When Oklahoma-based Pioneer Telephone Cooperative installs a new IPTV subscriber, technicians typically rewire the customer’s home from top to bottom. They run standard Ethernet Cat-5 cabling through walls from the Pioneer network interface device (NID) outside to the modem in a home office or den, and from there to three TV set-top boxes in different rooms.
The job takes about three to three and a half hours, so the labor involved represents a significant cost. The installation is also disruptive for customers and if they want to move a TV later or add another, it means Pioneer has to come out again.
The company has been doing it this way since it began rolling out IPTV to rural and small town Oklahoma in July 2004. Today, it serves 73 communities and has about 5,400 subscribers. The company’s aim was to grab 35 percent of the available market within the first two years. It’s on track to do that, says video products manager Scott Ulsaker. But provisioning was time-consuming and expensive. It needed to be fixed.
Earlier this year, Pioneer started testing a solution from Silicon Valley startup Ruckus Wireless that it believes will radically improve its provisioning process. Ruckus makes Wi-Fi wireless gear tailored for distributing multimedia in the home. Pioneer has found in its testing that it only takes about 45 minutes to an hour to set up the wireless equipment in a typical three-TV installation.
When purchased in volume, a pair of Ruckus devices—an MF2900 Wi-Fi router connected to the broadband modem and an MF2501 adapter (functioning much like a Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge) connected to the TV set-top box—will cost between $100 and $130. According to Pioneer’s calculations, the savings on labor mean the Ruckus solution may be slightly less expensive than rewiring, but it brings more important benefits as well.
The provisioning process today takes four to five days from receipt of the customer’s order to the service being set up and turned on, and two truck rolls. Using the Ruckus gear will allow Pioneer to reduce that to one truck roll and 24 to 48 hours elapsed time from order to provisioning—which means the customer revenue stream starts that much sooner.
“We figured we’d break even or see a slight decrease [in cost per installation],” says Ulsaker. “But where we saw our real positive points was on the quicker return to revenue. Plus the ease for the customer.” If a customer wants to move a TV from one end of the room to another, the customer can do so, now, without assistance from the ISP.
Smart radio
Wi-Fi has always been an option for distributing IPTV signals in the home, but standard 802.11 technology is unreliable and too vulnerable to interference. “The one thing that is constant in Wi-Fi is its inconsistency,” says Ruckus marketing director David Callisch. “[Radio frequency] in a home is always changing. People come into the room, they shut doors, they pick up a cordless phone, a neighbor turns on their [wireless] network. That’s not a big problem if you’re just surfing the ‘net, but it is for video.”
Interference can cause delays in IP packet delivery or loss of packets, which in turn results in degraded video—jerky motion or pixelization. The Ruckus gear uses a combination of technologies to solve these problems.
Chief among them are a patent-pending multi-element antenna design used in both the router and adapter products, coupled with sophisticated network traffic management and antenna control software. They allow a Ruckus system to select the optimal path between router and adapter on which to send packets and to concentrate RF energy on that path rather than spraying the signal as most Wi-Fi antennas do.
“Based on the quality of the link and the responses it’s getting from the other end, [the system] can steer [the signal] in a different direction on a moment’s notice, picking the best antenna [element] and path on a packet-by-packet basis,” Callisch explains. “If it starts to see a degradation, it automatically switches to a different antenna pair.”
Using a Ruckus router and adapter together gives the Wi-Fi system 53 possible paths from which to choose. “The best performance is when you have our technology on both ends,” explains Ruckus president and CEO Selina Lo. “But you can see some benefits even if you’re using somebody else’s wireless router.”
Ruckus developed the antenna and software technology over a two year period. “A lot of people know how to make multi-element antennas,” Lo concedes, “but to make it small enough to fit in a consumer electronics product takes a certain science. The second item, the software controlling the antenna, is really where the smarts are.” The third leg of the Ruckus stool is technology that solves problems with reliability of multi-cast streams from the IPTV modem.
