TV Over Phone Lines To Arrive In 2005

prostoalex writes "Associated Press says that telecoms have always considered expanding into digital television since the broadband infrastructure is already in place. But now they are putting billions of dollars into actually building such systems. "If everything goes as planned, the telephone industry will be all about television in 2005. TV over your home phone line. TV on your cell phone. Few topics have been as popular this past year among phone companies and their technology partners.""

Comments

Big deal

[ThisNukes4u]

Big deal. I'm still waiting for fiber to the home. I could care less about television.

Re:Big deal

[isdnip]

But here's the $64 question. Why do you want fiber to the home?

Oh, I know what you expect: Lightning-fast Internet access, right? But you forget that you're dealing with the Bell companies, under the Powell regime at the FCC.

The Bells have a bad case of cable envy. They want to sell you TV channels, sure, because they see TV as the next big thing. (Not TV over fiber, but TV in general. The Bells are still stuck in a 1950 mindset.) And while it is possible to do TV over ADSL, it's not as good as cable. Fiber optics can be as good as cable -- cable companies, after all, bring it to the neighborhood already, converting to coax for the final run (Hybrid Fiber-Coax). FIOS does the optical conversion on a per-house basis. SBC might do that too, but I'm not sure. BellSouth plans to run fiber "to the curb", and tie in to the old twisted-pair drop wire, up to 500 feet of it, which should be able to deliver 20+ Mbps, enough for switched (tell them what channel you want and they'll connect you to it, keeping track of your viewing like a phone call) TV.

But what about Internet? First off, if you have fiber to the home, an alternative DSL provider like Covad is usually cut off, period. (They might be allowed to salvage the old wire. "Green field" developments are closed to competitors tighter than a drum though.)

Second, BellSouth has petitioned the FCC to "forbear" from enforcing the well-established rules of Common Carriage, as well as Computer II obligations, which require a telco-owned competitive service (ISP) to buy the underlying communications service on the same basis as a competitive provider (independent ISP). In other words, BellSouth wants to be allowed to deny access to its network to any other ISP. It's BellSouth Internet or nothing. If you don't like their backbone speed, their mail blocks, their pr0n filters, their no-server-at-home policies, whatever, tough noogies. And with no competitors save cable (and maybe wireless, in a few places, but that'll usually be slower), how do you think their service quality will evolve? (Remember Lily Tomlin as Geraldine the Operator?)

And while it's BellSouth's petition at the FCC now, if it's granted, it'll be precedent for all of the other telcos. Verizon, SBC, Qwest and even that godwaful CenturyTel will get the same treatment. So your choice of ISP will be the telco-owned ISP or the cable-owned ISP.

The FCC just closed out its Comment period on this abomination, but Reply Comments are being taken until Jan. 28 or so. Go to the FCC web site -> e-filing -> ECFS -> search for filed comments -> enter "04-405" as the docket number.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. You may end up missing your creaky old copper DSL.

Re:Big deal

[DMouse]

For TV to be a killer app would require one thing. TV worth watching.

500...

[slapout]

500 ways to get TV and still nothing to watch.

Re:500...

[wdd1040]

Yeah, or in another way...

They are putting billions of dollars into finding new ways to inundate us with advertisements even though we pay for the content we are watching.

Re:500...

[intangible]

Content still exists?

first comment swoot

[CloudDrakken]

hey maybe my TV can lag now too :D

I smell FIOS...

[sH4RD]

My friend has FIOS, and they have indeed told him it will be avalible in his area next year. Although, that is television over fiber, but it's provided by the Telco (Verizon).

History of DSL

[lousyd]

This is what Digital Subscriber Line technology was orignally developed for. TV and such, deliveredd over phone lines.

See here.

A little out of place?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was common knowledge that most phone systems (especially in rural communities) are unable to support broadband data communication. Cable was supposed to solve this problem. Fiber-to-the-home is now replacing cable... how can the telecom industry expect that their old, for the most part outdated copper wiring is capable of distributing this type of media?

Until my grandmother is able to get DSL on her phone line (in the middle of no where), I just can't believe such a thing.

Re:A little out of place?

[Mycroft_VIII]

No kidding, I'm less than 45 minutes from the city limits of a fairly large city (St. Louis), and approx 5 miles (8km) from a state highway that runs nearly straight into the city and I cannot get over 28.8 dialup (oh about once a month or so I get a 33.6 connect, usually last about 5 min before I lose the connection all together) and that is the BEST I can get without satalite, and that may not work (river valley, the hill cut me from full cell signall to nothing in less than a mile).
How about finding a way to incourage the "baby bells" to upgrade EXISTING infrastructure outside of cities before spending even more money on downtown.
I realize that being able to upgrade a few miles of systems for 100k people is more lucrative than upgradeing a dozen miles per 100 people, but this is getting rediculous when as little as 10 miles makes the difference between 2005 and 1965 in terms of capability (but not necessarily quality within that capability).

