Cisco Patents the Triple Play

Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Cisco was recently granted a patent on a 'system and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premises over a single network.' Sound a lot like 'triple play?' Yes it is. The patent, which was filed back in 2000, describes a system that would allow consumers to receive all of their home services through one service provider instead of two or three. The patent's wording seems broad enough to cover nearly all existing implementations of triple play, and some are worried that Cisco will try to wield the newly granted patent against such providers as AT&T and Comcast. If such a thing were to happen, progress on AT&T's Project Lightspeed could slow even more."

Comments

Cisco = Scientific Atlanta

[LoadStar]

The reason Cisco is patenting this is because they now own Scientific-Atlanta, who are one of a few companies that provide the infrastructure that make it possible for Time Warner, Comcast, et. al. to offer "triple play" or "all in one" or whatever brand name your particular cable operator uses for the combination. If Cisco were to sue someone for using this, it wouldn't be the cable operators - it'd be Motorola or whomever, their competitors who also offer a similar infrastructure.

I'm not exactly sure why the author of the article thinks that they'd sue the cable operators, many of whom use the Scientific-Atlanta technology in question... perhaps he wasn't aware of the link between Cisco and Sci-Atl.. which leads me to question his authority to even speak on the topic in the first place.

Re:Cisco = Scientific Atlanta

[supersat]

The reason Cisco is patenting this is because they now own Scientific-Atlanta ... except the patent was applied for in 2000, and the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta was only announced in late 2005.

Re:Cisco = Scientific Atlanta

[xigxag]

In addition, it appears that the patent was thought up by techs at a company gobbled up by Cisco, not a homegrown invention.

A couple of things:

1) This appears to be a rather detailed and well-thought out patent. Although the "triple play" concept may seem obvious in hindsight, the implementation of it, converting everything into a single protocol, is not necesarily the only way to go, and seems as worthy of being patented as most other inventions that have received the imprimatur of the USPTO throughout the years.

2) Since, as I said, their implementation is not necessarily the only way to handle multiple types of data, a competing company could get around licensing by simply keeping the protocols separate. Cable wiring and fiber are obviously fat enough to multiplex various datastreams at once, hence instead of converting at the source, one might be able to avoid the Cisco tax by overlaying the various incompatible networks on top of each other and let the set top boxes sort things out at the receiving end. Chances are, though, that if that's worth doing at all, someone's patented it already.

Re:Not in a million years

[Spasmodeus]

Insightful?

Who *didn't* think we were going to get all our services over one wire once digital bandwidth became great enough?

It's all just data. They might as well have patented a "novel method" for sending HTTP, FTP and SMTP data over the same wire.

Re:Not in a million years

[cgenman]

Generally speaking, in business when you figure out in advance where the market is heading, you get a head start on all of your competitors putting yourself in a much better position to take advantage of the change. You do not, however, generally get to tax all transactions. I knew that online purchasing was going to take off years ago. Does that mean that I deserve to get paid once everyone else figured this out too?

Cisco figured this out ahead of time and positioned their product line to take advantage of the burgeoning communications infrastructure market. They deserve the financial success they've seen from this shrewd business accumen. They don't, however, deserve 5 dollars of every 50 I send to Comcast simply because they realized the obvious first.

Networks don't transport voice or video--only data

[KonoWatakushi]

The absurdity of this patent is mind boggling. All a network does is move data. Voice and video may be encoded as data, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the network.

Why don't I just patent moving web pages over networks. Or, moving mp3s over networks. (Now there's an idea for the RIAA...) Just how obvious does something need to be for the folks at the patent office? Moving DATA over a NETWORK? How novel...

This just goes to show that everything should be encrypted. Only then can fairness, and the end-end nature of the Internet be restored. As soon as the ISP's can peek at your data, you may as well bend over.

Triple play?

[JFMulder]

I prefer to call it "Ménage à trois". :)

Re:Not in a million years

[wish bot]

HTTP, FTP, and SMTP down one wire?!

Jesus - no one told me I didn't need to get all these tubes.

Re:Triple Play question

[KillerCow]

Instead of 3 concurrent streams, what about a single datastream.

We call that the network layer.

Converter box or software separates the single datastream back into the 3 (or more) original feeds.

And that would be the transport layer.