Not just for IPTV
While the company’s main focus is on video distribution—because it sees the most pressing need for the technology in the emerging IPTV market—the technology can also help triple-play providers more efficiently distribute signals for VoIP and other multimedia content within the home, Callisch says.
Many IPTV providers have tried Wi-Fi for in-home video distribution but almost always found it wanting. Pioneer was no different—until it found Ruckus. “I’ve brought a lot of products back into our lab,” Ulsaker says. “This is the first one that my techs couldn’t break.” Pioneer did exhaustive testing to see the effects of a variety of RF interference, including microwave ovens, treadmill machines, dishwashers, variable speed fans, and grinders.
According to a Ruckus press release, the ultimate test was placing a Ruckus access unit upside down in a file cabinet in a completely metal building. “We put the Ruckus receiver in a pickup truck and began streaming IPTV signals from the access unit to the Ruckus receiver,” Ulsaker is quoted as saying in the release. “Then we drove the pickup truck off to see how far we could get before the stream stopped. To our amazement, we got nearly a block away before the video stopped.”
Not mentioned in the press release is that Pioneer did find one interferer that could effect IPTV performance—2.4GHz cordless phones, which work on the same frequency as Wi-Fi. However, the company considers the risk acceptable. The phone has to be turned on and brought to within a few feet of the Ruckus unit before any degradation in video is detectable, Ulsaker explains.
Testing, testing
Pioneer is still beta testing the Ruckus gear. It has asked the company to develop a standard configuration that will further streamline the provisioning process. And it has asked for new functionality that will allow Pioneer to remotely manage Ruckus units in customers’ homes—to upgrade firmware, troubleshoot or change configurations. These enhancements may also eventually enable self-installation by customers. The remote management piece is crucial because Pioneer serves communities two or more hours in either direction from its headquarters in Kingfisher, near Oklahoma City.
“We’ll wait to evaluate the results of the remote access [development effort], but we’re fairly confident it’s going to be good,” Ulsaker says. “We’re pretty committed to rolling this out as a product to our customers. The only thing holding us back at this point is the remote management and preconfiguration pieces.”
The remote management features will make the Ruckus product more attractive to other customers as well, Ulsaker points out. Ruckus agrees. “For massive deployments we need the remote management features Pioneer has requested,” Callisch says. The company will have them in place no later than the summer, he adds.
Pioneer is by no means Ruckus’s only customer. The company announced in March that Dublin-based Magnet Entertainment in Ireland has selected the Ruckus products to use in the first European commercial roll-out of wireless IPTV in the home. Magnet has said the Ruckus technology will allow it to cut installation time and cable and labor costs by up to 84 percent.
Europe and Asia Pacific are the hot markets for IPTV with big deployments that dwarf Pioneer and other regional telco operators in North America. Ruckus has 30 other customers in Europe doing tests of one kind and another. Selling test systems to PCCW in Hong Kong was a significant coup, Callisch says. “PCCW is really the poster child for IPTV. They’re really well known for knowing how to make money at IPTV. Once we [sold to them] everybody and their mother started calling us.”
While the products have a consumer look and feel to them, and are available from online retailers in some markets (although not the U.S.), Ruckus insists it is focused exclusively on the IPTV operator market for now. Developing a retail brand and distribution would require too much time and too many resources for such a small company, Lo says. Ruckus is talking to set-top box and consumer electronics manufacturers about incorporating its technology in their products.
In the meantime, many IPTV operators—once burned, twice shy when it comes to Wi-Fi—are waiting for 802.11n, the higher-bandwidth Wi-Fi upgrade currently in the midst of the standards approval process, before giving wireless another try. Ruckus insists it feels no threat from 802.11n because, despite the higher bandwidth, the new technology doesn’t solve the reliability problems with Wi-Fi. And waiting for 802.11n makes no sense when the Ruckus technology works today, the company argues.
“A lot of people think 802.11n will be a panacea,” Callisch says. “We think it will be fantastic. In fact, it will be necessary to move HD TV signals around. But it won’t work that well unless you have technology like ours to pick the best signal path and adapt to the Wi-Fi environment in real time.”
Story courtest of ISP Planet.
