AT&T aimed to have U-verse, its ambitious IP-based video service, available in 15 cities by the end of last year; but at last check, it managed to reach a total of 11. AT&T plans to have 8 million households passed with the service by the end of 2007. AT&T doggedly insists that the development of […]
Making the consumer connection
LAS VEGAS–The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is enormous, bringing together doodads for cars, dongles for computers, DRAM devices, robots, and wireless refrigerators. But the 2007 edition was a bit less diffuse than usual because of the accelerating convergence of computing, audio, video and mobile products and services. On display at CES 2007 were a large […]
Listen Up, Big Guys!
There are well over a thousand cable system operators in the U.S. Of those, only 10 have more than 500,000 customers. While the big MSOs are involved with the alphabet soup of DOCSIS 3.0, VoIP, OCAP, VOD, DVR, HD, increasingly faster Internet access and other new services, medium-sized cable companies are expanding with VoIP, VOD, […]
Out of the lab, into the wild
The cable industry is getting ready to unleash PacketCable Multimedia (PCMM) on an unsuspecting world. Though it's still not entirely predictable what will happen when operators let PCMM out of its cage, they will surely be able to harness some of that pent-up energy to introduce innovative new features and applications, and boldly enter new […]
Building a better trough
What's the difference between a bandwidth hog and a great customer? Nothing some additional network resources and an attitude adjustment couldn't fix. Beauty (it says here) is in the eye of the beholder. Three years ago, that kid choking your network with music and movie downloads was a felon. Today, his mom is doing it […]
Powering up for the storm
Disasters have not changed much in the last five years. Hurricanes still snap lines, earthquakes rattle systems insensate, rivers flood over infrastructure. Cable operators have changed a lot in five years, however. Now that most are offering data services, and more and more are offering voice, it is increasingly important to do more than simply […]
The commercial services market
The business communications market has long been locked up by the telephone companies. Cable operators are finally in a position to steal some of that business away. And with the phone companies distracted by their rollouts of video and cellular broadband, there couldn't be a better time to do it. U.S. companies spend approximately $130 […]
Video’s Urge to Converge
Ask cable operators about IPTV, and they'll tell you straight out that of course they can do it. Ask them if they have plans to do it, and the answers get laden with dependent clauses about definitions and contingencies and migration paths and transition strategies. IPTV is an issue largely because it's the greatest advance […]
Picking your Spots
Merchants spend tens of billions of dollars on advertising in the U.S. Cable operators are of the opinion that they deserve a bigger piece of that pie, but until they can more accurately target potential customers, advertisers aren't going to be very accommodating. Most of the major cable operators last year implemented a way to […]