Mycroft

Re:A little out of place?

[Osty]

No kidding, I'm less than 45 minutes from the city limits of a fairly large city (St. Louis), and approx 5 miles (8km) from a state highway that runs nearly straight into the city.

45 minutes away from the city limits (as opposed to city center) is quite a distance. For comparison, that would put you almost halfway between St. Louis, MO, and Springfield, IL, on I-55. That's at slightly above-legal highway speeds, of course, and since you said "city limits" I'm not factoring much in the way of traffic, so you can get a pretty fair distance away. Now, if you said you were 45 minutes from downtown St. Louis, I would be more sympathetic. It's not like you're "right outside" the city. You're way out of it.

Oh, this will be the source of so much humor!

[Infonaut]

If the phone companies' approach to TV is anything like their approach to DSL, we're in for some exciting tales of boundless incompetence.

Let the hilarity begin!

Already have it in France

[nekosej]

In France, TV over DSL (or ADSL as it is known it France, where it was invented) has existed for almost a year now, and there are several competing offers. My DSL provider also provides a second VOIP telephone along with TV and very fast DSL service.

Too little, Too late.

[jgaynor]

Is it just me or is this a case of too little, too late?

My cable provider offers video/data/voice already and at 'decent' prices (barring additional 6% yearly increases). They already specialize in television, their data is currently faster than DSL and the voice is (so far) reliable and indistinguishable from traditional telco.

Still, offering all three can't hurt and hopefully the competition will drive down the costs of both providers . . .

We have that in HK already

[yehim1]

In HK, BroadbandTV services has been launched for over a year already. For a fee above your existing ADSL subscription, you get an extra decoder which connects to your phone line and decodes programmes to your TV.

You can also subscribe to broadbandtv as a separate package.

In my opinion, way to take advantage of the existing telephone infrastructure (just like ADSL).

Link -> Here! . Remember to click on the "English" !

Verizon FIOS

[$exyNerdie]

Verizon is working frantically to lay the optic fiber door-to-door. They already offer superfast internet speeds 15Mbps/2Mbps for $49.95 in some markets. The service is called FIOS (http://www.verizon.net/fios) and I strongly believe that Verizon is working hard to get into Cable TV business. They already offer DIRECTV® deals with their unlimited Freedom long distance package.

I used to work on that

[MSBob]

I used to work for the - now defunct - iMagicTV. The truth is that the bandwidth over phone lines is still very limited. At the time we used 4MB/sec Mpeg2 which gives good quality but an average DSL link can support 6MB/sec at best meaning you can only have one TV receiver without a noticable drop in quality. MPEG 4 offers compression rates that make 2 TVs more realistic but realtime MPEG4 encoders are still not quite there.

Also breaking into the entertainment industry is unbelieveably hard without having a solid DRM solution... as much as most slashdot crowd may despise DRM the truth is that it's necessary if you want to convince Warner Bros execs to let you broadcast their crap.

In Saskatchewan.. of all places

[Vaystrem]

Sasktel Max Interactive Services I have had 'Sasktel Max' for well over a year. My roomate, whose Dad worked for Sasktel, has had it for about 3 years.

It runs over DSL and you get internet and digital TV on one modem. If you elect to move up to the 5mbps down 768kpbs up Internet service (as I did) you have 2 DSL modems, 1 dedicated for Digital TV and one for Internet. Its interesting that it only requires about 3500kbps to deliver the digital cable.

The price? For 1.5mps down and 384 up with basic cable over DSL= 34.99 above basic monthly telephone fees. God Bless Canada's cheap Internet.

The sad/funny thing is that this service is available to every town larger than 10,000 people in this province of 1,000,000 people. This province is very rural and they are rolling it out to all the smaller communities as well. I find it interesting that Sasktel finds this profitable when so many Americans, in much denser population centres, have such a problem getting similar access.

Been doing it for years!

[glwtta]

I've been getting TV over my DSL connection for a long time now... well, until suprnova went down at least.

Come visit the Great White North

[freeweed]

Here in Manitoba, Canada, we've had this for many many months now. The local (formerly government) telco monopoly rolled out their digital television over phone line service with great fanfare.

I must say I'm less than impressed. It's basically the identical channels/packages as cable and satellite, for the same cost - however, the quality is VERY poor. Posts in this thread talk about bandwidth issues over POTS, and that has to be it.

Know when you're watching digital satellite and the screen suddenly pixelates like mad, like a really nasty MPEG artifact? Especially noticable during storms? TV over the phone lines looks like this pretty much all the time. Now just imagine an action sequence, with lots of frame changes. It's downright unwatchable.