IPTV on Wireless: Forget Home Wiring

Broadband and IPTV were envisioned as the fixed line saviors but the huge opex is proving to be the limiting factor. Moreover customer dissatisfaction also rises due to inconvenience from in-home wiring and installation time. The in- home piece of the IPTV delivery chain is one of the most critical, and it often goes overlooked and thus limits the gross additions per day.

On a large scale, requiring 4 to 5 hours for two technicians to bring up a single subscriber can’t be justified from a cost or resource perspective. Subscribers aren’t keen, in the first place, to have their homes re-wired . A wireless solution is ideal for triple play customers, but consumer-grade Wi-Fi's experience has been proved unacceptable. Consumer-grade Wi-Fi is an unstable medium and has been developed for data applications that are tolerant of delay and latency. Conventional Wi-Fi technology broadcasts Wi-Fi signals in all directions thereby limiting range and performance. Performance drastically degrades from interference of other RF devices such as cordless phones, nearby Wi-Fi networks, microwave ovens, etc., often causing packet error rates to exceed 15 percent. Other than interferences, it doesn't support the multicasting (required for triple play) due to its treatment as best effort UDP traffic therefore giving it minimum bandwidth.

Ruckus has an innovative next generation smart Wi-Fi product to surpass these hurdles for which it is going to have alliance with 15 telcos for wireless triple play. The Ruckus MediaFlex system reduces installation to less than one hour, eliminates cumbersome wiring and supports all media types over a single, universally-accepted technology: Wi-Fi. Adding extra TVs or connections is a simple process that doesn't require installers. The Ruckus's smart Wi-Fi system uses smart antennas and BeamFlex technology to select the best path through the air for a specific type of multimedia content. It directs Wi-Fi signals over that path to a given receiver instead of broadcasting it in all directions. In case that path experiences interference, the Ruckus system automatically transfers the traffic over another path in real time to ensure 15-20 Mbps of consistent bandwidth to every location in the home with virtually no interruption in Wi-Fi transmissions. MediaFlex also uses SmartCast, a traffic inspection, classification and QoS engine, identifies multicast IPTV traffic, prioritizes it and directs it to the destined end device using advanced IGMP snooping techniques. End devices are forced to acknowledge packet receipts, allowing the system to track link conditions to a given end point.