pioneer is using a technology from Ruckus Wireless (Mountain View, CA) (www.ruckuswireless.com), which cracks the full motion video interference issues related to standard Wi-Fi. The solution is packaged up in two components: BeamCast, its unique wireless traffic engineering software and BeamFlex, a smart antenna system. This antenna system is a dynamic, software-controlled array that navigates around the bandwidth noise by delivering signal routing on a per-packet, per-station basis. This is no small feat in itself. Wi-Fi uses the 2.4GHz bandwidth-the same frequency as your microwave oven, creating a tremendously noisy environment for very high bandwidth applications like full motion video. Pioneer calls the Ruckus Wi-Fi signal both "stable and predictable" - essential in delivering video services.

In the short term, this unique wireless approach buys a cable TV or satellite provider a cheaper installation path in the home, the same way Wi-Fi is less costly to deploy than CAT-5 wiring for local area networks (LANs). With no cables to pull under the house or over the attic and into walls, Pioneer has cut installation time down from an average 3 hours to a mere 45 minutes, with the goal of moving to the Holy Grail for service providers, customer self-install.

The Pioneer/Ruckus solution seems to be the next logical step in the evolution of information content via Internet / broadband delivery. First, low-bandwidth voice moved to packets and benefited from the economies of Internet distribution. Early adopters had to contend with dropped calls and no 911 services, but today Voice Over IP (VOIP) service is getting very close to your local area telephone provider.

One of the interesting things about VOIP technology is that it moved the telephone switch from the phone companys local switching station (and prior to that manual "central" switching) right into the home.

This really gets interesting when one begins to realize you can port this modem-sized device to any location - say Japan, plug-in to a standard broadband network and voila, your local phone number will ring in Tokyo. That’s right, local calls to the US from anywhere via your humble Vonage or Skype modem. Pretty slick.

Is this same level of service portability on the horizon for video content distribution? Or, are we already there with devices like the Slingbox that use the Internet to deliver content sent to your home to any on-line location (By the way, the latest news from Slingbox is the ability to move TV content from your STB to your mobile phone.

Suffice it to say that in time, as IPTV becomes mainstream, the distribution medium for just about any video content is becoming down right omnipresent. But it still must have been cool to pick up the phone and instead of the dial tone, hear a pleasant voice say, "Number please". -SS